We are excited to announce the launch of our dedicated Tsavo and Taita Hills packages for 2025 — a long-awaited addition to the Savanna Sojourns portfolio that opens up one of Kenya's most spectacular and undervisited safari regions to our guests. While the Maasai Mara remains our most popular destination, Tsavo's raw, ancient landscape and Taita Hills' unique nocturnal wildlife offer a profoundly different safari experience that is increasingly sought after by repeat visitors and those who want to explore beyond the beaten track.
Tsavo East National Park is enormous — at 11,747 km², it is the largest national park in Kenya and one of the largest in the world. This sheer scale means wildlife is genuinely wild, sightings require effort, and when you finally encounter animals in this primeval landscape, the experience carries a weight that busier parks sometimes lack. Tsavo East is not the Mara — there are no crowds, no convoys of vehicles at kills, and no radio networks of guides sharing sighting coordinates. It is old-school safari, and it is magnificent.
Tsavo East's most distinctive wildlife feature is its elephants — not for their genetics, which are identical to elephants elsewhere, but for their colour. The park's characteristic red laterite soil is kicked up by elephant dust baths and becomes embedded in their skin, turning what would otherwise be grey pachyderms a striking terracotta red. The effect is visually extraordinary, especially in evening light when the red dust glows against the golden savanna grasses. Tsavo's elephant population, numbering around 14,000 individuals across the two parks combined, is one of Africa's great wildlife concentrations.
Mudanda Rock is an inselberg — a great whale-back ridge of ancient rock — that rises dramatically from the Tsavo East plains and has become one of the park's most famous wildlife photography locations. A natural waterhole at its base acts as a magnet during the dry season, and visitors who climb the accessible pathway to the rock's summit are rewarded with panoramic views of the Tsavo plains extending in all directions, often with hundreds of elephants, zebras, and other wildlife visible simultaneously drinking below. It is a scene that conveys the scale of Tsavo in a way that no single close-up sighting can.
Built across the Voi River in 1952, Aruba Dam creates a substantial permanent water reservoir that acts as a year-round wildlife magnet in the otherwise arid Tsavo East landscape. During the dry season (July–October), concentrations of wildlife at Aruba Dam can be extraordinary — herds of over 300 elephants have been recorded at the dam in a single afternoon, along with buffalo, lions, cheetahs, giraffes, oryx, and the full spectrum of Tsavo East's wildlife. It is one of the best places in Kenya for high-volume game viewing without leaving your vehicle.
Where Tsavo East is flat, red, and vast, Tsavo West is hilly, dramatic, and geologically extraordinary. The Chyulu Hills — a chain of young volcanic cones formed less than 500 years ago — dominate the northwestern horizon, while the Shetani lava flow covers an area of 50 km² in black, fractured basalt that is still so fresh, geologically speaking, that almost nothing grows on it. Walking on the Shetani flow — "shetani" is Swahili for "devil," reflecting local beliefs about the terrifying lava flow eruption — is an otherworldly experience.
Mzima Springs is one of the most remarkable natural phenomena in East Africa. The springs produce 50 million gallons of crystal-clear water per day from the ground at the edge of the Shetani lava flow. The water originates as rain falling on the Chyulu Hills, which percolates through the porous volcanic rock over a distance of 40 kilometres before emerging at Mzima. The flow is so strong and so pure that it has supplied Mombasa's water since 1953 via a pipeline. Hippos and Nile crocodiles inhabit the spring pools, and the underwater observatory — a glass-windowed chamber built into the bank of the main pool — offers a genuinely unique experience of viewing hippos underwater as they walk along the sandy bottom.
The birdlife around Mzima Springs is exceptional: Peter's twin-spot, white-starred robin, purple-banded sunbird, and African paradise flycatcher are all reliably found in the riparian vegetation. A guided walk at Mzima is one of Tsavo West's essential experiences.
Rising dramatically above the Tsavo plains, the Taita Hills are among Kenya's most ecologically important landscapes. The indigenous cloud forest on the hills' peaks is home to several endemic species found nowhere else on Earth, including the Taita thrush and the Taita apalis — birds so range-restricted that birders travel from around the world specifically to see them. But for most safari guests, the Taita Hills experience centres on one extraordinary accommodation: Salt Lick Safari Lodge.
Salt Lick Lodge is architecturally unique — a series of circular, raised rooms connected by elevated walkways and positioned above the park's famous salt lick (a naturally mineralised area that attracts wildlife seeking sodium and other minerals). The lodge's design was built around a single concept: that wildlife should come to the guests, not the other way around. And it works. By night, floodlit waterholes below the lodge walkways attract a procession of nocturnal visitors — elephants, buffalo, hyenas, leopards, genets, civets, porcupines, and many others. Guests sit on the lodge's open walkways in silence, watching wildlife pass metres below them in the darkness. It is unlike any other lodge experience in Kenya.
Salt Lick also offers bush breakfasts and sundowners at a hide above the main waterhole, guided night game drives (one of the few parks in Kenya that permit them), and day drives through the surrounding Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary.
Guests who have already visited the Mara often ask us whether Tsavo is worth a separate trip. The answer is an unambiguous yes — but for different reasons. The Mara delivers guaranteed, high-density wildlife viewing in a beautiful, open landscape. Tsavo delivers scale, solitude, geological drama, and a rawer, more untamed feeling. You may drive for an hour in Tsavo East without seeing another vehicle. Your game drive in the late afternoon may consist of nothing but space, silence, and the distant silhouette of a herd of red elephants moving through the dust. Then you crest a ridge and Kilimanjaro fills the entire horizon, and you understand exactly why early explorers described this landscape as among the most beautiful on Earth.
For families, repeat safari travellers, serious photographers, and birders, Tsavo offers a depth of experience that perfectly complements a Mara itinerary. Savanna Sojourns recommends pairing Tsavo with the Maasai Mara for guests who have a week or more to spend — the combination covers the full range of Kenyan ecosystems and habitats in a single, coherent journey.
"Tsavo is Kenya before the tourists came. It is vast, ancient, and it asks nothing of you except that you pay attention. I take my most experienced safari guests here because it gives back in proportion to what you bring to it." — George Kimani, Founder, Savanna Sojourns
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