'It's either a bushbaby or a leopard,' said Paul, the blond safari guide, who knew what he was talking about. I balanced precariously on the top of the Toyota Landcruiser as he sent a searchlight slicing throught the eerie darkness of the African bush. The powerful beam landed on scrub that exploded into brightness. Several pairs of stars seemed to have dropped down to it from the sky; the eyes of anxious animals, staring at us, the intruders. One pair, ruby-red, shone out hypnotically.

'They're the only two animals with red eyes,' explained Paul. Maritei, a Masai warrior who wrapped his pendulous earlobes over the tops of his ears, drove us forward when a giraffe strode in slow motion out of the blackness into view, answering the question. No giraffe would go near a leopard.

It can often be easier to see animals at night rather than day in Eselenkei conservation area, an expanse of Masai tribal land in the shadow of snow-topped Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain and the highest stand-alone mountain in the world. During the day the animals, unused to humans, hide in the thickets. At night, their reflective eyes give them away. At night every tree comes to life.

Which was not a comforting thought for me as we drove back to the tents to sleep. We weren't protected by any wooden fences, electrified wires or rangers on watch with guns. The tents are just there, pitched in a clearing in the middle of the bush. As I lay in my bed there was nothing between me and any leopard but some canvas and a crisp white sheet. Earlier, while eating dinner, we had heard the howl of a wandering hyena. The previous night elephants had passed by, leaving nothing but droppings. This was camping al fresco, as close to African nature as you can get.

And sometimes closer than you would wish. Paul regaled me with campfire tales about how he once took a safari on the other side of Kenya and two guests were trapped in their tent by a buffalo sleeping outside who refused to move. Buffalo - grouchy at the best of times - do not like being woken up. On another trip, people stayed up all night as lions wandered between the tents engaging in a roaring contest. 'People were a little shaken,' admitted Paul. I was grateful that Eselenkei is not as packed with animals as Kenya's more famous safari parks.

The scarcity of lions means it is safe to walk about Eselenkei. Or so I was assured. You can wonder about and see lots of giraffe and ostrich, zebra and Thompson's gazelle, but no big cats. As we trooped up a dried-up river bed, Paul pointed out giraffe prints and piles of porcupine droppings. He told me how the river bed, with its steep sides, was the perfect location for a flash flood, where you hear the roar of trees being pulled down only seconds before a wall of water hits you. He confessed he hadn't checked the weather forecast before we left but assured me it was the wrong season for it.

Farther along we saw a hyena lair with holes full of animal bones, and the dried out waterhole where the zebra like to roll about in the dirt. Owned by the Masai, rather than the government, Eselenkei is a private reserve. It's 70 square kilometres and we were the only guests. There's an intimacy with nature that is hard to catch in other parks, where a truck of snapping tourists will drive up alongside you as soon as you've spotted anything interesting.

But you won't see the big animals. For that, we drove an hour down a shifting dirt track, across the parched terrain, in the direction of Kilimanjaro. The melting snow and the rain pour down the mountain to make Amboseli Park a huge oasis, a splash of year-round green in the browns of southern Kenya. Above you, wherever you are in the park, towers Kilimanjaro like a sentinel, its snow a strange sight just a hundred miles south of the Equator. The park is improbably teeming with buffalo, zebra, antelope, and wallowing hippos.

But the elephants are the unmistakable stars of Amboseli. Small, large, and super-large, they are swarming all over the verdant park, more than a thousand of them in total. The celebrated elephantologist Cynthia Moss lives in a camp in Amboseli, dubbed the Kingdom of the Elephant. They stroll in families across the grass plains, they loll in the water ponds, they wade out to islands to sunbathe, they frolic in the marshes, Kili towering above them. Which for me was wonderful. Far more than any other safari animal, elephants have character, social complexity, and a sense of a tale to tell. Most safari animals don't actually do that much, but sit there or stand there and you think after a while, what now?

I can stare at elephants for hours. At one point we were surrounded by around 200. Cute little ones, just a few months old, nuzzled up to their mothers; two amorous adults entwined their trunks and seemed to massage each other. Two males had a stand-off, one advancing slowly, the other backing away step by step. The lone bulls wandered about, with careworn tatty ears and tusks fractured in fighting. In Zimbabwe, where they cull elephants to control their numbers, they have learned how intelligent, social, and almost human they are. If you don't kill all the members of a family group, the survivors will turn into problem elephants. Not just distrustful of man, and vengeful, but they will warn other elephants of what man has done. Zimbabwe rangers have learned they must cull the entire family together, making sure that not one elephant escapes to cause trouble and warn others.

Amboseli is great for tourists but it has not been as good for the Masai. The national park was carved out of their land and not only have they lost the watering rights for their cattle - except during drought - but they have received little of the tourist revenues that it brings (this ends up in the pockets of corrupt government Ministers). Until now, the Masai have sought revenge in a traditional manner: spearing wildlife. For a people proud of their warrior traditions and keen to prove their hunting skills, nothing beats killing a lion. Earn your spurs and get back at the park authorities at the same time. Amboseli is full of antelope and zebra but has virtually no big cats. But now one branch of the Masai - the Kisongo - have adopted the American adage: don't get mad, get even. The result, after years of planning and politics with the group ranch committee, the equivalent of the local council, is Eselenkei conservation area. It is a wildlife park on their land, but this time it's on their terms. It nestles up to Amboseli, in the so-called 'dispersal area', and during the rainy season much of Amboseli's wildlife saunters through. Roads have been painfully cleared by hand, using just farm tools. Waterholes have been dug to make sure the wildlife stays there once the rainy season ends. 'Water is a magnet. The animals will stay where the water is,' said Paul.

The accommodation tents have been put up in a clearing in the middle of the conservation area. These aren't your usual camping-in-Devon tents. Indeed, they're not even the usual luxury safari tents. Put it like this: these are tents with flush toilets. They have hot showers, copper basins, wooden wardrobes, comfortable beds and solar-powered electric lights. Everything in the camp is 'low impact': take it all down and you'd never know there'd been a camp there.

There's a mess tent and the food is cooked for you but, perhaps fortunately, it is not traditional Masai fare. I didn't need to decline politely the traditional Masai appetiser of cows' milk with fresh blood. Having milked the cows, the Masai then tap a neck vein for a pint or two of blood. (Apparantly it's a favourite with growing young men and pregnant women.) Instead, on the first night I had roast chicken and potatoes with mange-tout and on the second a Greek version of lasagne.

I felt like a relic from colonial White Mischief days, sitting at a table in the middle of the bush, surrounded by animal sounds, sipping French red wine and eating a traditional English roast served to me by a usually semi-nomadic Masai warrior wearing his traditional red robes, covered from earlobe to ankle in multicoloured beaded jewellery, sword dangling at his side. The costumes aren't put on for the tourists: it is just the way they dress. Jeans and T-shirts have yet to make their mark. Their earlobes are hugely distended from dangling large objects in them. On their cheeks they have little circular scars where they were branded with burning rope as toddlers to ward off eye disease.

As I tucked into roast chicken, I was almost overwhelmed by Western liberal guilt. My presence was turning a warrior into a waiter, making a proud person servile. Wouldn't contact with all the tourists on their tribal land destroy their culture?

Such concerns were laid to rest by the remarkable Emmanuel Onetu, officially the conservation manager of Eselenkei, unofficially the cultural liaison officer, and, as he calls himself proudly, the 'community mobiliser'. He grew up in a traditional cow-dung hut, but was educated to O-level and is now chairman of the local school. He lives in a wood and corrugated steel hut and, quite startlingly in the bush, he has a telephone. He has been the driving force behind Eselenkei, working with Jake Grieves-Cook, founder of the travel company Tropical Places.

Emmanuel has had to work hard to ensure that all 3,000 people on the group ranch understand what the project is about, and give it their support. The involvement of a white man raised suspicions that they were going to be taken advantage of, but after decades of sending tourists to Kenya, Grieves-Cook is keen to put something back in to the community. It is a joint venture between him and the Kisongo group ranch.

The Kisongo Masai have agreed not to kill the wildlife for the sake of it. In Eselenkei there is no spearing or snaring. Emmanuel has even persuaded Masai from farther afield to cut down on the killing. 'We have all this nature and wildlife and we want to share it. We are proud of it,' said Emmanuel. 'We are learning about conservation.'

Emmanuel talks almost messianically about the benefits of the project. The Masai get a lease fee for the conservation area, as well as a bed-night fee and an entrance fee for every tourist. There are also 26 Masai employed in the upkeep of the conservation area. It's the first paid job they have had. Emmanuel explains that it is their chance to get some of the financial benefits from tourism, to help them with the most basic things. 'We want to generate income, so we can send our children to school and pay for health care.' He showed me the local school, which has 270 pupils, many of whom have to walk three hours there and three hours back each day. They have virtually no books but plenty of enthusiasm. They want to turn the wooden classrooms into brick ones, but first they have a more critical problem: getting water. The pump at the school borehole has broken, and, of course, with no water the teachers cannot wash, or drink, or cook for themselves or the children. Revenues from Eselenkei tourists will mean that they can mend the water pump, rather than close the school. 'Without education, nothing can happen. Without education you have no future,' said Emanuel, who believes conservation is the future.