Wild Frontiers

In Kenya’s Laikipia, beneath Mount Kenya, Sirai House is a private family home taken whole: six suites on 250 acres inside the 33,000-acre Borana Conservancy, a stronghold for rhino, with its own waterhole and hide below the house.

In northern Tanzania, on the forested outer slopes of the Ngorongoro Crater above Karatu, Gibb’s Farm has been a coffee plantation since the 1920s: seventeen cottages and two farm houses among organic gardens, with the Crater, Lake Manyara and Lake Eyasi each within a day.

In India, Aman-i-Khas is a tented camp on the fringe of Ranthambore National Park, its Mughal-inspired tents set for wildlife dawns. Park drives leave before the heat owns the scrub, and we brief sightings honestly rather than promise them. In southern Utah, Amangiri sits at Canyon Point, its pavilions set into desert rock beneath the mesas, with canyon outings and via ferrata from the door. Off Sumbawa in Indonesia, Amanwana keeps its tents under jungle canopy on Moyo Island, with marine-reserve diving and island exploration as the brief.

Further west, in the Marwar countryside two hours from Jodhpur, RAAS Chhatrasagar keeps sixteen hand printed tents on the shore of a lake dammed in 1890, with 1,500 acres of rewilded land around it and more than 200 species of birds on its checklist.

In New Zealand’s South Island, The Lindis keeps eight rooms on the floor of the Ahuriri Valley, on a 6,500-acre high-country station between braided rivers and the Southern Alps, beneath some of the darkest night skies on earth.

In Alaska, Tordrillo Mountain Lodge stands on the shore of Judd Lake in the Tordrillo Mountains, some 60 miles from the nearest road and a 45-minute flight from Anchorage: heli-skiing across 1.2 million acres in winter, king salmon under the June midnight sun, and floatplane days to the brown bears of Katmai.

In Canada’s Northwest Territories, Blachford Lodge keeps a log lodge and five cabins on a seventeen kilometre lake reached only by bush plane from Yellowknife, directly beneath the auroral oval, with Northern Lights on more than 240 nights a year and the whole lodge available privately.

In Argentine Patagonia, Los Cauquenes Resort + Spa + Experiences stands in the first row of the Beagle Channel outside Ushuaia, with the Fuegian Andes behind it: its own boat to the Les Eclaireurs lighthouse and the penguins of Martillo Island, the End of the World Train into Tierra del Fuego National Park, treks to Martial Glacier and Laguna Esmeralda, and snowmobiles and a mountain dome in winter.

In Costa Rica, Nayara Tented Camp brings the safari camp to the rainforest: canvas tents on stilts on a replanted hillside facing Arenal Volcano, each with a plunge pool fed by mineral hot springs, sloths in the Cecropia trees and naturalists leading bird walks at dawn and frog tours after dark.

For safari in depth, our Journal piece on private safari camps in East and Southern Africa compares the camps, and our Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and Namibia guides cover seasons and the flights between them. For the ice, see our Antarctica guide and the week on the ice itinerary.

For the sport at the heart of many of these journeys, continue to Sportfishing & Adventure, and for snow and high country, Alpine Escapes.