My 40th Birthday Trip: Kenya and Fregate

The scroll to find my year of birth on web forms gets a little longer every year.  This year it’s my 40th, arriving just in time for some AI-powered robot to do the scrolling for me.  Those trillions of dollars well spent.  Thanks, y’all.

Next week we’re going nowhere new, simply returning to two favourites, Ol Jogi and Wild Hill, and then trying out the brand-spanking-new Fregate.  Long-term readers are probably asking: why not Arijiju?  Yeah, yeah, rub it in.  I’m a man, and therefore listening to my own advice is anathema to me.  I tell every client who’ll listen to book Arijiju well over a year out.  I booked a year out.  Too late.

Wild Hill is hardly slumming it, mind. An exclusive-use house on the highest point in the Maasai Mara: five bedrooms, a superb spa, a rhino boma, and a view I’m hoping burns itself into my memory, given I’ll be forgetting my own name within a fortnight, once the old age kicks in.

It also couldn’t be any more different from Ol Jogi, which will make for a nice contrast.  One modern, the other one has been described by scientists as the first clinically insane building.  But, before that a private tour at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the orphaned elephant nursery in Nairobi National Park.  Most people see it at the morning feed, crammed in like they’re on the morning commute with a few hundred others.  We’re going private, cos I’m now legally an old man and can be grumpy whenever I damn well please.  And finally we got Fregate, because they took pity on how difficult my life has been.

When I got into this industry, I used to hear stories of billionaires who’d hire an ultra-luxury property and then go and sleep in a tent somewhere for the adventure.  It sounded mad.  I now find myself a mere one billion dollars short of being one of them, but with the same sense of adventure.  I plan to do something stupid at Ol Jogi, get into trouble at Wild Hill, and get banned from Fregate.

We’ll hang around wild animals, have a great laugh, and enjoy what it means to turn 40: being convinced you’re about to die and that you’re now worthless.

Can’t wait.