In the Masai Mara the animals are so used to people that they pose for photos. Find something exciting like a kill, and you’ll have to share the experience with a fleet of four wheel drives. So it’s a pleasure to stay in Ol Seki – a luxury tented camp situated idyllically in the heart of Eastern Koiyaki – on the edges of the Mara. It’s where the animals are timid and humans scarce. At night, guards with poison darts patrol the camp’s perimeters, ready to defend against marauding buffalo and hungry lions; and guests sleep, safe and sound, inside the tents with hot water- bottles.

In the lifting light of the morning, wildebeest herds gather with a dazzle of zebra on the plain, for protection against predators. Thompson gazelle speed away from our jeep, tails moving like high- speed windscreen wipers. With mounting excitement, we come across a troop of baboons and then ten hippos in a pool – bathing, going under water, blowing bubbles and reappearing. We stand inches away on the river bank knowing that if we joined them, they’d bite us in two. Later, from the car, we watch two cheetah brothers carefully washing each other. And why not, after eating a baby hippo?

Ol Seki is a no-bricks, no-mortar, 1920s-style camp. Think 12 sided tents like big tops but filled with contemporary cream sofas, African cushions, ethnic furniture and elephant-sized beds. You can sit on a Colonial plantation chair on the groovy circular decking outside your tent and look over the Savannah to spy elephant. Or shade from the sun under the cream awning, with sundowners or steaming mugs of Kenyan coffee in your hand.

We gather for meals at a communal table in the ‘mess tent,’ its tarpaulin curtains pulled back, our eyes feasting on the plains and animals. The food is excellent by any standards, particularly given that nothing grows locally and everything has to be flown in, in Tintin’s plane. Evans, the chef, appears in whites at breakfast with a portable stove on which, by popular request, he makes chilli omelettes. For dinner, we have the world’s best bloody and Virgin Mary’s followed by modern Colonial fare: asparagus, fillet and fresh passion-fruit sorbet. Afterwards we follow the directions of the Swahili words written in chocolate on the coconut cake, ‘Goodnight, sleep well.’

Ol Seki attracts French women in giraffe-high heels, couples and bonused-out bankers, here to sweat out the credit crunch. People dropped off on the tiny airstrip in one-pilot planes or spirited here in Lady Lori helicopters, Kenya’s finest fleet and known for its celebrity clientele. No wonder they come here: Ol Seki is a place of superlatives and not just for the game drives. Although we go on one drive, and then another and another. Animals and plains as far as the eye can see and just us, our children, and our guides Daniel Koya and Betty Maitai, who are the most knowledgeable I’ve encountered in six safaris.

But when I’m safari-ed out, Ol Seki also appeals to the Guardian in my soul. Rakwa is the local mud village, authentic to its last twig- filled cow hide mattress and fly-crawling child’s face. A brisk 45- minute walk away is the school, Olesere with 270 children and four teachers. There are wooden board classroom walls with gaping holes and wall posters bearing legends like, ‘Water is Life’ and, ‘Sanitation is Dignity’. ‘We used to be caned on the hand and under the feet and then have to walk to school bare foot,’ remembers Betty. ‘Now teachers just hit with a ruler and pinch. No wonder the children don’t behave so well’.

One day we drive to the local Nkoilale village, in the middle of a plain. En route, we pass Masai tribesmen – noble, lithe and carrying spears – walking to market in their red kikoys to scare off lions. In the village, there’s a Mother Teresa Clinic and near it the Empiris Shop, which sells Fanta, loo paper and flour: nothing else. Women with huge earrings, beaded hair and wearing orange, yellow and red garments sit on the ground selling potatoes, maize flour and cabbages. Others sell beads or goats. They perch in front of huge sacks of snuff and piles of second-hand clothes laid out on blankets. Best of all are the ‘1000 mile shoes’, made from tyres that have driven a thousand miles. (If you have a rubber bit sticking up purposefully between your toes, it shows you’re not married. Jimmy Choo take note.)

Afterwards we visit the restaurant, a place with a concrete floor and corrugated roof. It serves only chicken. Then we go to a pub in a breeze-block hut, with a frescoed wall of a tribal scene. Men with spears and knives sit in a line along the wall drinking local maize and barley beer, and spirits straight from the bottle. Afterwards they walk back to their village to stagger into the wrong huts.

These people believe in Enkai, a God who descended from the sky to give them cattle. They do cattle raids on other tribes to reclaim what seems rightfully theirs. For them, cows are moving banks. Indeed Daniel has to give his parents ten cows as a fine for having chosen his own wife. ‘Otherwise they will hate me and put a curse on me,’ he explains. Fresh cow dung is used as an antiseptic by ladies when they’re expanding their ears with huge earrings.

We return to the animals, to another fabulous game drive, and another. We’ve seen some of the Big Five – lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard. We’ve seen many of the Little Five – insects. Now along the dry river bed, a baboon has killed a leopard. Later vultures scavenge over a cow. We see giraffe, zebra, impala, buffalo. Rising dawns and setting suns. Then a huge male lion sits on a rock, surveying his plains. The sound of playing impala fills the air. The lion slides down his rock and walks very slowly towards them…