10 Days Kenya Lodge Safari

Your Ziwaland Holidays driver-guide collects you from the airport or your hotel and runs through the full safari programme with you before you set off. The road north out of Nairobi climbs steadily through Kikuyu farmland, terraced and green for most of the way. You break at Karatina, the largest open-air produce market in East Africa, then continue to Mount Kenya National Park. The afternoon is yours, and most guests spend it on the lodge balcony watching the waterhole below the forest edge. Overnight at Mountain Lodge or similar.

Breakfast, then north. The drive to Samburu is an easy one and the interest is in the changing country: within a few hours you pass through four climatic zones, highland farms giving way to scrub and then to open, red, semi-arid frontier. You arrive in time for an afternoon game drive along the Ewaso Nyiro, the river that draws almost everything in the reserve to its banks. Dinner and overnight at the lodge.

A full day in the reserve with unlimited game drives and a picnic lunch carried with you. Samburu’s appeal is that much of what lives here lives nowhere else in the country: Grevy’s zebra with their narrow stripes and rounded ears, reticulated giraffe, beisa oryx, Somali ostrich. Lion, leopard, cheetah, elephant and buffalo all use the river corridor too. Back to the lodge for dinner and overnight.

After breakfast you leave the north and drop back down into the Rift Valley, reaching Lake Nakuru in time for lunch. The afternoon game drive is a good one for rhino, as Nakuru was Kenya’s first rhino sanctuary and holds both black and white rhino.

The park was also the first in Africa set aside chiefly for birds. Around 400 species have been recorded, and when conditions suit them the flamingos arrive in flocks that turn the shoreline pink. The lake sits on the Rift Valley floor, fed by the Njoro, Makalia and Enderit rivers and drained by none of them. Dinner and overnight at your lodge.

A morning drive southwest brings you into the Maasai Mara around lunchtime. Check in, take coffee or tea and a proper break, then head out again for a late afternoon game drive as the light softens and the plains game begin moving. Dinner and overnight at the lodge.

You leave after breakfast with a packed lunch and stay out all day. The route works its way across the reserve toward the Mara River, where hippo pods lie in the shallows and crocodiles wait along the banks. Lunch is taken in the field and game viewing carries on until around 5pm. A visit to a Maasai homestead can be arranged for the afternoon at additional cost.

Over 450 bird species have been recorded in the Mara, but it is the density of large mammals that surprises most people. Lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, rhino, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, hyena, jackal, wild dog, warthog and a long list of antelope all share this grassland. Between roughly July and October the reserve also receives the wildebeest migration out of the Serengeti, with the predators following close behind.

The morning opens with a visit to a Maasai homestead before you turn north for Lake Naivasha, stopping for lunch en route. You arrive in the evening, in time for dinner and an overnight stay beside the lake.

Hell’s Gate first, a game drive through one of the few Kenyan parks where wildlife can be approached on foot, between red cliffs and steam vents. Afterwards the route runs south through Nairobi with lunch on the way, and on to Amboseli. The park is known for three things: elephants that are unusually relaxed around vehicles and unusually well studied, prolific birdlife, and the sight of Kilimanjaro filling the southern horizon. All meals and overnight at the lodge.

A full day of game drives across the park’s swamps and dry lake bed. The swamps are the reason the elephants stay, and hippo, buffalo and a heavy concentration of waterbirds use them too. A picnic lunch is provided. The afternoon drive runs until about 5pm, and if the cloud lifts off Kilimanjaro, most often at dawn and dusk, you will get the view the park is famous for. Dinner and overnight at the lodge.

An early game drive while the light is good and Kilimanjaro is most likely to be clear, then back for breakfast and the drive to Nairobi via Namanga. If you would rather continue to the coast you can be dropped at Emali to pick up the Mombasa train; otherwise the day ends with a drop-off at your Nairobi hotel or the airport.