All safaris, all journeys, have their own particular motivations, their destinations both real and metaphorical, intentional or otherwise. When I set out among the big five in the hills and savannahs of East Africa - the world capital of the experience we have codified as safari - I always arrive at a revelation about who we are, our physical dimensions, and maybe even our existential dispositions.

Wandering the vast Serengeti, my depth perception, appreciation of scale and distance, of movement and shape and shadow, no matter how acclimatized to urban settings, suddenly feels vividly correct. Up against the Chyulu Hills to the north, for example, in this fertile crease where man first walked, the sounds of creatures moving in the underbrush are obviously just what our earshot was calibrated to receive. On the plains of the Amboseli, you can imagine why we’re able to run as we can, should we need to get out of a jamb in a hurry... and even why we’re able to shape tools into weapons, and why our bodies have the range of motion they do to use them. Because here, in this landscape, we evolved to the particular shape we now recognize as human, and here we learned the necessary skills to survive.

This may be the secret, subconscious pleasure of safari: that here, like nowhere else in the world, we can return to the neighborhood where we all grew up and visit the very same neighbors we would have known back in our anthropic infancy. Because as soon as we came of age as a species, we wandered off, out of East Africa, leaving the flora and fauna we evolved within to flourish in our absence. Of course, the rest of the world did not recognize us for the threat we were, at least not until it was too late. And when, fairly recently, in the grand scheme of things, we came home again, it was with enough sense, or at least in insufficient numbers, to wipe out the megafauna of Africa... yet. For now, we are still able to experience this millions-of-years-old sort of déjà vu. And there may be no more incredible experience for modern man to have than that.

Cottar’s 1920s Camp

As far as our romantic imaginings of safari, though — where does that come from? Why is the fashion and romance around a game drive in Kenya such a heavy drug? Well, because of Sydney Pollack’s film of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, of course, says Calvin Cottar, a third-generation safari guide and the man behind the great 1920s-style camp on the edge of the Masai Mara. As Cottar says, because of the costumes and chemistry Robert Redford and Meryl Streep had while riding around looking at lions and leopards and elephants, fashion magazines and our own personal mood boards are rife with safari chic, year after year, generation after generation.

Arijiju

Up in the Laikipia Valley, on the other hand, in a terrain not unlike that which the notoriously debauched Happy Valley crowd made infamous in the mid-war era, Arijiju offers something entirely different and somewhat otherworldly. Modern luxe and colonial architecture still dominate in this private, five-bedroom spare stone mansion (available to let as a whole). It has a novel, almost-Mallorcan-Inca vibe, complete with a pool overlooking the game-dense bush extending to the horizon, bush which the outfit behind Arijiju can help you explore, by chopper, even.

Ol Donyo

The organic-shaped suites of Ol Donyo Lodge, nestled into the Chyulu hills, right at the edge of ancient lava flows, are more typical of the great bases from which to launch game drives in Kenya and beyond. The black pumice stones and succulent plants around the various pools, mixed with the ferns, fruit trees, and thatched rooves of the buildings, make Ol Donyo feel like a paradise unknown outside of fiction.

andBeyond Ngorongoro Crater

Speaking of fiction and paradise reminds me of a wonderfully charming moment in Bourdain’s episode in Tanzania in which he finds himself so dumbfounded by the hysterical beauty of the Ngorongoro crater— an actual lost world, like the one imagined by Conan Doyle, with its own ecosystem and species unique to the region — that he can hardly speak sensibly. It is a profoundly magical landscape and profoundly weird. Like a child’s picture book, imaginings of plants and animals without any rational realism to ground it. The flora and fauna here, surrounding the intensely luxurious andBeyond lodge, is of an order beyond the creations of Disney or Miyazaki.