Kenya Travel Guide

Amazing wildlife and scenery - Kenya's National Parks in December

Our family of 4 went on holiday during the winter school break - we visited 3 national parks - Amboseli, Samburu, and Mara, with a day in Nairobi on either end. Overall the trip was excellent and easy. As first time travelers to Kenya, we decided to go high-end and use a tour agency to book everything, but with some experience we could have saved a few dollars and put the pieces together ourselves. In Nairobi, we visisted the Blixen Museum, the Sheldrake Elephant Orphan Center, and the Giraffe Center - felt they were all worth it. In each park, we did a morning and evening game drive and saw lots of wildlife including 1 cheetah, a pride of lions, and luckily a leopard very close up in Samburu. The guides were knowledgeable and very attentive. Our 12-year old got a little bored and skipped a few game drives (in the mornings particularly), and the trip would have been just as nice doing just the evening game drives. In terms of accommodation, we stayed at the Amboseli Serena Lodge (excellent), Samburu Shova (lovely just next to the river), and the Mara Serena (amazing view of the plains). The Mara Serena had a water pipe break while we were there and our room didn't have water for 24 of the 48 hours. While the hotel was very nice about it and apologetic, they offered no compensation/benefit, which I found odd. We had to use bathrooms in the lobby and showers in the gym which were not so far away.

Amboseli safari with Beacon Safaris - fantastic!!!

What a great time! From the well written communications for booking the trip via email with Robert, thru easy online payment to a great driver in Kevin, we had a great time going on a three day safari in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, all organized through Beacon Safaris. They arranged to have the driver pick us up from our golf course hotel west of Nairobi and took us straight to the safari camp called Kibo Safari Camp, a luxurious tented camp that I highly recommend. The safari itself was excellent with an abundance of animals. Kevin definitely knew where to look and he is very knowledgeable about them. Overall, it was a great trip and I highly recommend Beacon Safaris.

Fantastic

Everything was perfect and people were so friendly and nice

It has everything from the greatest concentration of animals, to incredible scenery with a lot of variety. It also geared for tourism, which makes it that be easier to get around.

Great country to do safari!

Great country to go for safari. The big 5 and more. Maasai Mara was great!

Great moment during my 3 days Safari

I had a great time during my 3 days SAFARI as i was able to see cheetah, leopard, and the rest of the big five.

The organization was perfect and everything was done as i expected.
I was picked at my hotel the day of the departure and dropped off at the airport at the end of the Safari.

I definitely recommend to have a Safari during a trip to Kenya, this is real wild life!

Trip of a lifetime

We decided to book our Kenya experience ourselves and not use a travel agency in Canada. The safari bookings website was a great help.
I send off e-mails to several companies and only heard back from a few. Tropical Vacations from the start was great at communicating and finding out what we wanted.

What we had thought we wanted and what we ended up with, we could not have been more thrilled.

We ended up with 6 days and 5 nights of the best time ever.

We managed to see Amboseli, Masa Mari and a few other parks.

We saw Kilimanjaro At sunrise and sunset. We saw the big 5 and came home with over 2,000 photos.

Matthew from Tropical Vacation met the needs of the three of us. One person in our group is a birder and he made sure she got to see many new birds to add to her list.

We are glad we followed his advise to upgrade our accommodation as we heard after some of the places we had picked were pretty rough. We did not go luxury and for the fraction extra we paid for mid luxury and to be a private group of three was well worth the small extra.

We thought this would be our onetime trip Africa, but we are already talking about going back.

Great trip. Experienced guide. Simple food. Scenic beauty. Perfect combination.

Since our guide was experienced and enthusiastic about showing us all the animals, he went the extra mile to do so. He succeeded and made us fall in love with wildlife.
The food was simple. Less oily. Less spicy. We ended up losing weight

AMAZING

Hi everyone! PSA - This review will be long only because I want to answer all of the questions I had before this trip and could not find the answers to myself (and then I will rave about this awesome tour group!)

First and most importantly - You NEED a visa to enter this country! They cost about $100/$120 pending on the site you get it from, it's detailed and you have to fill in a lot of questions and send pictures of your passport to them (I was nervous to do that but it is real).

Make sure you buy hiking boots/shoes! You will thank yourself later.

When originally booking this trip I talked to many different tour companies and found myself unsteady when each of them told me to pay via Money Order/wire transfer or a third party website if I wanted to use a credit card (and a % fee for doing so). I was looking all over TripAdvisor for the answer because I didn't know what to do so I used a credit card incase it was a fake website so the fee kept my mind at ease. WELL, I am here to say, trust it! Don't stress that this isn't a real company because it is! (If I saw this during my booking I would've easily felt better).

The companies all email back and forth very quickly and will answer any questions you may have.

After picking my resorts & add ons like the Hot Air Balloon ride (DO IT!!) I had to ask for a detailed itinerary of our trip because it's not like Expedia where its all right there. This is a very, "Relax and trust me" system in Kenya, which made much more sense once I got there.

My originally weariness of "What if we get there and no one is actually coming" went away right when we got off the plane. We met with our driver Joseph right away! He had a sign with our names on it and everything.

I also suggest opting for the Land Rover because you will NEED the leg room. This country looks small but its not! We got off the plane only to sit in the car another 5 hrs to get to our first game park, and these roads are bumpy! Bring some motion sickness pills if you have problems in the car. We then had another 4 hr drive the next day to the next game park; followed by 8.5 hrs back to Nairobi at the end of the trip, and we did all of this driving on a 4-day tour. Not expecting that much driving time I'm really happy we opted for the Land Rover so we could all spread out and get comfy.

Make sure you get the shots and heavy duty bug spray! I know it's an unexpected cost but having food poisoning or travelers diarrhea is no fun and will make you miss a day of the beautiful game parks. The food was amazing everywhere we stayed so none of us got sick thankfully! We did buy packets of pedialyte (amazon) and drank one every day just to make sure we stayed hydrated because it is HOT HOT HOT there.

Lastly, they like tips and payment for things in US dollars. I went to the bank and ordered Schillings ahead of time thinking I was ahead of the game, but all of the shops we went to, the driver, and even the add ons to our packages (the hot air balloon ride) they all preferred US dollars. If you have schillings they will take that too but you could save yourself a lot of money in fees by not even worrying about transferring US dollars to Schillings.

For some people this may matter - there is wifi in most of the resorts except it is only in the lobby and for limited hours of the day due to not having power! I was worried about "incase of emergency" exceptions so I added the international plan to my phone - which will run you about $70-$80 for a month because Kenya is not part of the cheaper plans. However, I did feel better that if we got lost in the middle of the park/ran out of gas, I could call for help.

Ok - enough about the little details - lets talk about this amazing company- Beacon Safaris!

From the moment we arrived we were greeted with a smile and excited face from Joseph! He was awesome!! He was so very personable and went above and beyond to do whatever he could for us. We even got to meet Robert quickly, which made me feel so much better to be able to put a face to the name of the person I was emailing back and forth with for the better part of a year.

Anything we wanted to do and even our last-minute change of plans never upset him. We asked to stop many times for some snacks, beers, shopping at these awesome little spots in the villages that we saw, and especially the bathroom and he was happy to accommodate. (The places you will stay have toilets and toilet paper but some of the places you stop for the bathroom are just a hole in the ground so buy some travel size toilet wipes on amazon to keep on you at all times - just incase). He was so personable and really went above and beyond to meet our needs. We had some very long car rides from Nairobi to Lake Nakuru to Masai Mara and then all the way back to Nairobi, and Joseph never complained once.

Instead, he was just as excited as we were to see the animals, which made us even more excited too because it felt like it was all of our first experiences. His personality is vibrant and he really is a shining light for the company!

I was nervous at first that we wouldn’t see any animals but Joseph made sure our day was never boring! We saw endless amounts of zebras, lions, giraffes, elephants, a leopard, cheetahs, and even the black rhino! You can't get out of the car but you will get very very close - get the 4X4 Land Rover because the roof goes up and you can put your head out the top to see the animals better.

Our morning hot air balloon ride got cancelled on our first attempt due to weather one morning, and Joseph had to rush to come pick us up unexpectedly. When he arrived, we were so hungry and asked him if we could stop to get breakfast somewhere but to our amazement he already thought of that in his rush to get to us and pre-packaged breakfast for each of us. He truly went above and beyond for us each day and I don’t think we could thank him enough.

Joseph is not just our driver, but we now consider him family! Thank you so much for the experience of a lifetime to both Robert & Joseph.

Maisha Marefu! (Cheers to a good life)

Mariah

Best Family Vacation Ever

Eight members of my family traveled to Kenya this year to visit Masai Mara and Lake Nakuru. The wildlife was breath taking. KETS travel did a great job of making all the arrangements. We faced no hassle during the stay and travel.
The vehicle which was provided was great. We also did a hot air balloon ride, which was a slight disappointment as we did not get any sighting while we were up in the air.
Your your guide was Patrick. He was very knowledgeable .

Overall it was the best family vacation we had.