A Bush Dinner with a Twist

After your evening game drive and a bit of time to dress for the occasion, you leave camp a little while after sunset and drive about 10 minutes on a night safari through the bush. Edging nearer, you’ll approach a romantic dinner set-up dripping in lanterns with an illuminated pathway leading to the banks of the Mara River where a roaring campfire awaits. From here, you can sit back and watch the hippos below, dawa cocktail in hand aka ‘the good medicine’ in Swahili – a potent vodka, honey and lime concoction. The guides have these brilliant torches that sweep over the beady eyes of crocodiles in the water and maybe the odd glint of something in the bushes.

Enjoy a three-course dinner under the milky way starting with soup made from Governors’ vegetable patch. The pièce de résistance is the main course griddled out of a classic safari vehicle converted into a teppanyaki table where chefs cook whatever ingredients you pick. If the weather doesn’t play ball, we serve filet steak that just melts in your mouth or one of our delicious vegetarian dishes followed of course by something indulgent and chocolatey for pudding. Dinner is punctuated by a cacophony of wildlife calls. Expect to hear hyenas, perhaps even a lion.

Other camps tend to pre-prepare their bush dinners but at Governors’ we always try and up the ante. As an extra, we could even invite a troupe of Maasai that dash through the forest and arrive in their full splendour to perform a traditional dance, a magical scene which is totally worth the additional cost. The last time I did this was for a friend’s 50^th birthday. Even as a Kenyan, he was totally overwhelmed and emotional. That one went well into the night…