About Campi ya Kanzi

Campi ya Kanzi: Our full report

Campi ya Kanzi first opened in 1998 as a luxury home stay operated by an Italian couple who were deeply committed ...

... to the environment and their local Maasai community. It has since evolved into an expansive, 16-bed tented camp set on the hillsides around the family's former home, which today forms the main dining and lounge area.

Arrival at Campi ya Kanzi is invariably by a Land Rover which picks you up from the private Kanzi airstrip for the 20-minute drive along a narrow bush path to the hillside camp. A group of staff assembles to greet you in the parking area behind the main lounge and dining room that form the camp’s stone-and-thatch central building.

The lounge is comfortably and welcomingly furnished with plenty of sofas and armchairs, bookshelves and family ephemera, including lots of African objets d’art. A few steps up to the left is the dining room with its big dark-wood dining table and seating for up to 20. Straight ahead is an expansive stone deck area stretching the length of the building, with a fire pit and seating at one end, which is often used for pre-dinner drinks. There are superb views here across the Kuku Ranch savannahs and hills, towards Kilimanjaro – a majestic panorama in clear conditions.

The guest tents at Campi ya Kanzi are some distance from the central area, and very well spaced apart. As wildlife moves around the camp, you’ll be escorted by an askari after dark. Each of the tents consists of a large, traditional canvas safari tent (with screen-mesh “windows" with roll-down flaps for privacy), set on a wooden deck, and suspended beneath a wood-and-thatch roof, with a bathroom at the back featuring half-height polished stone walls. The bathroom and bedroom areas are separated by a partition formed by two large clothes wardrobes.

The decks at the front of the tents all look out to the south and west, offering lovely views across the savannah and hills towards Kilimanjaro. Seating on the decks, however, consists of somewhat uncomfortable chunky cane armchairs.

The bedroom areas are furnished with rustic four-poster beds, and a limited amount of seating – cane, ornamental and safari-style – with a couple of small tables. There’s nowhere in the tents to really stretch out and relax apart from the bed itself. The rather old mosquito nets over the beds don’t reach the floor and are decorative, rather than practical – but the camp says there is no mosquito problem here, so this may not be an issue. Certainly we weren’t bitten, even though there was some rain during our stay.

The tents’ interior décor is partly provided by faux-naif scenes hand-painted onto the cupboard walls, depicting the camp environs – decoration that could work but doesn’t quite hit the mark. The tents are equipped with Italian plug sockets (continental-fitting, 2-round-pin) which although working 24/7 mean most guests will need to do their charging with the multi-sockets in the dining room/lounge area.

The half-stone-walled and stone-floored bathrooms contain walk-in showers, with hot water supplied by a solar water heater for each tent, double wash basins, flush toilets and bidets. Toiletries are supplied in glass bottles.

Campi ya Kanzi has recently imported a lot of new Italian linen bath towels and bed linen – organic, pale grey and green sheets, pillow cases and quilt covers – that has a much rougher texture than most guests will be used to. We found it rather uncomfortable. The linen bath towels actually dry pretty well, but again it is an unusual and slightly eccentric choice for a luxury tented camp not to provide fluffy, cotton bath towels. Campi ya Kanzi ploughs very much its own furrow.

The camp’s guest tents are gradually being replaced (two new ones were almost ready during our stay in April 2014) and while the new tents are the same size as the previous ones they are reckoned to be a significant upgrade. Rather than an actual safari tent, they use canvas walls on a chunky frame of varnished tree trunks. They have better lighting and a single light switch to operate it. This is a good move, as our tent included some quite basic strip lighting and switches in various places around the tent, without the central on-off which is becoming a standard feature in high-end safari camps.

Although you get the feeling that Campi ya Kanzi hasn’t been following Kenya’s accommodation trends very closely, that may be no bad thing: it’s certainly unique. The new tents should bring a noticeable lift in standards.

Wildlife is all around: animals seen near the camp commonly include buffalo, hartebeest, Grants’ gazelle, impala and Maasai giraffe. Around the tents, not only were impala often grazing nearby, but on both evenings of our stay, our tent was visited by a genet on the hunt for snacks. It circled the bed, realized the tent was occupied and exited again, all in the space of a few seconds. The attractive visitor was a bonus as far as we were concerned, but some guests might be alarmed by the invasion of a small, lithe creature looking like a cross between a tabby cat and a mongoose. After an investigation, it turned out the genet was slipping through the gap in the tent flaps – easily defended!

While simply being at at Campi ya Kanzi and absorbing its atmosphere is deeply relaxing and rewarding, the range of activities at the camp is what makes it so special.

The game-viewing, Maasai range lands and bush savannah of the ranch’s lower altitudes contrast strikingly with the magnificent, high-altitude cloud forest up among the peaks of the Chyulus. When it comes to hiring and retaining driver-guides, Campi ya Kanzi views good communication skills and sheer experience as counting for more than qualifications from the Kenya Professional Safari Guides Association (KPSGA),whose silver qualifcation is the benchmark used by most top-end camps.

The camp’s vehicle fleet consists of one short-wheel-base and four long-wheel-base Land Rovers. With eight guest tents, many guests will get a private vehicle for their own group, but the camp will match guests preferences where it makes sense to do so, or ensure a private vehicle where ideal and where possible. Guests who want to absolutely guarantee a private vehicle can book one in advance at extra cost.

Bush walks are conducted straight out of camp, walking into the savannah, normally with a guide and a tracker, both traditionally armed Maasai. Your guide will always speak English and you can learn a great deal about the local wildlife and environment in a couple of hours, while usually seeing a good selection of game, from herds of impala to giraffe loping through the trees. It’s common to end an afternoon walk with a sundowner in a good vantage point, followed by a drive back to camp the dark, with a spotlight.

A morning trip up into the Chyulu cloud forest, inside the Chyulu Hills National Park, starts with a chugging climb by Land Rover through grassy hills, bracken and shrubs, with impressive, and easily photographed birdlife en route. Once up at the forest level, you leave the vehicle and hike another couple of hundred metres into an area of lush, grassy vales between stands of primeval cloud forest. Walking into the cathedral-like darkness of these jungle zones you’re entering a totally contrasting environment: you need to be prepared with suitable footwear for tramping up slippery, root-covered trails beneath towering forest giants. The wildlife in the woods is hard to see, though in theory it includes leopards, bushpig, bushbuck and colourful chameleons as well as forest birds such as Hartlaub’s turaco and white-starred robin and swallowtail and Charaxes butterflies flitting through the shafts of sunlight. You may also meet local honey-collectors and gatherers of miraa (the herbal stimulant also known as qat), who are tolerated by the national park rangers.

As well as bush walks, game drives and forest walks, the camp often takes visitors to visit a local network of caves. These are huge subterranean chambers, one of which they sometimes use for dinner parties. On a hot afternoon, a visit makes a cool and welcome interlude.

The Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, set up by the owners of Campi ya Kanzi, has had a major impact on the local Maasai community of the communally owned, 1000km² Kuku Group Ranch. For example, in order to prevent lion-hunting, the Trust pays compensation to the owner of every cow, donkey or goat lost to a lion attack. More visible beneficiaries are the 867 children enrolled at the local primary school in Il Tilal, the nearest village, where there are just four teachers on the government payrool. The Trust pays for another 13 teachers and a librarian. That still means an average class size of 48, but it’s a lot more practical than a class size of 217. Visitors are welcome, and you may also be able to call in at the local clinic.

If you want to meet the local community at home, one or two of Il-Tilal’s Maasai enkang, or thornbush-encircled compounds, can be visited. Late afternoon is a good time, when the cows are coming back from pasture. It’s a low-key interaction, with none of the commercialisation that sometimes spoils such visits. It starts with everyone gathering to greet you in song. The women and older children do then hurry to set out their crafts along a suitable fence for your perusal, and it’s nice to buy one or two items after a little bit of bargaining banter – but there’s no pressure to do so. You’re also welcome to stoop inside one or two of the dark and smoky huts: accompanied as you are by a local guide, you need not worry about making any faux pas.

Back at camp, an informal back-of-house tour is highly recommended. They use a washing machine here rather than the more obvious hand-washing solution (the machine uses less water), coffee husk charcoal in the kitchen stoves, eight colossal, 100,000 water-storage balloons to store the water collected from their huge rainwater catchment area on the hillside. There’s also a charcoal fruit-and-vergetable larder and an incinerator-boiler fuelled by the camp’s waste cardboard and paper to heat water.