Private, always
Your safari is yours. Your guide, your vehicle, your experience.
Our story
A family, five generations in East Africa, and twenty-five years of safaris.
Nigel Archer Safaris began in 1999, when Nigel — then guiding for other operators — decided that the safaris he most wanted to build for his guests could only happen if he built them himself.
But the story begins earlier than that. Nigel's father, Tony Archer, took out his first mobile safari in 1957, and grew up running safaris alongside some of the legendary figures of East African guiding. Nigel is the fourth generation of his family to live in Kenya, and his young children — now the fifth — are growing up here too. He grew up on safari with his parents, took a BSc at the University of Adelaide, and then came home to the bush. Everything we do today sits on that inheritance — seventy years of guiding, three generations of relationships with the Maasai and Samburu communities we work alongside, and a set of instincts that simply take that long to acquire.
Twenty-five years on, that conviction still runs the company. We are still small, still family-led, still stubbornly hand-crafted. Nigel still designs and leads safaris. Lolo, his right hand since the early days, is still out on the ground as Head Guide. Our senior guides have been with us for fifteen, twenty, in a couple of cases twenty-five years. Many of our guests were children when they first travelled with us and now bring their own children.
What we set out to do was simple: to offer the kind of private, fully-guided safari that feels less like a holiday and more like being invited into somebody's life. Somebody who knows, and genuinely loves, East Africa.
We operate our own camps — Seringet Mara Camp in the heart of the Maasai Mara National Reserve, and a classic mobile camp we move with the season — so the entire guest experience, from the first cup of coffee outside your tent to the last sundowner, is ours to stand behind. We do not resell other people's lodges. We do not take commission from properties we recommend. We run the safari ourselves, because that is the only way we know to do it properly.
Nigel
Founder, guide, and still the first person to reply to most enquiries.
Nigel grew up on safari with his parents. He has been guiding professionally in East Africa since the early 1990s. Today he divides his time between designing safaris at the planning stage, leading a handful of personal trips each year, and keeping Seringet Mara Camp to the standard he first imagined when the first tent went up.
If you write in, there is a very good chance your first reply will come from him.
Lolo
Head Guide, lead tracker, and one of the warmest people any guest will meet on safari.
Lolo has been with us since the early days, and is the senior guide our returning guests most often ask for by name. He reads tracks the way the rest of us read a newspaper, and puts you into positions for wildlife that still don't quite make sense an hour later — quietly, without fuss.
As Head Guide, he leads a handful of personal safaris each season, sets the standard every other guide on the team is held to, and mentors our younger guides through their first years in the bush.
"If I know a song of Africa — of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers — does Africa know a song of me?"
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
In the press
- The Telegraph Read the piece →
- ATTA Seas4Life partnership →
- Hospitality & Catering News Read →
What we believe
The principles that run the company.
People, not product
We have been with our team for decades. Our guests come back for them.
Conservation as a practice
A percentage of every safari supports the community and conservation partners we work with.