Going walkabout

Court, non-residents were only allowed access to the four ‘public’ beaches as the guest of a resident.

Ask any non-African what ‘safari’ means and they will almost certainly say that it has something to do with looking at wildlife, probably through the windows of a Land Rover. It doesn’t. Safari is a Swahili word meaning ‘a journey’, which in turn derives from the Farsi safara, meaning ‘travel’. If you’re ‘on safari’, you’re ‘incommunicado’ or, probably closest of all, ‘gone walkabout’. And if this is what you long for in a holiday — to disappear into the wilderness — few places on earth will meet your requirements better than a tiny Maasai lodge set in 60,000 acres of northern Kenya looking out over hundreds of miles of Africa towards Samburu and the sunrise. At Tassia, when the sun comes up, you can almost hear the opening bars of The Lion King. It’s that spectacular.

Behind, to the west, the Mokogodo forest of cedar and juniper is a refuge for elephant in the dry season, so you can sit and have breakfast outside Tassia Lodge, watching a family of elephants wallowing about in the river below you.

Tassia and the surrounding countryside form part of a protected wildlife sanctuary — the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy — overseen by the Lekurruki Conservation Group. The Maasai elders in this area realised some years ago that farming the land intensively was destroying its natural beauty, so they began to think about tourism, and agreed eventually to remove all livestock from the protected area and shift their families to the Mokogodo escarpment, where rainfall is higher, fresh water more plentiful and access to schools and roads easier. So that the tourism would be unintrusive, they made sure Tassia lodge was ecological.