Maasai Mara

I flew to Nairobi on Kenya Airways from London Heathrow, a direct night flight that lands at Jomo Kenyatta International at 6am just as the light is turning the acacia trees gold. I'd been on the plane for 8 hours and 20 minutes and felt remarkably fresh, which I put down to the excitement and the fact that Kenya Airways has genuinely good food and I'd slept for five of those hours. The immigration queue was long. The taxi to the hotel was not.

I spent two days in Nairobi first — underrated city, unfairly maligned. The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, where orphaned elephant calves are raised by keepers who sleep in the same enclosures, was the most emotionally affecting hour I've had on any trip. At 11am each day the babies are brought out to the mud pool and they charge around playing in the mud and nursing their bottles and falling over each other and I watched a two-month-old named Musiara try to climb into his keeper's lap and had to find somewhere to compose myself. The Giraffe Centre — feeding Rothschild giraffes from an elevated platform, close enough to smell their breath and feel the rough velvet of their noses on your palm — was similarly overwhelming.

The flight to the Maasai Mara from Wilson Airport (Nairobi's domestic airstrip) was 45 minutes on a Safarilink Cessna Grand Caravan, twelve passengers, low enough to watch the landscape transition from city to farmland to savanna from 500 metres up. We landed on a grass airstrip in the middle of the reserve, where a Land Cruiser was waiting, and by the time we'd driven 20 minutes to the camp I'd already seen giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, and a tawny eagle the size of a small dog.

The camp was Angama Mara, perched on the Oloololo Escarpment, tented suites with glass fronts that open onto the savanna. My suite had a freestanding bathtub facing floor-to-ceiling glass, the Mara plain dropping away below. I arrived, put my bag down, looked out at the view, and stood there for a long time not quite believing it.

Three weeks in the Mara meant three weeks of game drives, twice a day — dawn (5:30am departure, coffee and rusks, a blanket, the sky lightening from charcoal to crimson to gold) and dusk (4pm, the light going amber and long, predators beginning to move). In three weeks I saw everything. Lions hunting, a kill at dawn on day three — a pride of nine taking down a zebra, brutal and fast and impossible to look away from. Leopards: three sightings, two of them with cubs. Cheetahs: a mother with three adolescent cubs practising hunts, the fastest animals on land doing their thing 30 metres from the vehicle. Elephants in herds of 80. Hippos wallowing in the Mara River. And the crossing.

The Great Migration crossing is the thing. Wildebeest — 1.5 million of them, following the rains in an eternal circle between Tanzania and Kenya — must cross the Mara River twice a year, and the crossing is a spectacle of chaos and terror. They gather on the bank in their thousands, milling and nervous, and then something triggers the first one to leap in and suddenly they're all going, a tidal wave of hooves and horns and wild eyes, and the crocodiles — ancient, patient, enormous — are waiting. I watched three crossings in my three weeks. The guide explained: "The crocodiles are not cruel. They have been doing this for 200 million years." I thought about that a lot.

I went up in a hot air balloon on day five — a 6am launch over the plain at dawn, an hour floating at treetop height over the savanna, watching the world wake up below us. The landing was rough, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and then a full champagne breakfast was produced from a Land Cruiser that had tracked us. Scrambled eggs and bacon and fresh fruit and cold champagne in the middle of the African grassland with a herd of impala watching from a respectful distance.

I flew home from Nairobi via Dubai on Emirates, a connection I'd deliberately made long enough to spend one night in Dubai — the two cities could not be more different, which was the point. I was in the Mara looking at lions at 6am and in the Dubai Mall looking at Prada by 10pm the same day. The world is very small and very large simultaneously.