George’s Safari with Africa Calling Safaris

Updated: 15 October 2026

My recent safari experience with Africa Calling Safaris exceeded every expectation I had ever set. From the moment the small aircraft touched down on the red-dust airstrip and I stepped into the warm, aromatic Kenyan air, I understood that this was going to be something genuinely different from any holiday I had taken before.

Nikos and his team had arranged every detail with quiet precision. The camp was intimate — just eight guests at most — which meant that game drives felt private rather than crowded. Each morning we left before first light, thermoses of strong black coffee in hand, to catch the plains as they woke up. The light at that hour transforms everything: the savannah turns gold, the acacia trees cast long thin shadows, and animals that have been active through the cool night are still visible before they retreat into the shade.

The Elephants of Amboseli

The highlight came on the third morning in Amboseli, with Kilimanjaro emerging above the clouds behind a herd of perhaps sixty elephants moving across a dry lake bed. The matriarch was enormous — one of the guides estimated she was around fifty years old — and she led her family with an authority that was impossible not to admire. Calves no taller than my waist stayed close to their mothers while the older bulls browsed at the edge of the group. We sat in complete silence for forty minutes and nobody suggested moving on.

That silence is something I had not anticipated. On a good safari there are long stretches of stillness where nothing dramatic happens and yet you cannot look away. The guides read the landscape in a way I had no capacity for — a broken twig, a dust cloud three kilometres distant, a change in the wind — and those small observations led us to animals again and again.

Lions and the Maasai Mara

We then transferred to the Maasai Mara for the final four nights. The density of wildlife here is unlike anywhere else I have visited. On our first afternoon game drive, within ninety minutes of leaving camp, we found a pride of eleven lions — two males, five females, and four cubs — sprawled beneath an umbrella thorn. The cubs were perhaps three months old and still unsteady on their feet; watching them attempt to climb on the older males produced laughter from every vehicle in the convoy.

A cheetah hunt on the fourth day was the most focused wildlife moment I have experienced anywhere. The female selected a Thomson’s gazelle from a group of perhaps two hundred, closed to within thirty metres before accelerating, and the whole sequence — from stalking pose to the catch — lasted under a minute. The guides had positioned us perfectly so the action unfolded directly in front of our vehicle. I have watched wildlife documentaries for thirty years. Watching it in person is incomparable.

Would I Go Back?

Without hesitation. The logistics were seamless, the accommodation was comfortable without being excessive, and the guides — all with decades of field experience — made every drive feel instructive rather than simply transactional. Africa Calling Safaris clearly selects the camps they work with very carefully; nothing felt improvised or cut-price. If you are considering Kenya as a destination, I would encourage you not to delay. The quality of the experience depends enormously on choosing operators who know the ecosystems they are working in, and these people unambiguously do.