Take it with you

Add Nissa Safaris to your phone and it opens like an app, with the pages you have already read still there when the signal is not.

Open this page on the phone or tablet you want to install it on, then follow the steps for your device below.

Why you would want it

This is written for one situation in particular. You are somewhere in Laikipia or the Mara, there is no signal for the next two days, and you want to check what tomorrow looks like or read back what the guide said about the rhino you saw. Anything you opened while you had a connection is still there.

  • It keeps the pages you have opened. Read your itinerary once with a connection and it stays readable without one. Pages you never opened will not be there, so open what you want before you leave the wifi.
  • It opens from your home screen, full screen, with no browser bar around it.
  • There is no app store, no download, no account. It is this website, saved. Nothing is installed on your phone beyond the pages themselves.
  • It is light. Saving it costs a few hundred kilobytes. Photographs are only kept as you actually look at them, and the oldest are dropped once enough have built up.
  • It still tracks nothing. Same site, same rules: no cookies, no analytics. See the privacy policy.

How to install it

If the button at the top of this page is showing, that is the quickest way and you can ignore all of this. iPhones and iPads do not offer that button, so there they are the only way.

On an iPhone or iPad

  1. Open this page in Safari. It has to be Safari; Chrome on an iPhone cannot do this.
  2. Tap the Share button, the square with an arrow coming out of the top.
  3. Scroll down the list and tap Add to Home Screen.
  4. Tap Add. The spearhead icon appears on your home screen.

On an Android phone

  1. Open this page in Chrome.
  2. Tap the three dots in the top right.
  3. Tap Install app, or Add to Home screen on older versions.
  4. Confirm. It installs like any other app and appears in your app drawer.

On a computer

  1. Open this page in Chrome or Edge.
  2. Look for the install icon in the address bar, a small screen with an arrow pointing into it.
  3. Click it and confirm. It opens in its own window from then on.

What still needs a connection

Worth knowing before you rely on it, because the honest answer is not "everything".

  • Sending an enquiry or a review. The form itself opens offline, but it hands your message to WhatsApp or your email app, and those need a connection to actually send. Your message waits in WhatsApp until you have signal again.
  • Google reviews. They are fetched live and are never stored, so they simply do not appear offline.
  • Anything you have not opened before. There is no bulk download, deliberately: pulling the whole site onto your phone would cost you a lot of data for pages you will never read.

Everything updates itself. When you next open it with a connection you get the current version of the site, without reinstalling anything.

Removing it

Press and hold the icon and remove it, exactly like any other app. On a computer, open it and use the three-dot menu inside its window. Removing it clears everything it had saved, and nothing is left behind anywhere else.

Any question about it, message WhatsApp or email nissasafaris254@gmail.com.

Plan the trip first

Send your travel dates and Nissa will build the itinerary himself, drawing on the conservancies and lodges he knows first-hand.

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