Meeting people where they live: a Batwa community on the edge of Bwindi, a Samburu village in the north, a Swahili neighbourhood walk in Stone Town. Arranged with the community, not around it.
Each of these is somewhere we run cultural Visit, with its own page.
Kenya
Amboseli is where you photograph elephants with Kilimanjaro behind them. The swamps fed by meltwater off the mountain hold big herds year round, the plains are open and dusty so nothing hides, and it is close enough to Nairobi to be worth three days on its own.
Kenya
Samburu is the dry north, and the wildlife is different for it. Grevy's zebra, reticulated giraffe, Beisa oryx, gerenuk and Somali ostrich live here and almost nowhere else in Kenya — guides call them the Samburu Special Five. The Ewaso Nyiro river keeps it all alive and draws elephant down to drink all afternoon.
Rwanda
Five volcanoes on the Rwandan side of the Virungas, and the forest Dian Fossey worked in for eighteen years. Gorilla trekking here is shorter and better organised than almost anywhere — Kigali is two and a half hours away by road, which means you can land, trek and fly home inside three days.
Rwanda
The memorial is where more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi are buried. It is not a sight to tick off; it is a couple of hours that will change how you understand everything else you see in Rwanda. Most visitors go on their first morning, before heading for the gorillas.
Rwanda
Kigali surprises people: clean, green, laid out over a dozen hills and genuinely safe to walk at night. It is where every Rwandan trip starts and ends, and it is worth a day rather than a transfer — markets, a serious coffee scene, art co-operatives and some of the best restaurants in the region.
Tanzania
A collapsed volcano twenty kilometres across with twenty-five thousand animals living on the floor of it, walled in by a six-hundred-metre rim. It is the one place in East Africa where seeing all of the Big Five in a single morning is an ordinary outcome rather than a lucky one.
Tanzania
Where an East African safari ends. Zanzibar is an hour's flight from Arusha: white sand, warm water, and Stone Town, a thousand-year-old trading port of carved doors and narrow lanes that is a UNESCO World Heritage site in its own right. Three nights here changes what the whole trip felt like.
Uganda
Bwindi holds roughly half the mountain gorillas left on earth. You walk into thick, steep, ancient forest with a ranger and a tracker, sometimes for an hour and sometimes for six, and then spend one hour with a habituated family at a few metres' distance. People who have done every safari there is still describe it as the best hour of their lives.
Uganda
The best chimpanzee tracking in East Africa, in a forest holding thirteen primate species. Around 1,500 chimps live here and the habituated communities are relaxed enough that you watch them feed, groom and argue overhead rather than catching a glimpse and losing them.
Uganda
A Batwa community on the edge of Bwindi, where the forest people evicted when the park was gazetted in 1991 show how they lived inside it — tracking, hunting, fire, medicine, and the tree houses they slept in. It is a short visit and the most direct account you will get of what conservation cost the people who were already there.
Uganda
Kidepo sits in the far north-east against the South Sudan border, and most people who rank Uganda's parks put it first. The Narus valley holds buffalo herds in the thousands, there are cheetah and ostrich found nowhere else in the country, and you will share it with almost nobody.
Uganda
The smallest park in Uganda, where three volcanoes meet the Rwandan and Congolese borders. It has a gorilla family of its own and, more unusually, golden monkeys — and the Batwa trail here is led by the forest people who lived in it before it was a park.
Uganda
Uganda's oldest wildlife reserve, in the Albertine Rift where East African savannah meets Congolese rainforest — so the bird list reads like two countries at once. The Sempaya hot springs boil hard enough to cook an egg, and the Batwa still live on the reserve edge.
Prices are per person. Any of these can be adjusted to give the activity more time.
Our diversity is what makes us unique, get to learn the customs, beliefs, and way of life of different communities while at leisure.
Say so when you get in touch and we will build the route around it, rather than squeezing it in on an afternoon when the light is wrong.
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