Hal Jespersen’s East African Safari, July–August 2026 [Part 1]

These are my (Hal’s) notes from a trip with my wife Nancy to Kenya and Tanzania for a luxury African safari, organized by the travel company Micato Safaris. We are doing this to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in August! Micato published a multimedia webpage of our itinerary, but there would be a few minor changes (flight and hotel details) along the way, as you’ll see.

This is a lengthy report with lots of photos and videos, mostly from my iPhone 17 Pro Max, but a few from travel friend Natali’s more impressive Nikon, which I have annotated in the captions. Click on any of the thumbnails to access the full resolution photo. I have broken the report into three parts:

Monday–Wednesday, July 27–29 — to Nairobi

This is our second attempt to visit Africa. Last year, we planned a similar Micato journey with our friendly traveling companions, Ray and Pat, but just weeks before, Nancy broke her leg, and we had to cancel. Fortunately, travel insurance left us almost whole. (Ray and Pat report they had a wonderful time. Their itinerary also included South Africa and Victoria Falls, but we decided to focus entirely on the East African safari itinerary, which Micato calls the Grand Safari, devoting more time to animals and less time to flying long distances across the mighty continent.)

Our initial plan this time was to fly via Emirates Airlines with an overnight stopover in Dubai (airport hotel included in the fare), but we got cold feet about the military actions in the nearby Strait of Hormuz, so when Emirates announced an inconsequential scheduling change, I took advantage of the opportunity to cancel that flight for a full refund and re-book on British Airways. We flew ten hours from SFO Monday evening and arrived in London Heathrow mid-afternoon on Tuesday. After a six-hour layover, we flew nine hours direct to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (NBO), arriving in Nairobi early Wednesday morning. Both flights were on Boeing 777s and I was pleased to note that the lie-flat seats had just enough legroom for my freakishly tall frame. The overall timezone change was +10 (EAT), but breaking the trip into two overnight flights was a good way to tackle it. The BA club at SFO was okay; the one in Heathrow terminal 5 was massive and crowded, with a distinct third-world vibe, albeit one with a very good buffet.

Packing was a challenge. I usually travel with a 40 lb large checked-in suitcase and a backpack that can reach 15 lb (in which I carry back-up clothing and supplies necessary if the airline loses my main bag). Because of restrictions on safari vehicles and bush planes, we were limited to 33 lb total for checked suitcases and carry-ons. Micato sent us moderately lightweight duffel bag-style rolling suitcases, and I was able to store my backpack with their office in Nairobi. Packing lighter was possible because of the casual nature of safaris and camp accommodations, moderate weather, and the availability of free laundry service throughout the trip. Another unusual challenge was that Kenya prohibits the importation of disposable plastic bags, so we had to replace all of the Ziploc bags that we normally carry for toiletries, etc. (NB: no one examined our luggage at any point.)

The NBO airport arrival floor is quite small and very basic, odd for a metropolitan area of over 5 million. Before immigration and baggage claim, we were met by a Micato representative, Nellie, who handled our bags and escorted us expeditiously through the arrival steps. We needed a visa to enter Kenya, as we will for Tanzania (both of which required lengthy error-prone interactions through their websites). Nellie handled our luggage and took us to meet our tour director for the next two weeks, Wesley. I asked what I thought was a humorous question about whether he was a marathon runner, and in fact, he was in his younger days, before working in the tourism business and ruining his healthy diet. He is a member of the Kalenjin tribe, from which most of the world champion long-distance runners hail.

We drove in a van about 35 minutes all the way to the other side of the city. Fortunately, there is a brand-new toll expressway that made the trip easy. We did not happen to pass by any noticeable downtown city area with big office buildings, but we did drive by the Kianda slum of one million people, the second largest on the continent after Soweto. We arrived in the upscale suburban area called Karen, named after Karen Blixen, who owned about 6,000 acres in this area, and checked into the Hemingways Hotel. Our Micato representative here at the hotel—our concierge—is coincidentally named Caren.

All of the suites here are named after famous people, and ours is called the Leakey Suite, for Louis and Mary Leakey, the paleontologists who proved that the human race originated in Africa. It is quite luxurious, with a low balcony that views the lush gardens of the grounds. Our bed was decorated with flower petals arranged in a heart pattern, presumably in honor of our anniversary, and a Micato welcome package with a few items of merch was ready for us. Even though the tour does not start until tomorrow, today we were given early check-in to the hotel and meals for the day. (All meals and beverages for the next two weeks are included in the Micato package.) There was a decent buffet breakfast, and then Wesley took us out for lunch. It was a local restaurant supposedly frequented by diplomats and fancy people, but it was quite casual. The unusual menu held items from multiple ethnicities, including Japanese, Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern, but nothing apparently Kenyan. The items we tried were pretty good.

We spent a quiet afternoon lounging on our balcony. The weather is beautiful today, surprisingly similar to the San Francisco Bay Area this week. Nairobi is a little more than one degree south of the equator, so we are technically in winter. Dinner at the Brasserie restaurant, very nice outdoors.

Thursday, July 30 — Nairobi

After a nice breakfast, we started with a meeting hosted by Sean Walwyn, Micato’s East Africa CEO, to welcome us and talk about some high-level logistics, such as malaria pills. He brought with him a large cabinet of freebie personal items, such as snacks and OTC pharmaceuticals. His team passed out branded safari hats and felt jackets. We received lucky necklaces with carved wooden wild animals and a nugget of petrified zebra poop—for good luck, supposedly. We met the other participants, a mother-daughter pair from New Jersey and a retired married couple from Florida.

We boarded a six-passenger van and headed out. Wesley narrated a brief history of Nairobi and some cultural information about local tribes. Unlike yesterday, we drove very near the CBD and saw a few modest skyscrapers. The National Museum was inundated with more than a thousand schoolchildren, who crowded every exhibit but, fortunately, were considerably better behaved than their US counterparts. It is a large museum, and with our local guide we could only see some of the highlights. We bypassed the Hall of (stuffed) Mammals, since we will see the real animals on safari. The exhibits included the Cradle of Humanity, beginning six million years ago; a skull eighteen million years old found by Mary Leakey; numerous skulls from a couple of million years ago, all discovered in my lifetime; an exhibit on tribal customs, including female genital mutilation; and a history of Kenya from pre-colonial times (before 1820) to post-independence (after 1963).

We drove through a slum, the Mukuru shantytown—really primitive conditions, but acres and acres bustling with commerce. Like a quiet oasis, we visited the AmericaShare campus, the Harambee community center, which Micato created and funds. Each safari booking supports one student. There are three programs: basic support for school uniforms and supplies; scholarships for attending boarding schools; and support of girls who miss school during menstrual days. Libraries and computer labs are available to local students. We interacted with a few of the students and donated to support their computer education; many seemed quite motivated. We also visited the Huru reusable sanitary pad factory and school, where women learn to sew school uniforms.

At the Giraffe Centre, they are repopulating the Rothschild breed from near extinction. There is a platform to feed pellets one at a time to seven adults and one adolescent, with warthogs running under their hooves.

We had lunch at Cultiva Farm, an outdoorsy restaurant with another international menu that was really good. To conclude the busy day, we visited the Karen Blixen Museum, preserving her house from 1917 to 1931; no photos were allowed inside. There were lots of references to the movie Out of Africa—a good thing we had watched it a few weeks earlier. We then had a couple of hours relaxing at the hotel before dinner at the Brasserie again.

Friday, July 31 — to Tsavo National Park

Room service breakfast was delivered by our butler at 4:45. Wilson Airport is tiny, tucked inside the city limits. We flew Safarilink airline at 7:15 on a Cessna Grand Caravan C208B, a twelve-passenger turboprop—really cramped but comfortable, except for the super-tight seatbelts and the contortion required to get to the seat. It was a forty-five minute flight to the Tsavo/Finch Hattons dirt airstrip, where we were met by a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven by Richard through Tsavo West National Park to our hotel. Tsavo West and East (separated by the historic railroad) together comprise Kenya’s largest national park.

We saw a baboon family, a banded mongoose (which looks like a meerkat, though meerkats are not found in East Africa), a bald eagle, impalas (recognizable by the McDonald’s logo on their rear ends), zebras, a common waterbuck, and Maasai-breed giraffes, whose pattern is quite different from the Rothschild giraffe’s. We had breakfast at Finch Hattons Luxury Camp, owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and named for Denys Finch Hatton, the boyfriend of Karen Blixen.

Our first game drive, forty-five minutes long, brought us to an elephant family with two playful babies. We watched the tentative approach of a large male checking out the family matriarch, while a giraffe and a zebra herd tiptoed around them. The elephant was our first of the “Big Five” sightings—a term coined by big-game hunters for the five African animals considered most dangerous and difficult to hunt on foot: lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo. It has since become a standard checklist for safari-goers, though these days the danger is more historical than practical.

Our room was an isolated cabin/tent right next to a large pond covered in lily pads and with a resident crocodile, in a unit named Galagos, the animal known in Swahili as bush babies. We were warned to keep the doors closed to resist monkey visits, and there were lots of exotic bird noises. We enjoyed watching three baby vervet (black-faced) monkeys play-fighting on our deck. We skipped lunch, not being hungry after two breakfasts, and just chilled.

Our second game drive was at 4:00, in beautiful weather in the low 80s. It was sad that Mount Kilimanjaro, fifty kilometers away, wasn’t visible, but we got to see it later in the trip. We saw a herd of Cape buffalo, our Big Five sighting #2, eyeing us very intently—the buffalo is considered the second deadliest African animal after the hippopotamus. There was a fish eagle looking regal while watching over a small river, numerous guinea fowl, a red-billed hornbill (like Zazu from The Lion King), more impalas, and a pair of hippos barely visible in the river.

We also saw a rock hyrax, which is related to the elephant despite looking like a large guinea pig—hyraxes and elephants share a common ancestor and both belong to the superorder Afrotheria, along with animals like manatees and aardvarks, a relationship first suggested by anatomical similarities in their teeth and toenails and later confirmed by genetic studies. We also saw a pair of jackals, smaller than we had imagined, eating tiny prey.

We returned at 6:45, just past sunset, so the camp mandated a staff escort to our tent—a young Maasai man—and then another one to get us back to dinner at 7:30, since animals are loose on the grounds. Dinner was an excellent four-course meal served on an open deck, and as we returned to our tent afterward, a nearby elephant trumpeted in the dark.

Saturday, August 1 — Tsavo National Park

A few animal noises in the night, but we slept well. Our first game drive started at 6:30. High overcast, low 60s. Numerous giraffes clustered along the camp entrance road. A big herd of buffaloes crossed the road right in front of us. A dik-dik was too small and skittish for a photo. A Thomson’s gazelle and a gerenuk were visible in the distance, as was an oryx communing with zebras and a Grant’s gazelle further off. We spotted a yellow-billed hornbill, a different color for Zazu. The same elephant family as yesterday blocked the road for quite a while. You can’t aggress elephants. We also saw a martial eagle, Africa’s heaviest bird and a mighty predator. At 9:15 we were surprised to turn into an open area and find the camp had set up a remote breakfast for us, not a simple continental but a full cooked service with all the trimmings.

We had a relaxing time until lunch, enjoying exotic bird calls on our deck. Our four companions all scheduled massages. We had been expecting some swimming pool time on this trip, but it’s pretty chilly. Lunch was served poolside. We encountered a large baboon on the path back to our tent.

The 4:15 game drive was warm enough for shorts. We saw a lesser kudu youngster, two waterbuck females then one male with a white toilet seat rear, a hyrax, and a yellow baboon troop. An impala male was aggressively snorting. At a waterhole we found numerous giraffes, zebras, buffaloes, and a lone male elephant, along with a giant flock of guinea fowl.

We came upon a hotel popup open bar way out in the bush with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Staff members recognized me and knew I didn’t drink alcohol, offering me alternatives. We were greeted by a Maasai in traditional costume, (our second) Richard, who gave us an overview of his tribal life. We played a subset of the Maasai Olympics, which here was a competition to toss a club—like an Irish shillelagh—into a target bag, plus archery; this is what centuries of Maasai warrior and hunting spirit have come to in modern times. We split into teams, and Nancy’s and my team was trounced, but we had fun.

Driving back in the dark, we saw a number of giraffes and zebras, then did a U-turn to get a dim sighting of a lion family, a mother and cubs, hiding in the bushes. Good photos weren’t possible. That was Big Five #3, but a vastly better sighting happened on August 3. Dinner was excellent again, and we sped to our tent to pack and get a good night’s sleep.

Go to Part 2.