Our room — a tent, actually — is located on Hippo Corner.

Or at least that is what operators call it, here at the Fairmont Mara Safari Club in the Masai Mara.

On the balcony of this particular tent, a person can look down the 50 feet or so to the Mara River, and see a half dozen hippopotamuses lying on the muddy bank or lolling in the dark brown river.

This is wildlife territory, in this corner of Kenya, near the border with Tanzania and a few miles from the eastern end of Lake Victoria.

In the Range Rover on the drive in from the airstrip — a band of smoothed dirt about 1,500 feet long and 50 wide — we saw a zebra, a group of retreating gazelles, a helmeted guineafowl and even more hippos.

Today, we left busy, crowded and ramshackle Nairobi and headed over to the southwestern corner of Kenya, in and near the wildlife haven known as the Masa Masai.

The cab from the hotel to Nairobi’s “other” airport cost us about $15 and took 25 minutes.

Wilson Airport is the original locus of aviation here in Kenya, going back to the dawn of flight. It is old and small and quaint and perhaps just basic enough to leave you wondering how attentive everyone is to making sure the little planes are airworthy.

This is where bush pilots (and everyone else, for that matter) flew into and out of before the first jet touched down in Kenya. Think Out of Africa and you are in the neighborhood. A control tower that may fall down at any second, handcarts used to carry the luggage for planes that hold two dozen people, or fewer, and dozens of aircraft, no two of them of the same model.

We made a bet, while checking in: How many seats would our plane have? Leah guessed 24. I said 16.

It was 11.

The plane, above, was a single-prop job, a Cessna 208B Caravan, made in America. The two pilots had only four passengers, and we sat where we wished, with our weight-controlled luggage stuck in the back.

Little planes are way more like flying than commercial jets. Every little puff of wind jostles the fuselage, as you hurtle along at maybe 3,000 feet — mostly below the clouds, but not always.

The scenery, down below, as we headed west, was fascinating. Like nothing we have seen in North America or Europe. Dry soil of a sort of clay-red color, occasional scrub brush, lots of north-south ridging — and very few signs of human activity.

About halfway into the 45-minute ride, we flew over flatter terrain, and a few small patches of agriculture could be seen, as well as lots of round enclosures — for keeping cattle penned up at night? — and what appeared to be huts and the occasional stouter structure. Not a single road.

I would be remiss in noting that I apparently have become one of those people who gets motion sickness almost immediately, even with the administration of dramamine. As my stomach heaved with each updraft and downdraft, I kept looking at my watch, willing the 45 minutes to be over.

It’s not all in my mind (probably in my ears); it was rough enough that the co-pilot gave up trying to read her book, midway through the flight, and stuck it back under her seat in the cockpit — which I could reach out and touch, from the first row.

After a queasy eternity, the pilot twice banked to his right, and I knew we were not headed into a real airport, so I was trying to look past the pilots and out the front window — and there it was. The landing strip. Just a ribbon of dirt.

We sank down to meet it, bouncing a time or three until the back wheels were attached to the ground, and then the pilot lowered the nose and we were well and truly earthbound again, at the very end of the strip.

We were greeted by a Land Cruiser, a driver, and a shack that advertised itself as the Ngerende Air Strip Duty Free Shop. Selling the gamut of Masai tribal wares.

After a welcome-to-Masai glass of fruit juice, the four tourists were loaded into the open-air Land Cruiser. We sat in the raised seat in the back as we bounced toward the hotel. The road was a suggestion of a path, never actually flat, and as we banged through the low and high spots, the driver and guide, named Ashford, turned and announced: “This is what we call an African massage.”

He pointed out various sights, answered a few questions and warned us quite vividly about hippos. “They don’t look dangerous, but they are. They kill more people than any other animal in the Masai. If you get between them and the river, or between a mother and her baby, they will tear you in half and leave you for the vultures.”

OK, then. Noted. Don’t pet the hippos.

We got to the “safari club”, and entered the locked gate, which is part of a perimeter of electrified fence (Jurrasic Park, anyone?) meant to keep out the major animals of the region, though our guide conceded that the occasional bush babies and other monkeys come in, via the trees.

We were led to our room, down on Hippo Corner, and there were the hippos sprawled on the side of the river, like morbidly obese tourists, and we began to make plans for going back out in the Land Cruiser, looking for the animals of  Masai Mara.