Even today a wild life safari in Africa can be an adventure. It is a journey into the unknown - a world which is completely different from the one we live in. There are the vaccinations against diseases you only read about - cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and yellow fever. If you can survive the jabs, there is the choice of the malaria drug : the expensive one with no known side effects - or the one the doctors recommend, but has all the bad press. Well, we thought, we'd know if we were going to hallucinate, if we start the course three weeks before we go!

By the time we'd read all the warnings and heard all the apocryphal stories, we'd paid our deposit and booked the holiday, and it was too late to cancel! So, we set off with some slight feelings of unease. If the bugs didn't get us, and we didn't hallucinate, would we be mangled by a lion, jumped on by a leopard, swallowed by a snake or just robbed and beaten up by bandits - or worse?

As it happened, the one creature we never saw was a mosquito!

You can go the expensive way with the big travel companies and stay in luxury game lodges, or, if your resources don't stretch that far, you can study "Lonely Planet" and try the e-mail and the internet. This was our choice, and it turned out as half the cost of going through the big tour operators - about £1,300 each, flight inclusive.

We flew by Kenya Airways, booked a few nights at the Fairview Hotel in Nairobi, and a wild life game park tour with Prime Time Safaris and Stanbok Safaris. We had no idea what to expect, and began to have second thoughts as the departure day loomed,

We need not have worried. The service on Kenya Airways was as courteous and efficient as on any national airline; the Fairview Hotel turned out to be one of the best in Nairbobi, but the exchange rate made the accommodation ridiculously cheap, and all our safari drivers were absolutely superb and very friendly.

During our ten days wild life tour, we visited four game reserves. The best was the Masai Mara. At first, we enthused over zebras, elephants, giraffes, and countless species of horned creatures, but after a day or so, we had seen so much that even lions were becoming monotonous. So, then the hunt was on for photographs of animals with young families!

I shall always remember the male lions. They hunt at night and sleep during the day. So, when we saw them, they were half asleep, and looked really cudly - perhaps just as their mates were meant to find them. We saw hippos in and out of the water, and got a photo of a crocodile in classic pose with mouth wide open. Then there was the annual southwards migration of wildebeeste - a huge herd of over a million animals with some zebras in the lead, all walking slowly southwards, grazing as they went. It is something you cannot imagine unless you see it for yourself.

There was Lake Nakuru with its rhinos, monkeys and birds. The edge of the lake was tinged with a pink fringe. This is the original Flamingoland! Several million of these birds stood in the shallow water on their long legs, while pelicans and other birds you only see outside Africa in books swam, flew and walked among them.

We stayed half of the safari under canvass, with meals cooked over charcoal and wood fires. One camp site had showers, with a rather primitive looking boiler warmed by an open air wood fire. It was run and guarded by Masai tribesmen. Two of them took us for a long walk up the hillside outside the camp. There is something very romantic about being escorted through lion infested country by two warriors armed only with spears and swords, with a troop of baboons looking on! The top of the hill was crowned with a mobile phone tower - powered by a sunlight electric array. Further on was a place where young warriors sleep on beds of aromatic dried leaves while watching their cows - an interesting contrast between traditional Africa and modern technology.

There were the moments of farce - like when I had a swim in an open pool. The safari buses are mini-buses with pop up roofs. The drivers not only watch for animals, but also keep their eyes open for other minibuses. As I was in the water, our minibus was seen to have stopped. So at least a dozen other vehicles converged on the pool to see what we were looking at. They appeared all of a sudden, crowded with excited tourists with cameras with enormous hooded telescopic lenses bristling from their pop up roofs like huge phallic proboscises - only to see me!

Kenya is a poor but beautiful country, with fabulous wildlife. Kenya is keen to promote tourism, and we were made to feel very welcome. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. If you are considering an exotic holiday next year, why not try a Kenyan safari?