The week the river rose.

We had come for the crossing. Everybody comes for the crossing, and by our fourth journey with AETHER I had stopped pretending otherwise — I wanted the thing on the postcard, the thousands of animals in the water, and I had told Wanjiru so on the telephone in February with what I now recognise as embarrassing confidence.

What we got instead was thirty-one millimetres of rain in four hours on our second night, a river that came up two metres before breakfast, and a guide standing at the edge of the dining tent at half past six in the morning saying, quite calmly, that the herds would not be crossing this week and that our camp for nights five to seven no longer had a road.

What happened next is the reason I am writing this

By nine o’clock Joseph had spoken to the office in Nairobi twice. By ten we knew we were flying north that afternoon instead of driving south in three days’ time. By eleven a mobile camp in the Loita hills, which I had never heard of and which was not in our journey book, had accepted four guests at four hours’ notice. Nobody asked us for money. Nobody explained at length how difficult it had been.

“The thing I keep returning to is that we were told before we noticed. Not reassured after we complained — told, at breakfast, with the alternative already arranged.”

I have spent thirty years in a business where things go wrong, and the tell is always the same: how long between the operator knowing and the customer knowing. Ours was about forty minutes, and most of that was Joseph driving back into signal.

The week we got instead

The Loita hills have no lodges. You sleep in canvas that was pitched the day before, wash in hot water carried to you in a bucket, and walk. That is the whole offer. We walked eleven kilometres on the first morning with two Maasai guides who did not narrate and did not perform, and who stopped every twenty minutes to show us something we would have driven past at forty miles an hour — a dung beetle, a bark stripped for toothache, the pug marks of a leopard that had walked our path in reverse an hour earlier.

My wife, who had been quietly dreading a fourth safari on the grounds that she had seen enough lions, has since described this as the best week of travel of her life. I have not stopped hearing about it.

We did see a crossing, in the end — a small one, four days later, perhaps three hundred animals at a ford nobody was watching, from a vehicle that contained only us. Joseph had heard about it on the radio and said nothing until we were parked. It lasted eleven minutes. I took two photographs and then put the camera down, which I have never once managed at a sighting I had planned.

What I would say to someone booking

Do not buy the postcard. Buy the operator who can move you. Ask them directly what happens when the river rises, and listen for whether the answer contains a name, a telephone number and a precedent — or a paragraph about their commitment to excellence.

This was our fourth journey with them and the first we did not plan ourselves. It will not be the last.