Don't like sun holidays? Had enough city breaks? Grania Willissaddles up for a horseback trek across the Masai Mara
Couch potatoes, continue at your peril. Or, better still, avert your gaze altogether, as you may find the following stories distressing. But if you have even the slightest spark of the adventurer's spirit, read on. And salivate. For I want to bring you on an adrenalin-filled journey with Offbeat Safaris that must be one of the best holidays ever.
As an inveterate watcher of wildlife programmes, I leaped at the opportunity to go on safari in the Masai Mara, in Kenya. What made the trip doubly enticing was the fact that I would be mingling with big game while perched not inside a relatively safe four-wheel drive but atop a horse. Admittedly, a horse isn't wild like the lions, elephants, hippos, zebras and wildebeest I was going to encounter, but even the domesticated horse is wild enough to have a mind of its own and to be unpredictable in the face of big game. And neither bull bars nor quick-shut windows come as standard on any of the horses I know.
It would be me and my horse, preferably in tandem, facing some of the world's most dangerous predators as we watched what has been billed as the greatest animal show on earth: the migration of wildebeest from the Serengeti, in Tanzania, across the River Mara and on to the plains of the Masai Mara.
Fast-forward to Nairobi, which I am whisked across by taxi to reach Wilson Airport for the short flight across the Great Rift Valley down to the Masai Mara. Antoine Drion of Equine Adventures, which has organised the safari, tells me that 500,000 wildebeest had crossed the river the day before. I wonder who on earth counted them.
Far below the Air Kenya aircraft - which offers the equivalent of a Mara bus service - I can see small black dots: a few scattered wildebeest, isolated from the main herds on the savannah. A brown river, presumably the Mara, snakes through a forest. And, as we come in to land at the first airstrip, a small herd of zebra give me a taste of what is to come over the next 10 days.
The next airstrip is Governor's Camp, where my seven fellow safari-goers and I are met by our guide, an Argentinian named Jakob von Plessen, and his girlfriend, Francesca Cumani, daughter of the Newmarket racehorse trainer Luca Cumani.
Most of us pile onto the roof seats on von Plessen's jeep for the drive to our base for the first night, Jua Kali campsite, on the banks of the Mara. Accommodation for most of the safari is under canvas, and although the tents are fairly basic there are plenty of luxuries to make life pleasurable.
Food, as we discover at our first lunchtime, is one of those luxuries. We dig in with glee, watched by a group of hippos wallowing in the river. Between their grunts, von Plessen tells us what to expect to see on the safari and how to react to, say, an elephant charge. "The elephants will flap their ears, but don't go until I say so," he says. "I'll tell you which direction to go if they charge. The horses will all go the same way anyway, but often I turn around to say go and the whole group is 20km away." We all vow inwardly not to be so cowardly. We will stand our ground no matter what.
And then it is time to meet the horses. Von Plessen says three are "chilled out" and the rest are "a bit more peppery". I am offered one of the chilled-out trio, the baby of the group, at just seven, but definitely the prettiest. Manyara, named after a lake in Tanzania, is a lovely grey mare, but she's inclined to leap sideways at unfamiliar objects.
By 5pm the sunshine has been replaced by lowering skies, but we have decided on an evening ride, to get to know our horses and, with luck, see a bit of game. We have been hacking along for about an hour, having already spotted distant baboons, zebra and Thomson's gazelle, when von Plessen turns in his saddle to face us. "Elephant," he mouths, before putting his finger to his lips. We fall silent. Even the horses seem to step more lightly. For right in front of us are two elephants: a mother and her youngster.
Von Plessen slips a bull whip from around his neck as he moves his horse closer, gesturing to show us our escape route, away to the left. We tiptoe after him, barely daring to breathe. Indignant, the mother flaps her huge ears. A cloud of dust rises as they slap noisily on her huge shoulders. Then she lifts her trunk, to intimidate us with her bulk. When that doesn't work she tries a mock charge. We stand our ground.
Suddenly, from nowhere, three much larger elephants arrive, summoned by a low rumbling inaudible to the human ear. In a matriarchal society we are facing the matriarch. And she means business. It starts with a lot of posturing, the matriarch leading the dance: billowing ears, raised trunks. Then she lifts a front leg. This isn't a circus trick: it is real and menacing. The horses are like coiled springs. I can feel Manyara's heart hammering under the saddle. Or maybe it's my heart. Von Plessen cracks his whip, a deafening trumpet rips through the air and, as the elephants charge, the horses take off.
When we get them back under control we turn to see von Plessen cantering calmly towards us. "I didn't tell you to go," he says, a huge grin across his face. It wasn't a serious charge. If they'd wanted to, the elephants could have trampled us, but they had just been giving us a warning, and the horses had decided to heed it.
In the excitement we have barely noticed that the navy sky has decided to dump its load on us. We are soaked, but we are also buzzing with excitement. We have diced with danger and survived. Our horses are our heroes. The bond is made.
Even the sight of three giraffes, majestic and aloof, fails to transport me the way the elephant charge did. It is going to be hard to maintain this level of excitement, I think, as we head back to camp, sodden but elated, for hot showers and drinks round the campfire before dinner.
With just one overnight in Jua Kali, we have no chance to get used to the rhythm of camp that first night. But our next camp was a three-night stay and I knew I could get very used to the luxury of being waited on hand and foot over a three-course candlelit dinner and the unexpected delight of finding a hot water bottle when I finally snuggle into my bed.
As it is a moving day, we have to be ready to leave straight after breakfast the next morning so that camp can be dismantled, packed up and driven to our next site. The horses are already tacked up and the grooms have thoughtfully provided us with sheepskin seat-savers on our saddles to spare us from too much punishment.
Our first task on leaving camp is to cross the Mara River. Under a grey sky, the water looks cold and deep, with fast-flowing muddy swirls as we stand on the bank looking downstream at the hippos. Von Plessen advises us to cross diagonally to counteract the current, but steering with your legs hitched up in front of the saddle to avoid a swell that threatens to carry us into the gaping jaws of the hippos is a feat not easily mastered.
A few wet feet are the only damage, however. Nobody is swept downstream. Nobody drowns. And nobody is eaten by the hippos. Maybe they were already full, having been hoovering up grass all night - up to 50 kilos of it apparently.
Once we are on the far side of the river, I am not the only one glad to get off the narrow, flattened path through the grass, known as the "hippo highway", which marks the route to the best grazing, sometimes as much as 10km away.
It is not long before we come across our first herd of wildebeest, and it is quite a shock to see them at such close quarters. They're ugly on television, but they're even worse in real life. Von Plessen tells us to fan out behind the herd so that we can use a pincer movement to drive them ahead of us. Great in theory. Not so easy to execute. And we fail dismally. But as the days go on, we get reasonably proficient at the job. And better at avoiding the termite mounds and lethal aardvark holes that threaten to - and sometimes do - upend our horses in mid-gallop.
The wildebeest are always the easiest, simply because there are so many of them and it isn't difficult to get right into the middle of the thundering herd, providing you and your horse are brave enough - and fast enough.
The rain from the first day has long since evaporated in relentless sunshine. In among the galloping hooves it is a dust bath. Vision is drastically reduced, but not so much that it removes the thrill of seeing the galloping throng switch direction in an instant and, instead of neat little butts and tails bobbing in front of you, there are suddenly big coffin-shaped heads and very sharp horns aiming straight for your horse's flanks. Somehow the wildebeest flow round us like a rushing river round a rock and we remained unscathed. And ready for more.
Zebra are faster and less easy to corral, but two days into the safari, we have a sensational gallop with a herd that dodge and zigzag in front of us, scattering and then reforming as a group until they finally outmanoeuvre their pursuers, leaving us gasping for breath but grinning like Cheshire cats.
The wildebeest and zebras, vulnerable to so many predators, want to get as far and as quickly away from us as possible. But the giraffes are different. They seem to relish the encounters with us, their elegant, loping stride eating up the ground in apparent slow motion while our horses' legs are going like pistons. At one stage Manyara and I are so close to one giraffe I could have reached out and touched it.
In the middle of one game drive, a totally new group of giraffe appear from our right flank and join in the merriment. When we stop, the giraffes stop too, lowering their necks and turning their heads to gaze at us with fabulously lashed eyes that seem to be asking, when is the fun going to start again?
I had assumed that being on a horse would mean I could get closer to all the game than my jeep-bound counterparts. Although that was undoubtedly true with the wildebeest, zebra and giraffes, it was a different matter when it came to lions. Apparently the combined scent of human and horse is one that lions don't care for. Whereas they are quite happy to doze in the presence of a whole posse of vehicles or even stroll languidly in between jeeps, indifferent to the human eyes straining to catch their every move, they shrink away from riders on horseback.
The joy of the Offbeat Safari itinerary is that it allows clients to indulge in the thrill of galloping with the animals, but also offers both day and night-time game drives, all well away from the normal safari routes. We find our own lions and even, one memorable night, catch sight of a leopard as she slopes out of the beam of our spotlight. And, one memorable day, we are surrounded by hyena, which obviously think that von Plessen's dog Pups is a particularly tempting morsel. They stalk us, unnervingly close, for quite a distance before melting into the bushes.
We come upon endless herds of buffalo, and give the dangerously hormonal solitary males a respectful berth. We see delightfully chirpy warthogs, trotting off with their tails erect, like rigid antennae. And we watch entranced as a Thomson's gazelle, desperate to show any watching predators that it is far too fit to be caught, springs clean-heeled over two grazing zebra. We hear the night-time shriek of a tree hyrax, bloodcurdlingly like a strangled scream, and we are treated to a bird's eye view of the male, black-faced, vervet monkey's turquoise undercarriage.
We glimpse Bateleur eagle, Nubian vulture, the staggeringly ugly Maribou stork and secretary birds. And we sit in stunned silence, only feet away from a lioness, who is panting painfully with a belly distended from gorging on a zebra as she guards the remains of her prey in the heat of the midday sun.
We see so much that jeep-bound safari goers would have missed, except for the classic sight of the Mara River roiling with countless wildebeest plunging across its swollen waters, desperate to avoid the crocodiles' jaws.
Instead, all we see are hoof prints to show their passing, and a single beast stuck in the mud on the far bank, flailing in its efforts to free itself, a monstrous catfish ripping at its flanks. Von Plessen leaps into the water and tries to rescue it, but it has already given up the unequal struggle and, moments later, falls back into the water and drowns.
We see nature in the raw and, for a brief space of time, become a part of it. We have days that are so crammed that they seem to have each lasted three. We cover close to 200km and the horses never flag. Our washing is done for us and returned, neatly ironed, in the evening. And our jodhpur boots are polished every morning.
A local Masai tribe send their warriors down to one of our camps to show us their dancing - and jumping - skills. And I get a marriage proposal from the Masai chief, Lemeria, although it isn't reiterated when he discovers that I don't have any cattle. And in among it all, we eat our faces off, drink our heads off and laugh uproariously around the campfire, around the table and even, sometimes, on night drives as von Plessen regales us with endless safari tales.
And the finishing touch - two splendid nights at Tristan and Lucinda Voorspuy's wonderful mansion, Deloraine, to give us a taste of the old colonial lifestyle. If there is a holiday closer to heaven, I have yet to find it.
GETTING THERE
Grania Willis travelled with the British-based company Equine Adventures (00-44-1962-737647 or www.equineadventures.co.uk) which offers horse-riding holidays in Africa, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas. Equine Adventures uses Tristan and Lucinda Voorspuy's company Offbeat Safaris (00-254-720461300 or www.offbeatsafaris.com) for its horse-riding safaris in Kenya. An itinerary similar to this costs from £3,335 (€4,950) to £3,995 (€6,000), depending on the time of year.
Kenya Airways (www.kenya-airways.com) flies direct from London Heathrow to Nairobi.
Don't waste time and money getting a visa beforehand. Visas can be purchased on arrival in Nairobi for £35 or $50.