The equatorial sun is just rising over an acacia tree beyond the thatched roof aircraft shelter at Lewa Downs’ Wilderness Trails airstrip as I stow my gear and climb into the right seat of Will Craig’s Piper Saratoga. “There’s nothing like seeing this land early in the morning,” he says with a smile as he starts the engine. He asks the driver of a Land Rover sitting nearby to chase some grazing waterbucks off the runway, and we taxi down to the other end of the short, bumpy dirt strip for takeoff. The morning light is glancing off the snow-covered peak of Mount Kenya in the distance as we rattle down the rough strip and lift off into the African sunrise.
“Just north of here is good elephant country,” Craig says as he banks low around a family of giraffes out for an early breakfast of tree leaves. We fly past a striated outcropping of rock just as the sun touches the rust-colored cliff face with a hint of gold, dip down through a valley and flatten out over a plateau of acacia trees and short grass. The landscape becomes more arid as we head toward the northern mountains, and I might almost think I was flying across Arizona-until Craig banks right and we fly over a mother and baby elephant ambling slowly across the plain. A smile spreads across my face as we circle around more zebra and giraffe, then drop down low over the Ngera Ndare river. Laughter bubbles up through my smile as we bank hard to follow the bending curves of the river, elephants, baboons, crocodiles and other assorted wildlife passing in and out of view almost too fast to see clearly as we weave our way northward.
