A guest called me from the Ol Kinyei gate last year, stuck. She had 40,000 Kenyan shillings in cash and a stack of dollars, but no card reader in sight and no signal to check her eCitizen account. The gate wanted a pre-loaded Safari Card. It took two phone calls and forty minutes to sort […]
If you have ever sat at a Masai Mara National Reserve gate at 6:15pm watching the light turn gold and known your guide has to turn the vehicle around, you already understand the frustration. This guide covers night game drive Kenya conservancies: which ones allow it, what it costs, and how to book it. Kenya’s […]
Every couple who calls us asks some version of the same honeymoon safari splurge vs save question: how much should we actually spend on this trip? The honest answer is that a Kenya honeymoon safari can cost anywhere from $250 a night to over $3,000 a night, and the difference often has nothing to do […]
You’ve seen the ads. “Masai Mara day trip, $220pp, all inclusive.” It sounds simple until you start asking what “all inclusive” actually means, and whether spending ten hours in a van for six hours of game viewing makes any sense at all. I’ve booked this trip for hundreds of first-time travelers out of Nairobi. Some […]
You landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport with eight hours to kill before your next flight. Somewhere between baggage claim and the departures board, you started wondering: could you actually see a lion today? The answer is often yes. Nairobi is the only capital city in the world with a national park inside its limits, […]
If you have already done the Masai Mara, you know the drill. Wall-to-wall vehicles at a leopard sighting, a radio crackling every few minutes, and a guide who knows exactly where the action is because ten other guides already told him. Meru National Park is the opposite of that. This Meru National Park safari guide […]
Every year a parent emails us asking the same question. “Is the Masai Mara malaria-free? We’re traveling with a toddler and I don’t want to give her antimalarial tablets.” Here’s the honest answer. The Mara sits at 1,500 to 2,100 meters, which keeps mosquito numbers lower than the coast, but it is not malaria-free. Doctors […]
This Kenya safari packing list checklist answers the question every first-time guest asks us a week before departure. “What do I actually need to pack?” It’s a fair question, because most packing lists online repeat the same generic advice. Neutral colors, sunscreen, done. We’ve watched hundreds of guests unpack at camps in the Maasai Mara, […]
An affordable honeymoon safari Kenya trip is not a myth, even though the first search results suggest otherwise. Search “honeymoon safari Kenya” and you will find page after page quoting $800 to $1,500 per person, per night. That is a real price for a lodge in the Mara Triangle. It is not what most couples […]
If your first Kenya trip was the Masai Mara and maybe a few days in Amboseli, you saw the classics. Lions on a kill, wildebeest crossing a river, Kilimanjaro floating behind the elephants. It is a good trip. It is also, in a way, the easy trip. A Laikipia conservancy safari repeat visitors choose for […]