This safari will be held at Amboseli National Park and Tsavo East National Park in Kenya.
Amboseli National Park
Like an oasis in the dry savanna with its emerald-green, perennial swamps beneath towering Kilimanjaro, Amboseli National Park is the best place in Africa to see elephants in dense concentrations. Amboseli became a wildlife sanctuary in the 1940s and was declared a national park by Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta in 1974.
Although the first impression when you take the inside road in the park can be of a bleak dust bowl, any doubts about the park are allayed by its magnificent elephant herds and high counts of other plains animals which converge to graze and drink at the park’s permanent swamps and lakes. The wildlife can be viewed against the strikingly beautiful backdrop of Kilimanjaro, towering behind and offering scenes that are instantly recognizable.
The Amboseli wetlands are the dominant features of the park, with the Enkongo Narok swamp and its central feature, Lake Kioko, the main focus in the western part of the park, and the Longinye Swamp, the big wildlife magnet in the east. These permanent swamps are fed by meltwater from the peaks of Kilimanjaro, which soaks into the volcanic rock and springs up from the plains all year round.
After the rains, a carpet of pasture fills the plains in between, but for much of the year, the swamps with their sedges, water lilies, and papyrus provide a brilliant contrast with the dry plains. Much of the park’s vegetation is low, but to the south of the wetland areas, towards Kilimanjaro, there is more woodland, with yellow-barked acacia and several other species of trees providing great opportunities for seeing hundreds of Maasai giraffe and cover for hunting lion and cheetah.
Although most of southern Kenya’s plains wildlife can be seen at Amboseli, including Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles, buffalo, hartebeest, eland, and waterbuck, the most numerous animals of the open plains are wildebeest and Burchell’s zebra.
Bird counts in Amboseli can be astonishing: There are reckoned to be as many as 400 species present in this small park, including native rarities like the Madagascar squacco heron and the Taveta golden weaver (relatively common at camps and lodges around the park) as well as Palearctic migrants such as the Caspian plover.
The water birds are the highlights, and in many areas, the park’s tracks follow close to the water’s edge, allowing you great sightings of specialties like the long-toed lapwing and rufous-bellied heron, if you can take your eyes off the elephants in the swamp.
Tsavo East National Park
At more than 13,700 square kilometers, the Tsavo East National Park is most famous for its huge herds of dust-red elephants as more than 10,000 of them bulldoze their way around this vast park.
Incidentally, although Tsavo East and Tsavo West share a name and a common border, coinciding with the Mombasa highway, they are two distinct national parks with different eco-systems: the wooded and hilly landscapes, dotted with volcanic cones and dramatic, black lava flows of Tsavo West National Park and the much flatter, more open plains and scattered bush that characterize Tsavo East National Park.
The southern part of Tsavo East National Park is a popular destination for short Tsavo East National Park safaris by minibus from the coast. But the park can be visited by safari vehicles coming in all direction (Nairobi, Amboseli, Tsavo West, and more).
Tsavo East is mostly a vast flat plain of sandy soil, split by the shallow trough of the Galana River. Nearly all visits take place south of the Galana, where seasonal streams form tributaries that run into the river, their banks lined by small areas of thicker bush. Another watercourse, the seasonal Voi River, runs east through this part of the park, feeding the shallow Aruba dam and then meandering to the coast.
The Galana, which rises in the central highlands and whose upper reaches are known as the Athi, is one of Kenya’s biggest rivers. Its valley, rocky in much of its western course, sandy and doum-palm fringed further east, is one of Tsavo East National Park’s defining physical features.
The plant communities of Tsavo East are dominated by short grasses, thorn bushes and two major species of tree. The baobab is the iconic tree of Tsavo West National Park, across the Mombasa highway, but you will still find significant numbers of these compelling trees, with their enormous trunks and stumpy branches. They form important habitats for many species of birds and insects. You will often see hornbills using holes in baobabs to nest in.
On wildlife densities, short-maned Tsavo lions and cheetahs appear often, all the plains grazers and bush browsers are much in evidence, and elephants many with big tusks, surge across the river, wallow in the waterholes, and file over the red earth roads in front of bulging baobab trees.
Despite being in southeast Kenya, Tsavo East is zoologically associated with northern Kenya, meaning you will see long-necked gerenuk and Somali ostrich, the male of which has a blue neck and legs, and introduced herds of the handsome, fine-striped, Grevy’s zebra. There is also a breeding population of black rhinos, closely monitored by rangers who track them through the bush, though very few travelers on Tsavo East safaris are lucky enough to see them.
