Tourism in Kenya: Best Destinations to Visit, Safari Packages & What It Costs

Where to Go

Kenya has over 50 protected areas. Nobody visits all of them. Some earn their entry fee ten times over. A few are skippable.

Masai Mara

The Masai Mara has some of the highest predator density in Africa. Three nights here and you’ll likely tick off lion, leopard, cheetah, elephant, and buffalo. Between July and October, the wildebeest migration floods the Mara River. During crossing season, the smell at the river is wet fur and churned mud, mixed with something sharp that sits in the back of your throat.

The Mara’s main problem is congestion. Peak season weekends can mean twenty vehicles around one leopard. Conservancies bordering the reserve (Naboisho, Olare Motorogi, Mara North) charge from USD 130 (about £103) per person per day on top of camp fees, but vehicle numbers are capped. Worth every penny, in my opinion, though some clients disagree and prefer the reserve’s lower base cost.

Entry to the Masai Mara National Reserve: USD 100 per person in low season (January to June) and USD 200 in peak season (July to December), payable through KAPS or cash at the gate.

And about the migration timing: everyone fixates on July to October. But roughly 250,000 resident wildebeest move from the Loita Plains into the Mara around May and June. Guides call it the Loita Migration, or the shadow migration. If you visit in June, you get serious predator action in the conservancies at half the peak season price and probably zero other vehicles at a kill. We did a June trip last year where a family from Cardiff had a cheetah hunt entirely to themselves for nearly forty minutes.

Amboseli

USD 90 (about £71) per adult through KWSPay. That’s the practical bit out of the way.

Amboseli is small. On a clear morning, Kilimanjaro takes up half the horizon behind elephant herds. The park has some of the biggest tuskers left in Kenya. The springs area smells of sulphur and wet earth, and cattle egrets ride on elephant backs like paying passengers.

The dust, though. Amboseli sits on volcanic ash. It’s finer than anything in the Mara or Tsavo and it gets into camera sensor housings, between laptop keys, inside bags you thought were sealed properly. Double-bagging electronics in ziplocks is the minimum. I’ve seen a client’s £2,000 lens develop a persistent smear after two days because they left their camera bag open on the seat during a game drive.

Lake Nakuru, Tsavo, and Samburu

Lake Nakuru is a compact Rift Valley park. When the flamingos are in, the shoreline looks like someone spilled paint. When they’re not (flamingo numbers depend on the lake’s alkalinity, and it fluctuates), you’ve still got black and white rhino and Rothschild’s giraffe. One night is enough. USD 90 (about £71) through KWSPay.

Tsavo is two parks bigger than some European countries combined. East has red-soil plains with rust-coloured elephant herds. West has Mzima Springs and an underwater hippo-viewing window that looks like it belongs in a natural history museum. USD 80 (about £63) through KWSPay. Neither park gets Mara-level crowding.

A note about Tsavo’s wooded areas, and this applies to parts of the Mara too: tsetse flies are attracted to bright blue and dark black. Those blue-and-black cloth traps you see hanging from trees along park roads? That’s why they’re those colours. Wearing a navy shirt into the bush makes you a walking fly-magnet. Stick to pale stone or light khaki. Even dark green can be too much.

Samburu is northern Kenya. Arid, remote, home to five species you won’t find in the southern parks: reticulated giraffe, Grevy’s zebra, Beisa oryx, gerenuk, and Somali ostrich. The Ewaso Nyiro River draws elephant herds in the hundreds during dry months.

The Coast: Diani, Lamu, and Watamu

Diani Beach is where most visitors decompress after bush time. White sand, warm Indian Ocean, reef snorkelling. The beach-and-safari combination is our most-booked format. Day trips to Wasini Island for dolphins or the Shimba Hills for sable antelope are easy add-ons from Diani.

Lamu Island is UNESCO-listed. Donkey transport, narrow coral-stone streets, Swahili architecture that hasn’t changed in four hundred years. Worth the trip if you’ve got the time, but the flight from Nairobi adds cost. Watamu Marine Park, further south, has good coral and turtle conservation projects.