Borana Lodge in Kenya

Writer James Traub gets a taste of wild Africa in stylish comfort at this lodging that preserves the land and a way of life.

Clinging desperately to our horses, my 11-year-old son, Alex, and I were clattering along a rocky defile in the Laikipia Hills, northeast of Nairobi. "You're doing great!" shouted Bimbi Dyer, co-manager, along with her husband, Fuzz, of the Borana Lodge, within whose 35,000-acre expanse we were riding early this December morning. And, in fact, we were doing great. The air, 6,600 feet above sea level, was crisp; the light was brilliant. And after days spent cruising the savannah in a jeep, the very fact of being out in the open, seeing Africa from atop an animal, moving at its pace, felt like a closer communion with nature.

And then, when we finally dismounted, proud of our aches, we looked up to see an enormous table spread with white linen beside a creek rushing over great boulders. Breakfast! The Borana Lodge staff had set up a field kitchen in the reeds by the creek and began to serve a cornucopia of breakfast foods: fresh mango, toast, cereal, pancakes, glossy yellow eggs from the ranch, sausage, bacon, and wheat porridge. Added to the snapping breeze and pastoral setting was Bimbi's obvious delight in her successful orchestrations.

Borana Lodge, which Fuzz's brother completed in 1993, is a living reminder of the gracious Anglo-African life that we read about in Beryl Markham or in Hemingway. The lodge is perched amid steep hills and wind-scoured scrub—the very sort of landscape, in fact, that Hemingway describes in Green Hills of Africa.

Bimbi and Fuzz have carved a little patch of domesticity out of this rugged setting: A flagged path runs down the hillside to a well-watered lawn and then to the six thatched cottages that serve as the guest quarters. These African-style chalets with cathedral ceilings each have a separate bathroom, fireplace, and comfortable couch. In the morning, sitting in bed with your breakfast tea gazing out the picture window at the green hills and Mount Kenya, it's easy to indulge in the fantasy of being lost in space and time.

But Africa is never far away: A family of elephants often wallows in the water hole at the base of the hill. You can, if you are of a mind to do so, sit in the rocking chairs below one of the cottages and commune with the elephants.

There is a kind of semiofficial policy of languor at Borana Lodge; guests are free to imitate the old leisure class by doing nothing. You can swim in the oval pool dug into the hillside or browse in the gift shop or chat with Harry and William, the Dyer boys, if they happen to be home from school. You can dawdle over cocktails by the great roaring fire in the lodge's living room. And you can eat. The food is on a level with that of a French country inn—fare such as a fine filet of home-bred beef, irreproachable pommes dauphinoise, and a delectable crepe with mango ice cream.

There are, of course, myriad things to do for task-oriented families. The ranch is thronged with giraffes, buffalo, gazelles, and zebras. (The ranch next door, Lewa Downs, is home to one of Africa's largest collections of the endangered black rhino.) After our horseback ride, we crept by jeep through the brush in search of lions (which we found). We took a walk through the hills and then climbed into jeeps and drove into a wildflower-filled meadow; we turned a corner, and there was a large elephant blocking our way. He shot us an unmistakably dirty look and lumbered off up a steep, wooded hill, smashing foliage as he went. We continued on to the summit for cocktails.

Of course, you could see all those animals and drink all that bed tea at a hundred places in East Africa. But Borana Lodge is not simply a resort. It's a window onto a way of life—the inherited, still flourishing life of white Kenyans. In the years after World War I, the English settled their East African colonies by offering farmland free to demobilized veterans. And while elsewhere in Africa and Asia the English were either booted off their land with independence, or simply left; today perhaps 2,000 Kenyans of English descent remain of that migration, many of them rooted in the same countryside their parents and grandparents settled. Both Fuzz and Bimbi are third-generation Kenyans; Fuzz's grandfather at first operated a ranch higher up in the hills and then later bought the property that now includes Borana. Other Dyers live on other hilltops in the area; in fact, one of Fuzz's brothers and his sister-in-law designed the lodge.

Fuzz and Bimbi ate dinner with us every night; and while Bimbi is a gregarious enthusiast who presides over the horseback rides and epic breakfasts with a camp counselor's mixture of sunshine and tight control, Fuzz is more introspective and is probably happiest flying his plane or tending his livestock. And yet one evening we kept talking after everyone else had left the table, and Fuzz said something startling:

"If you asked me what tribe I belong to," he said, "I would tell you, 'Laikipiak Masai.' These are the people I grew up with and played with as a boy. The happiest times of my life were spent wandering these hills with my Masai friends and a camel, going out for days and not even planning where we were going or when we would come back home."

It was true that the Africans Fuzz spent the most time with in his youth worked for his father. And of course he wasn't really Masai. But he was someone who belonged to this land and in this land.

One afternoon we visited the Masai village supported by the lodge, where a circle of chanting, jumping young men performed a dance of celebration. Perhaps the village might have seemed more genuine had it not been so carefully purged of modern impurities. When I asked Fuzz if he could let the villagers wear their Nikes, he shook his head impatiently. "This is the real Masai life," he said. "We want to show people a way of existence that has always been."

Preservation of the old ways matters deeply to Fuzz. In fact, Borana Lodge is as much a preservationist project as a profit-making one. The majority of Kenya's animals now live on private land. Fuzz has been working with the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, a community conservation and wildlife management association, to encourage ranchers to tear down their fences so the animals can roam free. That seemed like a utopian project, but Fuzz was quite determined about it, and some fences have begun coming down.

"If you come back here in two or three years," he said to me, "I think you'll see a completely different environment."

—James Traub

*An excerpt from Staying Real—5 Authentic Lodges in Traveler's March 2004 issue.