The First Hosted Safari

Female Cheetah - Samburu

On our first visit to Kenya in November 2017, we could not have predicted how captivated we would become. We already had multiple safari trips to South Africa, Zambia and Botswana under our belts, so we thought we had a good idea of what to expect. But here we are, a little over two years later, eagerly awaiting our fifth visit, with another planned for later in the year.

Our first trip was to the Maasai Mara for a straight nine days, where we stayed at the very new Zebra Plains Mara Camp. I blogged about it in November 2017 and in my last blog about the trip we had already started to plan another trip in 2018. In addition we had the opportunity to host a group in 2019.

A mere seven months later we were back and it was even better than the first trip. Already the Mara was beginning to take hold and we were hooked. I blogged about that trip, a blog that ran to nine posts. It also gave details of the hosted trip that had become a reality and would be our next planned visit.

Mdomo at Sunset

It didn’t work out that way though, we couldn’t wait that long and a trip in January/February was arranged. It was a special trip and produced four blog posts, but this time we didn’t restrict ourselves to the Maasai Mara.

We started out by having three nights in Samburu where we had some ‘firsts’ in the form of Reticulated Giraffe and Gerenuk. Moving on to Solio, we were after Rhino and weren’t disappointed. After three nights there it was time for the Mara and another great trip.

White Rhinos - Solio

November soon came around and, for us, the long-awaited hosted safari where we had 5 guests booked in. Over the next few weeks I’ll blog about that trip including the add-on we had with two of our guests to the newly opened Zebra Plains Amboseli Camp.

The special offer hosted safaris are still on offer with two dates this year available at the 2019 rate. There are also dates available in June and November 2021 with a slight increase in cost. Full details on our Safaris pages.

Website Works

 Green Iguana - Iguana Bridge, Costa Rica

For some time we have been of the opinion that our website needed a refresh. The design was out-dated and we didn’t feel the images were displayed to their best advantage. It was easy enough to maintain and quite economical to run, but it had to go.

In my last blog post I talked about the amount of time spent away from home and that was one of the reasons why nothing happened quickly. Indeed, there was no actual plan in place and certainly no urgency as our hosting deal lasted until October this year.

Suddenly at the beginning of December an opportunity arose and after a couple of days mulling over the plan, we set off to make the change. Unlike the previous site, which I built myself, this one was going to require the services of an experienced web designer. I’d go so far as to say part of the problem with the original site was down to the fact that I built it.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated was the amount of time it would actually take. On more than one occasion I put in a 14-hour day organising content and liaising with the designer to get the look that we wanted. We even spent time on Christmas Day working through certain pages.

 Storm Clouds Gather Over Swanage

In between all of this, we spent 10 days in December at the Artisans on the Beach event in Swanage. It was a successful event for us and resulted in the sale of a number of pictures, three of which will soon be gracing the walls of a home in Germany. But the website work was still going on apace and when time permitted, many phone calls and texts were exchanged with the designer.

We set a target of going live with the new site on January 1^st, but it was only January 1^st in Australia when it actually went live. We had a couple of days testing things in the live environment and had one or two issues to resolve, but as I write this, I’m fairly comfortable that it is working as planned.

As part of the website upgrade, we realised we needed to consolidate our social media accounts. As a single photographer, that’s perfectly straightforward. However, as there are two of us, both with our own social media accounts, the situation has been somewhat difficult to resolve. Even now, I’m not totally convinced we have managed it. We want to ensure that we don’t desert any of our followers and hopefully our solution will achieve that. We’ve included links to all of our joint social media accounts on all pages of the new site and also an RSS feed where you can pick up these blog posts as I post them. Time alone will tell if these changes work.

Female Serval - Maasai Mara, Kenya

For now, it’s time to go through the thousands of images from our November trip to the Maasai Mara with five guests. We were fortunate to have some wonderful sightings yet again. If you’ve seen our post on social media featuring the Serval, a very elusive cat, the three and a half hours we had with her was very special. Keep an eye out in the Kenya 2019 album in our Gallery to see what other successes our guests and we had.