Samburu, Shaba and Buffalo Springs
Game Reserves Covering an area of 300 sq kms, 314 kms north of Nairobi, off the shoulder of Mount Kenya, Samburu, Buffalo Springs and Shaba Game Reserves lie at the edge of the vast scrub desert that extends to Lake Turkana and beyond. A permanent relief is the broad ribbon of the Uaso Nyiro River which has blessed the park with an abundance of tiny dik diks, buffalos, elephants, cheetahs, leopards and lions. It also has resident wildlife species, rare elsewhere in
the country.
Masai Mara Game Reserve
An extension of the Serengeti plains, it lies on the border with Tanzania, 250 kms to the west of Nairobi. The park covers an area of 1,800 sq kms of rolling grassland dotted with acacia.
Among wildlife sanctuaries the Masai Mara must be one of the world's greatest, with an abundance of wildlife.
Large herds of plains game
gazelles, zebras, wildebeests and topis are pursued by the predators - blackmaned lions, cheetahs and leopards, as hundreds of elephants, buffalos, hippos and crocodiles complete this magical scene. A spectacle to be seen at least once in a lifetime is the annual migration from bordering Serengeti of hundreds of thousands of zebras and wildebeests. And yet, oddly, “Mara” means “mottley”. More likely, the Mara was named for the spotty, speckled inundation of the 1.4
million wildebeests and a million other herbivores that make their way across these plains any time between the end of June and the middle of September.
Nairobi National Park
Just 13 kms out of the city, the Nairobi National Park is the smallest and oldest of Kenya's GameParks, covering an area of 120 sq kms. Today, in a cosmopolitan 20th century, a browsing rhino is photographed against the backdrop of a modern city skyline, or a more unique imagery, a lion kills a gazelle in the wild, not more than 15-minutes drive from the portico of the Hilton!
Situated at the main gate on the Langata Road, the Nairobi Animal Orphanage provides a home for the young, sick and stray animals that are nursed back to fitness before being relocated to the wilderness.
Tsavo National Park
The world's largest wildlife sanctuary, Tsavo National Park, covers an area of 20,700 sq kms. Tsavo West stretches from the main Nairobi-Mombasa road down to the Tanzania border and Tsavo East northwards up to the borders of the Ukambani region, though tourist traffic north of the Galana River is prohibited.
More popular of the two is the wilderness of Tsavo West, with its fine extensive plains, lava flows, steep rocky hills and the parks centrepiece - a natural wonder - 48 kms of underground rivers flowing from the Chyulu Hills into a marvellous eruption of crystal clear water. Gushing 2,250
million litres daily, Mzima Springs forms a natural jacuzzi for hippos and crocodiles.
