Enjoy Kenya’s, and one of Africa’ largest game reserves from a front row seat without having to move to a different lodge every day. After your days on safari, a really family friendly beach holiday awaits, with one of the country’s biggest pool areas. Enjoy 5 relaxing days next to the sea under the sun.
The chance of seeing The Big Five is very real on this tour, part of which is spent in Kenya’s biggest national park and the rest in an attractive resort hotel.
This is just the tour for people looking for a high quality safari, but would rather not change to different lodges several times during the safari.
On top of your safari this tour offers some exciting cultural experiences. These include visiting a local school, and getting an introduction to the local language, Swahili. An exciting look at the dramatic events that took place in Kenya during the First World War also awaits you.
You will be served nice and varied food and if you wish accompanied by excellent wine, all served in an open sided restaurant, which offers great views of the beautiful surrounding safari area.
The swimming pool and the well stocked lounge bar are natural meeting points for our guests after the day’s adventures. Naturally Wi-Fi is available in a number of places in the lodge’s public area.
Depart from your local airport and fly to Nairobi via, for example, Paris or Amsterdam.
Meals and drinks will naturally be included on your intercontinental flight.
You will arrive in Nairobi early in the morning, once you have cleared immigration and customs you will be met by our representative in Nairobi, and then head for the first stop of the tour, the Giraffe Centre, where you can feed giraffes, and meet them ”eye to eye”. Afterwards you will visit the Daphne Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, which lies on the fringes of Nairobi national park.
Here you get close to young orphaned elephants, and a few rhinos which have met the same fate, where they are fed and cared for until they can be released in special areas within Tsavo national park, on their way to a new life in new family herds in the wild. The center is open for an hour every day from 11.00 – 12.00.
You will then visit Kazuri Beads and afterwards be driven to Karen Blixen Coffee & Gardens, where a delicious lunch will be awaiting you. The restaurant is housed in the old school building that Karen Blixen built for the children of her employees.
After lunch you will visit Karen Blixen’s farm, which is a must see for fans of “Out of Africa”. The museum has been set up in Karen Blixen’s home at the foot of the Ngong Hills in Nairobi’s Karen district. After your visit you will be taken to the EKA Hotel, where you will stay for the night.
Accommodation is in a 3 - 4 star hotel and includes breakfast.
Transfer to the train station to take the new Nairobi-Mombasa train’s 09.00 departure to Voi, which is close to Tsavo National Park. Your train journey will be in 1st class and is very comfortable. You will be met at Moi train station at around 12.00-13.00 by your driver/guide and transferred to Ashnil Aruba Lodge. After only a 15 minute drive from the station you will enter Tsavo East National Park, where you will quickly see the beautiful scenery and your first wild animals. The drive through the park to Ashnil Aruba Lodge takes approx. 1 hour. After lunch you will start your safari, with an afternoon gamedrive in the park.
Dinner and overnight at Ashnil Aruba Lodge, which will be your base for the next 6 nights.
The lodge is situated next to Aruba Dam, which is a natural assembly point for the varied local animal life, which you can often see directly from the lodge.
There are 40 rooms which all offer a high level of comfort, with beautiful bathrooms, and your own veranda offering views to the national park.
Meals are taken in the open-sided restaurant, from where you take in the beautiful surrounding nature. The pool area and the lounge are naturally both popular with the guests when they are in camp.
At sunrise, 06.30 in the morning, you will drive out onto the savannah. The beautiful morning light combined with the freshness of the savannah, often make the early morning hours the best time to see animals. Amongst the big game animals you can see in the park are lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, giraffe, baboon and the elegant beautiful giraffe-gazelle, also known as the gerenuk.
After an exciting safari you will return to the lodge where a very generous breakfast buffet will be awaiting you.
During the day you can relax and enjoy the swimming pool.
In the afternoon you will again go on safari, finishing when the sun sets at 18.30. The day’s activities will end with a welcome cocktail together with the lodge’s manager, who will tell you about the lodge and the surrounding area. Afterwards dinner is served and you can enjoy the rest of the evening in the lodge.
The beautiful Galana river, which is formed by the Tsavo and Athi rivers merging close to the Lugard waterfall, before finally flowing into the Indian Ocean. The river is vitally important for the wildlife and is always a good place to encounter game animals. On the walking safari you are naturally accompanied by an armed park ranger.
During the walk you will be able to see the Yatta Plateau, which at 300 km in length and up to 10 km in width is one of the biggest lava flows in the world, and forms an impressive background to this part of the national park.
You will return to the lodge in time for lunch. During the rest of the day you will have time to relax, and enjoy the nature and the wildlife while sitting by the pool for example.
After a peaceful morning and a lovely breakfast you will be given an introduction to Swahili, which is spoken even in districts far from East Africa.
This introduction to the national language will be followed by you being given an insight into the local cuisine.
After lunch there will be a safari in the reserve, followed by dinner and an evening in the lodge.
After breakfast you will visit a local school (depending on local school holidays) where you will see that good teaching can be provided even in the most humble surroundings.
From here you will continue to Voi church yard where victims of the first world war, both local and British and allied casualties are buried. They lost their lives during the regular assaults from what was then German East Africa (now Tanzania), which in particular targeted the important Mombasa to Uganda railway line.
Lunch will be taken at the wonderfully situated Voi Safari Lodge. From here you will enjoy a safari drive back to Aruba Lodge for dinner.
The last safari adventures of the tour will take place this morning and afternoon, when you will have your final safari-drives in Tsavo. Perhaps you will be lucky enough to “tick off” another couple of animals that you haven’t yet seen.
In the evening there will be a farewell dinner, including Kwaheri cake, during which many of the tours exciting experiences will doubtless be shared.
After breakfast you will drive for a couple of hours to get to Mombasa and the beautifully situated south coast hotel Southern Palms Beach Resort, where you will stay for the next five nights.
You can enjoy the rest to the day by simply relaxing or taking a swim in the pool or the warm Indian Ocean.
Overnight in the Southern Palms Beach Resort including half-board.
You now have four full days to enjoy your beautiful surroundings of the Southern Palms Hotel and the Indian Ocean.
The Kenyan coast is perfect for a relaxing beach holiday after an eventful safari. The coast offers many different activities both on land and on the water - and even in the skies.
The district has three golf courses, of which the two 18 hole courses in particular are of very high quality. There is also plenty of opportunities to place tennis on some excellent courts.
If you need some city life then Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city with over 1 million inhabitants, can offer shopping in the Old Town district around Fort Jesus or at one of the local handicraft co-operatives.
At sea you can enjoy many different types of sailing tours, exciting big-game fishing for a really big “trophy”, as well as snorkeling and diving on the coral reef - and whatever your reason for being at sea, you will have a great chance of seeing dolphins swimming around your vessel.
You will be able to spend most of the rest of the day at the hotel, before being driven to the airport for your flight home, late in the day.
After catching a connecting flight in, for example, Amsterdam you will arrive at your local airport in the morning.
Southern Palms Beach Resort has 298 rooms, including 2 luxury suites, and lies in an approx. 10 acres of tropical gardens and has two large swimming pools, perhaps the largest in East Africa. The rooms are furnished in a Swahili inspired style and most face the pools or the gardens. 36 rooms are “Ocean Front Rooms” with a balcony and a sea view.
Read moreOnly a couple of hours drive from the major harbour town of Mombasa and the beaches of the Indian Ocean, lies Aruba Lodge in Tsavo National Park. The lodge is situated next to Aruba Dam, which is a natural assembly point for the varied local animal life, which you can often see directly from the lodge. Here you get excellent accommodation set in a beautiful landscape and can see an impressive amount of wildlife – often directly from our lovely lodge. Our 40 rooms all offer a high level of comfort, with beautiful bathrooms, and your own veranda offering views of the reserve.
Read moreKenya’s largest national park, the vast expanse of Tsavo covers a total of 23.000 km2, which makes it one of the largest parks on the whole continent. It is divided into western and eastern sections by the main road and railway line between the country’s two biggest cities, Nairobi and Mombasa. The park is home to the country’s largest population of elephants, which numbers around 12,000 head, and the rare black rhinoceros as well as many large baobab trees. From the small western section of Tsavo, in clear weather you can see the snowy peak of Kilimanjaro. This section of the park is very hilly, the landscape dominated by recent volcanic activity. Here you can also find a number of wetlands and the impressive Mzima springs, with their hippopotamus and crocodiles, where around 220 million liters of crystal clear water gushes forth from the ground every day, a small proportion of which is enough to supply Mombassa with water via a long pipeline. This underground spring water has its original source in the rainfall on Kilimanjaro and the Chyulu Hills.
Read moreThe Indian Ocean is the smallest of the globe’s three great oceans, but certainly not the least interesting. Along the east coast of Africa in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, and certainly not to forget the tropical island paradises of Mauritius, Madagascar, Bazaruto, Zanzibar and the Seychelles, your dreams of the perfect tropical beach paradise can be made real.
Read moreThe Big Five is a historic term that comes from big game hunting. It groups together the five animals that were considered to require the most courage and skill to hunt: Elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard. The term has been readily adopted by today’s wildlife safaris, on which rifles have been swapped for a camera and animals are only “shot” through a telephoto lens. It is also widely used in the marketing of reserves, camps and lodges, where the “Big Five” can be found, and visitors have a reasonable chance of encountering them.
Read moreOn the beautiful coastline just south of the equator, close to the port-city of Mombasa, especially to the south around the famous Diani Beach and beyond, you can find many attractive beach hotels. This destination could have been created just to give visitors the chance of relaxing on the beach after an eventful safari. Plenty of activities are also available, on the land, at sea and even in the air. Here you can find several golf courses, of which the three 18 hole-courses are of especially high quality.
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