Living in the heart of the African savanna

I had been a telecommunications professional for over 15 years when I moved to Kenya. Living and working in a new continent was an exciting experience especially since I had the chance to travel to 15 African countries on work though I was based in Nairobi, Kenya. And while in Kenya, my wife Jui, our son Rik and I developed a passion for wildlife and conservation. We got involved with a voluntary organisation that works to mitigate human-wildlife conflict on the southern, unfenced periphery of the Nairobi National Park that faces away from the city. This portion is kept deliberately open so as to allow lions and other wildlife to move to and from other parks, and facilitate genetic diversity. However, while moving through community land, the big cats often attack livestock and this invites retaliation from the Maasai herdsmen. So, we got involved in projects to instal flashing lights (called Lion Entry Deterrent lights) in cattle enclosures to deter lions and thereby protect them from conflict with humans.

When Rik went off to university and Jui and I no longer needed to live in a big city, it seemed like an almost natural progression for us to consider setting up a camp in Maasai Mara where we could live surrounded by wildlife and contribute to wildlife conservation. We entered into a discussion with Porini Safari Camps who already had five eco-camps with most of them being in private conservancies. While poaching is a much talked about crime, a far greater albeit insidious threat to wildlife is actually the loss of habitat caused by the large increase in human population. In a world where the space available to wildlife is constantly shrinking, one of the few initiatives to expand the space available is private conservancies in Kenya. Large tracts of land are leased from private owners and opened up to wildlife. Low density, high value tourism in camps on those conservancies then provides the revenue to pay the rent for the leased land and employment to the local community in conservancy management and in the camps.

For safari tourists, this provides a great alternative to the normal game drives in the national parks because of the far lower tourist density, and the ability to drive off-road and go on night drives. While tented camps in private conservancies have been popular with western safari tourists for almost two decades now, these have not been very popular with Indian tourists so far, primarily because of low awareness. We thought that with increasing affordability, the Indian market was ready for what we consider to be a more authentic safari experience. So that is how we thought of setting up the Porini Cheetah Camp. This is the first Indian-hosted wildlife camp in Kenya and opened in June 2017. While the camp retains an international flavour, it is a comfortable bubble for Indian safari tourists in the middle of the African savanna.

—Nirmalya Banerjee
— As told to Srishti.Dasgupta@timesgroup.com