Anniversaries

An anniversary is a smaller brief than a honeymoon and it usually travels better. You have done this before. You are less interested in being surprised, you know within about ten minutes which rooms you like, and there is often a specific reason to go back somewhere rather than to try somewhere new.

So we plan it backwards from one evening. Which night the dinner goes on, where it happens, and what the two days either side have to look like for it to land properly.

Going back, or going somewhere new

Both work. Going back is the harder one to get right, because the place in your head is ten years old and the place on the ground may not be. Camps change hands. A manager who made the whole thing leaves and takes the feeling with him. We keep track of that for a living, so ask us before you book rather than after. If the answer is that it has slipped, there is almost always a camp doing now what that one did then.

Somewhere new is the easier brief and the better one if the last few years have been busy. In that case we would rather build it around what you have both been quietly wanting than around the anniversary itself.

The evening

One good dinner, on the right night, in a place you would not have found. That is most of what this trip is.

What that looks like depends on where you are. A table set on a riverbank with lamps and nobody else in sight. The end of a jetty at Watamu. A deck above the plains with the fire going. Camps do this all the time and most of them do it well, and the thing that decides whether it works is not the setting but the night we put it on.

Tell the camp what the trip is. Say it when you book rather than at check-in. Most properties do something: a bottle sent up, a turndown, a cake nobody asked for. None of them can if they do not know. It is a gesture rather than a contract, which is why we set it up quietly instead of promising it here.

Vow renewals

If the anniversary comes with a ceremony, the shape changes: a celebrant or a friend who reads, twenty minutes at the right hour of light, and often the camp held on exclusive use for a night or two. That needs months rather than weeks, and the legal side stays with a lawyer at home. Honeymoons covers renewals in full.

Good to know

• Send the date first. Everything else is arranged around it.
• Say which of you is the early riser. It decides the camp more than the view does.
• If you are returning somewhere, tell us the year you went. We will know what has changed since.
• Round numbers in December book like festive dates, because they are.