the chronicles of Keira; On a much-needed spring break, Keira Knightley hops the green hills of Africa in fittingly romantic, feminine looks.

Byline: Plum Sykes

Well, there you go. I've done my homework!" says actress Keira Knightley, handing over a leather-bound Louis Vuitton journal. Inside are pages and pages of immaculate, copperplate handwriting. Keira has taken her recent Vogue assignment-writing a diary of her escape to Africa-very seriously. "I got my flatmate to check all the spelling," she adds.

In person, the Pirates of the Caribbean star exudes the peculiar charm of a slightly scatty but ravishingly pretty British schoolgirl. Just back from her African safari, she tumbles into London's Soho Hotel on a cool spring afternoon. An oversize bag is falling off one spidery arm, and a huge knitted coat is bunched up under the other. Her mahogany tresses trail from a messy ponytail, and her black chiffon minidress is a little askew. She is scruffily glamorous, in the vein of the classic English rose at 22.

We are more used to seeing Keira Knightley swashbuckling her way through tropical islands in her role as the feisty Elizabeth Swann than romping in the Kenyan bush. (The third film in the franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, hits multiplexes this month.) But she took to the role of Vogue's African princess with equal spirit. I open Keira's diary and read a few sentences: "Masai Mara is wide, green, and beautiful. We're right on the border with Tanzania, and the sun is shining. Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp is like something out of a fairy tale. Totally in the wild. White tents, huge four-poster beds with draped white mosquito nets. All the furniture is like something from Out of Africa."

Curling her gangly legs beneath her in the armchair, Keira sips at a cup of English breakfast tea while she recounts her adventures. Located in the southeast of the Masai Mara, bordering the Serengeti and Loliondo reserves, the safari is owned and run by Calvin Cottar, whose family settled in East Africa in the early 1900s after hearing about Teddy Roosevelt's adventures there. Dressed in regulation khaki, Cottar is described as a Liam Neeson type who leaves female clients swooning when he leads the game drives and presides over his old-style camp. Guests are housed in huge white tents furnished with colonial antiques, Persian rugs, and eccentric bric-a-brac. There are even several small Julian Schnabel paintings of the camp's staff that the artist gave to Cottar after staying there.

On her first day, Cottar took Keira on an early-morning game drive. (They were also accompanied by Keira's current boyfriend. In true movie-star style, she refers to him in code, as "Passepartout" in her diary and "my traveling companion" when she talks about him. She never uses his name, although regular readers of supermarket tabloids will know he is the actor Rupert Friend.) Out on the Mara the group observed a herd of elephants and "four lion cubs in a tree. I mean, it was unbelievable. . . . These cubs were just flopped over these trees," says Keira. She puts down her teacup for a moment and splays her hands and legs in a cute impression of a baby lion.

During the day, Keira wrote her diary and read. She started The Day of the Triffids, The Human Zoo, and Othello. She didn't finish any of them. As the week went on, there were picnics in rainstorms and Masai tribesmen dancing by firelight. Keira sunbathed and slept, and in between obligingly posed for ...