On the hoof

Trotting through the Kenyan savannah is one thing, but setting up camp in a lion haunt is quite another, as award-winning novelist Sarah Penny discovers on a horseback adventure in Africa
Riders with giraffes
Saddle up ... taking a slow amble among the wildlife. Photo: ©horsebackinkenya.com

The massive beast we had just inadvertently flushed from the lush river undergrowth lumbered up the opposite bank, where it stopped, snorted sharply and directed a glare of pure bovine malevolence at us from beneath its curving, heavy horns.

"An elderly bull African buffalo," said our safari guide Laria Grant, breathlessly. "You don't want to provoke them. They can be rather bad-tempered." This was a quite unnecessary caveat. Buffalo provocation was the last thing any of us had in mind right then. Our horses, recovering from a fit of shying and alarmed whickering, calmed down slowly and we resumed our winding course through the riparian woodland, wondering what denizen of the bush would be the next to introduce itself abruptly to our little company.

We were on El Karama ranch - a breathtaking 14,000 acre wilderness of savannah, rocky escarpment and riverine habitat, located in the Laikipia plains to the northwest of Mount Kenya. The name El Karama is Arabic in origin, meaning "a treasured possession", and the ranch belongs to Laria's father, Guy Grant, a second-generation Scottish Kenyan. With its blue hills and undulating plains stretching to the horizon it is a beautiful place and we were seeing it in the best possible way - on horseback during a six-day trail.

After lunch at the farmhouse the day before, we had been introduced to our horses while the jeeps and side-packed camels with our gear, tents and food were sent ahead. My horse was a grey Anglo-Arab called Pesaka - Swahili for Easter because she was born on Easter Day - and she did fortunately seem to have a peaceful and forgiving temperament despite my rusty horsemanship. The Karama website advises that guests need to be fairly adept at riding. Laria rides at the front of the column and a groom brings up the rear, creating a sense of security and control. But the long days of between six and eight hours in the saddle do require a habituated bottom and the pace varies between amble, trot and canter.

The first day's ride took us through biscuit-coloured grassland dotted with acacia whistling thorns, and over the Uaso Nyiro River, a name meaning "dark water" in Maasai. The rivers on El Karama have their sources on Mt Kenya and the Aberdares and are too cold for crocodiles. Consequently human swimming is a possibility. Once you've harnessed all the horses to a picket line slung between trees and done a grunt-and-bubble reconnaissance to ensure that the wandering hippo community is sunning itself elsewhere, a midday soak is a gloriously bracing way to sluice off the accumulated slick of equine and human sweat and veld dust.

The first tent circle was pitched on the lip of a granite escarpment and as we came into camp an incarnadine African sun was swiftly sinking behind the distant blue hills. A welcoming fire crackled in a natural bowl in the granite and we gathered round to snack on macadamia nuts and biltong (dried raw meat) while an evening meal was prepared in the mess tent behind us.

The camp meals - despite their apparently rough-and-ready preparation on open fires- are sumptuously epicurean. Part of the pleasure of eating is in the care taken with the way dinner is presented - the plates and glasses resting on leather coasters and decoupage mats hand-made by the Grant family, and the atmospheric hiss and spit of the hurricane lamps which create a tight circle of warmth and light against the vast, dark night outside.

The next morning at half past six Laria got us up for an early ramble. A choir of slate-coloured bou-bous were already in full song - a sound like champagne bubbling in crystal pipes - and a bucket of hot water ready besides our tents. Tea and scones helped to ease the transition from warm bed to crisp African dawn and we set off behind Joseph, the Meru gun bearer. Following his pointing finger we saw eland, buffalo and several dik-diks, that tiny soft-eyed antelope which, unknown to us, Prince William was currently spearing Maasai-style on another Kenyan ranch.

After a hearty three-course breakfast we were up in the saddle again and hardly out of camp when we encountered our first roaming herd of antelope. These were hartebeest, or kongoni as they are locally known in Kenya - a long-faced reddish, antelope with backward-curving horns. Interspersed among the hartebeest were numerous zebra - both the common plains zebra and the rarer Grevy's zebra - distinguishable by their finer stripes and comical paddle-shaped ears.

The wild animals seemed to have little fear of the horses even with all of us homo sapiens astride them, gawping, exclaiming and snapping away with our cameras. We were able to approach far more closely than would ever be possible in a jeep.

The tropics are sultry at noon even in the mid-year - the cooler period between the long and the short rains - although equatorial Kenya has no distinct seasons as such. We were all in a state of somnolent happiness when we startled the buffalo. It provided a sharp reminder that despite the luxury of the camps and the apparent peacefulness of our surroundings this is still virgin bush - home to big cats, and bigger, aggressively territorial browsers and foragers.

Laria, who was born on this land and has a degree in zoology, is a mine of information about the animals and their habitat. Just before arriving at the second camp, she pointed out the smooth side of a tree, its bark completely worn away by elephants soothing itches. And the next day we did spy a large family group of matriarch, sisters and calves - a slow and dignified caravan of cambered grey backs tracking through the mottled dun-green bush - which we followed for some time, keeping carefully upwind and as shtoom as we could manage despite the excitement.

The second camp was a river camp tucked in a bend of the Uaso Nyiro, on a spongy bed of penisetum grass studded with violet convolvulus flowers and under trees alive with birdsong. Despite all this seeming cosiness Laria warned us that on no account were we to move between tents after dark as it is a favourite lion haunt.

The camps on safari are only struck every other day and the "in situ" days involve an early morning and late afternoon ride with a long and much-relished siesta in between. Bucket showers are available on demand during these rest times. This ingenious combination of rope, tree and fire-heated water allows a piping trickle of smokily pungent liquid to cascade deliciously over one's body; a spectator's gallery of chattering blue-scrotumed vervet monkeys passes laddish comments from the branches overhead.

After hours spent among zebra, antelope and giraffe we would intermittently happen upon herds of cattle ("ngombes" in Kenyan ranching argot) protected by a herdsman leaning nonchalantly on a rifle butt. Livestock and ecotourism are the simultaneous mainstays of economic survival on the ranch, and the same veld that sustains cattle also supports the herbivore populations and the scavengers that predate on them. During the day the ngombes roam the land but at nightfall they are herded into circular acacia thorn tree "bomas", the spiky tangle offering a simple but effective deterrent to the sensitive eyes and snouts of the predators.

Our final night was electrified by a passing herd of elephants that came to investigate the outskirts of our camp shortly after we had turned in. They declared their presence by a cacophony of snapping branches and low stomach rumbles, although sporadic salvos into the air from the gun bearer, Joseph, kept them at bay. In the morning we saw that the visiting hefalumps had left calling cards: steaming mounds of dung, on which the dik-diks quickly sprinkled their own hard tiny pellets. This cheeky dik-dik custom is the source of a Maasai observation: "The dik-dik hopes one day to trip up the elephant!"

Way to go

Sarah Penny stayed at El Karama, Nanyuki in Kenya. For reservations call +254 (0) 176 32526 or email horseback@swiftkenya.com.

The price per person per night is $250. The maximum number allowed on a safari is eight people. Safaris can be tailored to an individual group's requirements provided that eight "bed nights" in total are booked, for example a group of four would need to book at least two nights each or a group of two would need to book at least four nights each.

British Airways flies to Nairobi International Airport daily from £650. Kenya Airways flies daily to Nairobi from £450.