As Kenya’s hoteliers discovered, few things derail a tourism campaign like Blood Diamond-themed news reports. A few weeks of violence, in limited locations, followed a disputed presidential election last December; one year later, Kenya’s tourism industry is still recovering—not from the fighting, but the bad press. “The country was already at rest when the political parties sat at the negotiating table last January,” says Luca Belpietro, an Italian expat who runs the Campi ya Kanzi lodge in southern Kenya’s Chyulu Hills, near Tsavo West National Park. CNN junkies, take note: the country remains one of Africa’s safest, and a wave of new, privately funded conservation ventures are making this flat-out gorgeous region—with neither the crowds nor the fences associated with better known parks, like South Africa’s Kruger—the optimal place to find the dazzling, wild Africa of Hemingway books. (The Chyulus, after all, were his titular green hills.) This month Belpietro will rechristen his thatched-roof former family home as Kanzi House, sleeping 10 and providing views of Mount Kilimanjaro from the swimming pool ($550 per person per night, plus a daily $2000 conservation fee per group; maasai.com); the house’s private safari guide is Samson Parashina, perhaps the only Maasai chief to bunk at Ed Norton’s apartment while fundraising in the U.S. (The actor is a former guest and a top supporter.) Next door to Campi—two hours by car, 20 minutes by plane—Great Plains Conservation, a rapidly-expanding, National Geographic-funded private company, sponsored a $2 million upgrade of Ol Donyo Wuas, one of the oldest lodges in the region ($610 per person per night, with an $80 conservation fee; oldonyowuas.com). Both outfits aim to protect the local Maasai’s group ranches, preventing the land from being subdivided and developed, so the choice to make is an aesthetic one: Ol Donyo Wuas’s cottages, with starbeds and plunge pools awaiting guests back from horseback safaris, or Kanzi House’s walks beneath the verdant, volcanic Chyulus, past the camp’s lions, elephants, and leopards, followed by sundowners viewing Mount Kilimanjaro. Nervous travelers are invited to pack the Valium. They won’t need it.