Central Kenya

In Laikipia, An Elite Group Of Conservationists Has Created A High-luxury, High-stakes Experiment In Frontier Living.

- Sophy Roberts

We are off into the Blue as our helicopter catches air and the sound of Garth Brooks fills our Bose headphones. “One of my Texas playlists,” remarks our sandy-haired pilot, Ben Simpson. His frontier-breaking helicopter safaris take travelers (among them George W. Bush) from Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression to the forests of eastern Congo. But this time, he’s working closer to home: Laikipia, in Kenya’s central highlands, where Simpson has lived for 18 years.

The dirty skies of Nairobi recede as we fly 45 minutes north from the capital, past the cloud-ringed peak of Mount Kenya to the golden savanna of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, which contains roughly 12 percent of all Kenya’s rhinoceros. To Lewa’s northwest lies the Laikipia Plateau—a tapestry of farms, Maasai cattle encampments, and private ranches alongside swaths of land that have been turned over to wildlife conservation. We fly over Simpson’s house, a glass-and-stone bungalow set on a rock where 22 elephant broke into his garden the week before, then tip deeper into the plateau’s wilds, spotting a herd of reticulated giraffe—of the estimated 4,700 that remain, around 30 percent are in Laikipia—and a black rhino, its calf trotting behind.

You won’t see rhino in these concentrations in the Maasai Mara, says my seatmate, Alice Daunt, a husky-voiced London-based travel agent with an elite client list, referring to southern Kenya’s most iconic game reserve. “What the Mara was to grand tourists 20, 30 years ago, this patch of northern Kenya is to the next generation.” Our trip will cover not only the great game in the area, but several privately owned lodges, including a new rental house, Arijiju, which Daunt bills as the most beautiful bush home in Africa.