Four great African adventures

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Go (ultra) private at Grumeti

The 350,000-acre Grumeti reserve, abutting the Serengeti in Tanzania, is one of east African conservation’s great success stories. It owes much to Singita, the safari company that partnered with Grumeti founder Paul Tudor Jones nearly 20 years ago. Donations made via Singita’s ultra-exclusive lodges funnel directly into the non-profit Grumeti Fund, which has helped quadruple megafauna numbers, pioneer anti-poaching technologies, and educate thousands of local children.

New to the collection is Kilima, a private house at the edge of an escarpment with full Blixen-esque views of the western Serengeti Plain. Its five en suite bedrooms are ideal for groups of friends or multiple family generations, complete with dedicated chef, butler and field guide. The design is anything but Blixen-esque: contemporary sculpture, low-slung sofas in front of slick stone fireplaces, and shaded day beds on a patio beside a slate-blue infinity pool.

The Middle East’s new frontier

If the Arabian Peninsula’s remote reaches figure in your travel fantasies, Sean Nelson is your man. The ex-Royal Navy officer – who also served in the Oman Desert Regiment – has been leading the adventurous around Yemen, Abu Dhabi’s Empty Quarter and Oman’s most off-piste deserts and mountains since 2006. His newest outfit, Socotra Island Expeditions, is now officially up and running. Its mobile camps – pop-up canvas, soft cotton towels and accompanying chef – allow for fluid exploration of Socotra’s extraordinary biodiversity; around 37 per cent of flora and a whopping 90 per cent of its reptiles are unique to the area which, while administratively controlled by Yemen, is actually geographically part of the African continent.

(Humans are scarce too; just 50,000 across a land mass around half the size of Puerto Rico, population 3.2mn.) Gangly, spiky aloes; indigenous yellow pomegranate; the Dragon’s Blood Tree, shallow of root and crimson of sap: these and many similarly freaky others punctuate a landscape of saw-backed mountains and desert coastal plain. As otherworldly, and bucket-list, as they come. 

Nature meets nurture on Madagascar

Southern-African outfitters Time + Tide started in the 2000s with a clutch of remote camps and lodges in Zambia. But it made international waves in 2017 with Miavana, the spectacular beach lodge on the site of an eponymous conservation project on the north-east coast of Madagascar, where design that marries rawness and refinement compliments the ambitious rewilding campaign (to date, more than 100,000 endemic species of flora have been replanted, and all invasive ones cleared).

Tsara Komba, its second Madagascar property, is in the island’s Nosy Be archipelago; its eight suites-on-stilts exploit the site’s dramatic collision of dense jungle and an aquamarine sea with open-wall floorplans and deep covered terraces. Guests can snorkel, scuba-dive and fly-fish in the flats, or swim with whale sharks; land activities include conservation hikes (lemurs and chameleons roam the rainforest), and exploring vanilla and pepper plantations to learn about sustainable farming within wilderness areas.

Central Africa’s other great ape epicentre

Rwanda seems to have upstaged Uganda as the destination for great-ape expeditions. Which is strange, given that in Uganda’s Kibale National Park 13 species of ape, at least two endangered, can be found, including 1,500 chimpanzees. Mountain gorillas range in large numbers; Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to the south is home to around 460, almost half the world’s total wild population. Kibale Lodge, run by Volcanoes Safaris, opened here last summer – a high-style proposition whose eight enormous bandas have put some of Rwanda’s swankier lodges on notice (as will A&K’s revamped Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Lodge when it opens this spring in the Bwindi).

Volcanoes has put together a 10-day “Primates of the Great Rift Valley” circuit, combining Kibale and its chimps with lodges – and primates – in two other sites: Kyambura, in Queen Elizabeth National Park, famous for its “lost” troop of around 30 chimpanzees (and home also to a healthy lion population); and Mount Gahinga, where guests trek with the Nyakagezi gorilla family, known for its silverbacks.

@mariashollenbarger