The words of Isak Dinesen (nom de plume of Baroness Karen Blixen), opening her memoir of life in colonial Kenya, “Out of Africa,” evoke a dream of knowing East Africa as home:
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
On some of the remaining European-owned farms and ranches in Kenya, it’s still possible to experience the intimacy with Africa known by settlers of Dinesen’s generation.
Indeed, it is possible to bed down in a house owned by descendants of Dinesen’s neighbors in a roomful of the author’s furniture and wake up with a giraffe at the window.
A former owner of Giraffe Manor got the furniture from the writer when she moved back to her native Denmark in 1932. Dinesen lived five miles away and was then the closest European to the manor.
The once-isolated manor, now a 120-acre preserve for a breeding population of endangered Rothschild giraffes, is just eight miles from downtown Nairobi. It is the most citified of a recently formed group of settler farms and ranches across Kenya that offer home stays that include a variety of outdoor adventures, from soft to challenging.
Far more remote than Giraffe Manor, but at least as posh, is Ol Malo, a 5,000-acre ranch and game sanctuary in Kenya’s North East District. There, guests go animal-watching on camels and luxuriate in clifftop cottages overlooking a watering hole used by game. They also have their own “watering holes”–a swimming pool and baths with a view in the cottages.
By opening their homes, landowners offer a familial, intimate experience of Kenya. Owners, some of them third- or fourth-generation African-born Europeans, preside at meals and act as bush guides on all-day outdoor adventures.
Accommodations range from rooms in grand British-style estates, such as Giraffe Manor, to smaller guest houses and thatched-roof cottages and tent camps near farm and ranch complexes.
Some of the quarters are downright baronial, and home-stays often provide more freedom to roam and greater physical challenges, such as horseback rides and long hikes, than vehicle-borne group safaris.
The privacy and lack of regulations on private property is in sharp contrast to some group trips in heavily visited national parks, where movement away from vehicles and camp is restricted.
Whatever the activities, group size is usually small because most of the homes have only a few rooms open to guests. Tent camps are also small.
An Atlanta-based company, Bush Homes of East Africa, has begun marketing Kenyan adventures based on series of home stays. Some of the 15 settlers’ farms represented by the company have accommodated paying guests for years, but others are recent entries in the tourism game.
Abercrombie & Kent International in Oak Brook offers stays in a few of the Kenyan properties represented by Bush Homes. The company has also added estates in South Africa and Zimbabwe to its catalog trips and components of customized adventures.
The innovation created by Bush Homes, according to founder Phil Osborne, is offering central bookings and packaging custom trips built entirely around staying in a number of homes.
With properties next to Masai Mara Game Reserve and Tsavo National Park, near wildlands such as Samburu National Reserve, as well as on Indian Ocean beaches, a bush homes tour can be a complete experience of natural and cultural Kenya.
Osborne says his company concentrates on Kenya because the country has the most settlers’ holdings in East Africa.
Thousands of Europeans left the country after the Mau Mau Rebellion, a nationalist uprising in the 1950s. After independence in the 1963, the government promoted the breakup of European-owned farms and ranches. But some 100 settler-owned properties survive.
Settler families are increasingly interested in tourism to get more hard cash out of land that is often lean and harsh, Osborne says.
For the Rev. John Cromartie, who stayed with his wife at Lewa Downs Ranch in the Northern Frontier District, the legacy of endurance was part of the charm.
“It was delightful to meet people who have chosen to stay through a lot of difficulties and tumultuous times,” Cromartie, an Atlanta Methodist minister, says.
An Africa-lover who likes his trips challenging–he made two ascents of Kilimanjaro two years running–Cromartie used the ranch as an R&R spot between the tough stuff. He, his wife and family have also stayed in tent camps on ranches and camped out on private property with a guide and cook. Bush Homes coordinated these adventures.
He, like others who have experienced home stays and group trips, found his time on private holdings offered a more personal contact with the land and wildlife.
All of Africa’s “Big Five”–lions, leopards, elephants, rhino and Cape buffalo–roam Lewa Downs. Concentrations of animals were smaller than those seen in big-name national preserves, but Cromartie says that freedom of movement and the isolation more than compensated.
Group-trip visits to the Serengeti Plain and other famous wildlife-watching areas can, Cromartie says, seem “more like Busch Gardens in Florida than a real game preserve.”
“This (Lewa Downs) is one of the places where you can get really close to rhinos,” he says.
While staying at the ranch he met Anna Merz, a crusader for the preservation of the endangered black rhino. Lewa Downs’ 61,000 acres lie within the Ngari Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary, which Merz founded.
Mike Ivey, an Atlanta mortgage banker, did a 17-day home-stay tour this year, part of which he spent at Lewa Ranch. He says his 1995 trip, compared to a 1994 group safari, was an adventure in freedom.
On game-watching drives, Bill Craig, whose grandfather founded Lewa Downs, let Ivey take the wheel when he felt like it. Ivey was even allowed to make short unescorted drives with fellow guests.
Ivey says that longstanding contacts between settler families and native Kenyans made for more intimate cultural contact in villages less-visited by tourists.
He built in a break from intensive game-viewing at the posh Deloraine Estate, which has a celebrated string of polo ponies, and then wound down on the Indian Ocean beach at Takuangu House, about 30 miles north of Mombasa.
After vegging out, Ivey and his traveling companions snorkeled and scuba-dove, then went on a day-cruise aboard a ketch belonging to Charlotte and Philip Mason, who own a boat yard as well as the Arab-style beach house, which has three guest bedrooms.
Ivey’s 17-day Kenyan adventure cost about $5,000, airfare included, which is comparable to many non-custom group trips.
Ivey’s daily land costs were about $250, but Osborne says it’s safer to plan on spending about $300-$350 a day, which allows for air transfers, instead of highway travel, and other upgrades. This is still less than high-end safaris, which can cost $500 per person daily.
But price arithmetic can’t do justice to an equation as complicated, and personal, as an African adventure. Those who crave independence and privacy can find more of what they want on home stays.
As Cromartie says, “I find Africa a very soulful experience. I don’t want to be out with hordes of other people.”
For information: Bush Homes of East Africa, 1786-A Century Blvd., Atlanta, Ga. 30345 (404-325-5088); Abercrombie & Kent, Suite 212, 1520 Kensington Rd., Oak Brook, Ill. 60521-2141 (800-323-7308 or 708-954-2944).
