If you haven’t been on safari, let me describe a game drive to you. You pile into a LandCruiser sporting your best Eliza Thornberry look. You meet the guide who’ll reveal themselves to be so kind and accommodating, you’ll be tempted to send them Christmas cards for years ahead. Then, you bump around the savannah searching for remarkable wild animals to ogle through your binoculars. You will feverishly try to snap documentation of each species on your iPhone or camera with a telephoto lens you never read the instructions to.
You will also, in all likelihood, be in the company of honeymooners and multigenerational families who are wondering when the Champagne toast will come out. Which is why my friends and I were considered a wild card on our group trip to Kenya. Most people who book a safari wait for a major milestone to warrant the price tag of this kind of trip, but we’d decided to gift it to ourselves this year.
It wasn’t completely out of nowhere. My friend Lauren had just finished grad school with a master’s in social work, a hard-pivot career achievement, and the rest of us—Tanya, Vera, and myself—were burnt out on life. We were desperate for the excuse to indulge in a fabulous vacation. After comparing the places none of us had been yet, narrowing our list down to destinations boasting good weather in February (the month we were all free for a 10-day trip), we landed on a safari in Kenya followed by a few days of suntanning (and sunburning) on the island of Lamu, and an Afropop-fueled weekend out in Nairobi.
We could also feel that, at this juncture in our early 30s, the seasons were changing quickly around us. We were still free of great responsibility, like children or mortgage payments. We’d been friends for years, experiencing the rollercoaster of life and work together, but the web of our shared lives already spanned high school, college, stints living abroad, and a number of international trips. And the thing about bucket lists, I find, is that many people spend more time compiling them than checking things off. We figured, why wait? We’d take any excuse to do our first safari, and we weren’t holding off for our honeymoons.
So, we booked round-trip flights to Nairobi.