A friend of mine once asked me, ‘‘Can you describe the emotion an African safari creates?’’ You are lifted. Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above. If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa.

Nothing but breathing the air of Africa and Magical Kenya to be particular, and actually walking through it, can communicate the indescribable sensations. It’s really beautiful. It feels like God visits everywhere else but lives in Africa.

 Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just home.

 Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there, you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe its magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are elephant paths? Could it be because Africa is the place of all our beginnings, the cradle of mankind, where our species first stood upright on the savannahs of long ago?

 Few can sojourn long within the unspoilt wilderness of a game sanctuary, surrounded on all sides by its confiding animals, without absorbing its atmosphere; the Spirit of the Wild is quick to assert supremacy, and no man of any sensibility can resist her.

To witness that calm rhythm of life revives our worn souls and recaptures a feeling of belonging to the natural world. No one can return from the Maasai Mara unchanged, for tawny Big 5 & Wildebeest Migration  will forever prowl our memory and great herds throng our imagination. There is something about an African safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne -bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

  In Africa you have space…there is a profound sense of space here, space and sky. Everything in Africa bites, but the safari bug is worst of all.

You cannot leave Africa, Africa said. It is always with you, there inside your head. Our rivers run in currents in the swirl of your thumbprints; our drumbeats counting out your pulse; our coastline the silhouette of your soul.

There is a language going on out there – the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops and chirps have meaning derived over eons of expression…we have yet to become fluent in the language – and music – of the wild.

 The only man I envy is the man who has not yet been to Africa – for he has so much to look forward to. When you leave Africa, as the plane lifts, you feel that more than leaving a continent you’re leaving a state of mind. Whatever awaits you at the other end of your journey will be of a different order of existence.