Night Game Drives

You go out after dinner, which is the first odd part of it. Same vehicle you sat in all afternoon, same guide. Someone hands you a blanket as you climb in, because it is colder than anyone warns you, and then the camp lights go behind you and there is nothing at all.

A night safari runs on one lamp. A spotter works it from the back, usually red-filtered, and it sweeps slowly across ground you drove over at four o’clock and did not look at twice. What it finds first is never an animal. It is two points of light floating at the wrong height, and the animal arrives a second later, when your eyes have caught up with them.

The roster changes completely after dark. Bat-eared foxes hunting in pairs. Genets and civets crossing the track and stopping halfway. Porcupines, usually gone by the time the lamp holds them. Bushbabies somewhere up in the acacias, sounding like an argument in a nursery. Aardvark if the guide is patient and you are very lucky. The animals you already saw are different animals now: lions that lay flat all afternoon are up and working, and a leopard at night is not the leopard folded over a branch in your photographs.

Then there is where you are allowed to do this. Night driving is generally not part of what Kenya’s national parks permit, since their gates and their rules are built around daylight, while the private conservancies alongside them set their own, and many run night drives as a matter of course. That is a large part of why we put people on a conservancy bed rather than a park lodge: Ol Pejeta and the wider Laikipia conservancies, the Mara conservancies like Naboisho, the ranches out past Samburu. Which of them runs drives on your dates, and under what conditions, is something we confirm with the camp rather than something we publish.

We sell the other night safari as well, Singapore’s, where the barriers are hard to find and the lighting is engineered to imitate a moon. It is genuinely good, and it is the rehearsal. This is the version where nothing is lit for your benefit and nobody knows what is out there. The Kenya destination page sets out which regions have the conservancies to do it from.

Good to know

• Whether a camp runs night drives, what it charges for them and what the current rules allow are set by the conservancy and change. We confirm for your dates rather than assume.
• Minimum ages are common and vary by property. We check them against your party before anything goes in an itinerary.
• It gets cold fast in an open vehicle at altitude. Take more than the blanket they hand you.
• The guide runs the lamp, and there is a reason it is filtered. Leave your own torch in the tent.
• One drive on a stay is usually the right number. It is an hour or two after dinner, not a replacement for the morning.