Guest Reviews: 48 Years of Private Tanzania Safaris, One Family Name

The grey hour before dawn at Lamai Serengeti holds a quality of light that has no equivalent anywhere else on earth — a cool, pearl-coloured mist that lifts slowly from the plains, leaving the grass heavy with moisture and the air carrying the first warm breath of the sun. That is when guide Samson found M & J on the morning of their seventh day in Tanzania, a two-week honeymoon that had already begun to feel less like a holiday and more like an education in beauty.

"We have made it ourselves to understand what beautiful meant," J wrote months later. "Tanzania revised that entirely."

The previous evening had been the Serengeti at dusk from a private bluff — a sundowner in hand, a coalition of seven lions dozing in a tamboti tree fifty metres below, the sky turning through copper and rose and then the deep bruised purple of African nightfall. The Land Cruiser had not moved in an hour. Samson had switched off the engine and simply pointed when the first star appeared, holding the moment without commentary.

The elephants came at Lamai on the third morning — a breeding herd of thirty-four moving through the camp's peripheral tracks with a casualness that felt like benediction. The youngest calf could not have been more than a week old, its trunk curling and uncurling with the bewildered curiosity of all new things. M wept without explanation, and J held the camera steady and forgot to take the photograph.

What M & J did not expect was how a great landscape rearranges the self. The final dinner was a private affair on the beach at Zanzibar — lanterns on the sand, the sound of the Indian Ocean, the Swahili crew humming as they lit the last candle. The honeymoon ended. The marriage, in some essential way, began.

The Okonjo family came to Tanzania because Chief Okonjo — eighty-one years old, a retired professor of ecology — had been dreaming of the Serengeti since he read Bernhard Grzimek's book in 1974. He had told his grandchildren stories about what he would do when he finally reached Africa, and they had listened with the particular credulity children reserve for their grandparents' impossible promises. When his son called Bobby Safaris, the promise was forty-eight years old.

"We gave the Kassim family four months' notice," Mrs Okonjo wrote afterward. "Don himself spoke with my father-in-law three times before we travelled. He asked about his mobility, his medication, his bucket list. By the time we arrived, the itinerary was built around Chief Okonjo's pace — which is to say, it was built around wonder rather than schedule."

The guide for the family was Daniel, who had been tracking the Serengeti for twenty-three years. He had a particular gift for reading a landscape and finding its story — for understanding that Chief Okonjo needed to sit quietly at a watering hole while the hippos surfaced, and that his twelve-year-old granddaughter Adaeze needed to be in the vehicle when the cheetah brothers crossed the open plain at sixty kilometres per hour.

The night before the final dinner at Ngorongoro, Chief Okonjo asked Daniel to stop the Land Cruiser at the crater's edge so he could watch the sunset alone for a few minutes. When he returned to the vehicle, he said only: "It was worth the wait." His granddaughter was quiet for most of the drive back to camp. Later, she showed her mother the photographs on her camera — more than six hundred images of a week she would later call "the best of my life, including my birthday."

The first trip was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. R & A.W. had planned it as a fortieth anniversary celebration — two weeks in Tanzania, the kind of trip you save decades for. They returned home to Toronto with that particular disorientation of people who have been changed by somewhere and cannot explain the change to anyone who has not been there.

"We called Bobby Safaris from the airport," A.W. wrote. "We were still in the arrivals hall, still wearing our safari clothes, still carrying the dust of the Serengeti in our bags. We knew immediately that we would not be able to stay away."

The second trip added Rwanda — the mountain gorillas of Volcanoes National Park, a complement to Tanzania that R describes as "the difference between reading about music and hearing it played live." The guides on that extension were different from the Tanzania team, but the quality of care, the unhurried attention, the sense that the family is genuinely invested in your experience rather than simply delivering a service — that was identical.

This third journey — their most ambitious — combined the Kili approach trek with a traverse of the Serengeti's northern reaches, a region so remote that Daniel, their guide for the latter portion, had not visited in three years. The privacy was the point. The absence of other vehicles. The sense of the landscape as something unchanged and unpayable.

"Kassim asked us, before this third trip, whether we thought we would keep coming back," R writes. "We said we did not know — that at our age, each trip might be the last. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: 'Then we must make sure each one counts.' That is the Bobby Safaris philosophy, and it is why we have now given them eleven years of our lives and have no intention of stopping."