Tag: Samburu
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A Night on the Sacred Mountain
‘Maape!’. ‘Let’s go!’. Our Samburu guide, Lemaiyan, urged us to continue our climb after a long water break. The mid-morning heat had been turned up a notch, and our progress was slow. We zigzagged up the eastern slope of Mount Ololokwe, along a path well trodden by elephants and cattle. Stumbling under the weight of…
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Buffalo Springs: Of Blue Pools and Pink Elephants
‘You guys missed all the action!’, one of the rangers said, as we returned to camp from a long morning game drive. ‘A big crocodile dragged an impala into the river, and then fought with three other crocodiles over the scraps!’ They would have had a good view of this toothy tussle – the Spring…
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Breakaway Drive to Saruni Samburu and Saruni Rhino
We woke to the roar of a lion. Well, my wife did. When I eventually opened my eyes, she told me she was sure it was a lion. Maybe it was, because on a game drive the previous evening we saw a lioness leaving the waterhole way down on the plain below our villa. We…
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Camping on the Banks of the Ewaso Nyiro
A couple of weeks ago I covered a recent trip to the Shaba National Reserve, and a night at the Sarova Shaba Game Lodge. As part of that trip, my fiancée and I also camped along the Ewaso Nyiro River, at one of the reserve’s many campsites. Accommodation options are limited in Shaba, but I…
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A Weekend at the Sarova Shaba Game Lodge
Tales of riverside campsites, crystal-clear springs and waterfalls had recently elevated Shaba to the top of my list of places to visit in Kenya. The 240sq.km reserve forms part of a much larger ecosystem that includes Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves, but Shaba is the least visited of the three. This relative obscurity simply…
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Nights in the Elephants’ Bedroom
‘We’ll struggle to see lions in Samburu.’ I offered this little nugget of wisdom to family friends we were hosting from the UK, based on my experience from previous trips to the reserve. Inevitably, we spotted lions on every game drive over the course of our three-day visit. For our guests, though, the choice of…
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The Road to Samburu
Every year our family drives down the 500km stretch from Nairobi to Mombasa. Although staying at the coast is the main attraction, the journey there usually provides an added incentive. The recent rise in the volume of traffic, though, can make the journey very frustrating, and it can therefore be difficult to appreciate the changing…