Karen · The Ngong Hills
Damaris, on the grounds she ran for twelve years — the coffee, the Ngong Hills, the long story of Out of Africa.
GIROS is not run; it is hosted. The Ambassador and Damaris in Nairobi, David and Kathy in the United States — the same four people, every step, from arrival to farewell.
GIROS is not a tour company in the usual sense. It is a hosted journey — convened by two families, kept small on purpose, and built around people and places rather than itineraries and checklists.
Nehemiah and Damaris in Kenya; David and Kathy from the U.S. The same four faces, from arrival at Nairobi airport to your farewell drive twelve days later.
Damaris ran the Karen Blixen Museum for twelve years. The afternoon she gives on the old farm — its coffee-drying machinery, the Ngong Hills, the years with Denys — no guided tour can recreate.
David has worked in Kenya since 2009 — every transfer, every customs queue, every long road. He knows the drivers, rangers and innkeepers by name, and the country by feel.
We cap each departure at fourteen, intentionally mixing older travellers with families and their children. Dinner stays a conversation. The Land Cruisers are never crowded.
Nehemiah spent his career representing Kenya abroad — a diplomat in the old sense of the word, which is to say someone who could begin a conversation with anyone and end it as a friend. He still opens doors that don't usually open: rangers, researchers, the keepers of long memory at the museums and parks.
Damaris spent hers as director of the Karen Blixen Museum, the coffee farm at the heart of Out of Africa. She has stood in that house, by the fireplace where Karen wrote, and answered the same question from a thousand visitors with the same patience. The afternoon she will give you on the old farm is the afternoon we built this entire safari around.
To know a country is one thing. To love it well enough to share it — that is a different kind of work entirely. — Damaris Rotich
David and Kathy first travelled to East Africa sixteen years ago, and kept coming back — first as guests, then as friends, eventually as family. David has worked in Kenya since 2009 and knows it the way you only know a country when you have been broken down on its roads, fed at its tables, and trusted with its quieter stories.
It was over a long dinner in Nairobi in 2022, with the Rotichs, that the idea arrived: not a tour company, exactly, but a way of bringing fourteen people each year to the country we had come to love. The first safari, in 2023, sold out before it was advertised. The second did the same.
We don't run a safari company. We host friends — some of whom we haven't met yet. — David Gies
Four friends. Two families. One conversation that ran past midnight about the country they had come to love, and the kind of journey they wished existed.
By the morning, the rough shape of it: fourteen guests, no more; the Sheldrick orphanage on the first afternoon; Damaris on her old grounds at Karen; the Ambassador opening the parks; the Mara at the end, when the river is running. The first safari was full before it was announced. The second the same.
If GIROS feels less like a tour and more like a long welcome, that is by design — and it is the only design we have ever wanted.
GIes, ROtich, Safaris — a small partnership convened with like-minded travellers who value the appreciation of people, places, and the habitat supporting all life — and in Africa, especially, its wildlife.
Six places remain for August 2026.