HIGHER GROUND

The country that gave birth to safari has seen its wildlife diminish in recent years, but a new breed of pioneering camps and lodges in Kenya is turning the tide.

- By Lisa Grainger Photographs by Andrew Urwin

IT'S 11PM AND I'M EXHAUSTED

but just can't sleep. In London, it's drunks and ambulances that break my slumber. Here in Kenya, it's chomping. Tucked up beneath the muslin in my fourposter, all I can hear is the munching of zebras on the savannah, followed by the eerie “whooooop” of a hyena, and then a sound that no visitor to this patch of wilderness would have heard until recently: the roar of lions.

Of all the African countries, Kenya is probably the best known for its safaris. It is from here that the Swahili word “kusafiri”, meaning to travel, entered our lexicon to describe the extensive ego-driven trips of hunters to “bag” the giants of our planet: elephants sporting the world's biggest tusks, lions with beatific manes, rhinos whose horns mirrored the priapic ambitions of the men who'd come to cull them.

Although the country was the first on the continent to ban hunting in 1977, today, its wildlife is under greater threat than ever before. It is not only poaching that is responsible for this decline, but development. In 50 years, its population has grown fourfold to 55 million – and to feed it, herds of cattle, goats, and sheep compete with wildlife for pasture. Anyone who sees an elephant these days is likely to see a goat too. Those who spot a vegetable patch might – if they're around in the dark, as David Attenborough was while shooting Planet Earth – witness elephants sniffing out a tomato field, until the animals are chased off by a night watchman bearing blazing sticks, spears or, worse, guns.