This is a special Safari with bias on Elephant Watching. This Safari is fully customizable to meet your needs and budget. You visit a combination of the following destinations which have high elephant populations;
- Samburu National Reserve
- Nairobi - David Sheldrick Elephant Orphange
- Amboseli National Park
- Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Park - Voi stockade/Ithumba Stockade
For a much closer interaction with elephants we recommend that you foster an elephant at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DWST). Doing so will give you a chance to have private evening visits to the Nairobi Elephant Orphanage where you will have personal interactions with your 'baby' (Note: The 5 pm visit is suspended until further notice). Foster parents are allowed to visit DWST's Stockades in Tsavo East National Park - a chance to interact with elephants as young as 3 years old to 12 years old that are about to be released into the wild to join wild elephant herds.
After breakfast leave your hotel for the Nairobi David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Your arrival will coincide with the 11 am public viewing of the orphaned elephants. We will visit the nearby Giraffe Center before having lunch at a restaurant at the Galleria Mall. At 5 pm we will have a private foster-parents-only visit to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust at this time you will be allowed time with your ‘adopted baby elephant’ and a short lecture from one of the keepers. Drive back to your hotel for a rest, dinner and overnight. Your time at the Nursery will also allow you to meet some of the famous faces of the Nursery Keepers and the DSWT team. Leave Nairobi in the morning and drive to Amboseli National Park arriving around midday. With game viewing en-route drive to Ol Tukai Lodge for check-in, lunch and a short rest. Ol Tukai Lodge is one of the best spots in the world to watch elephant with the backdrop of Africa's highest mountain - Mount Kilimanjaro. Afternoon Game Drive looking out for Elephants among other wildlife. Dinner and overnight at the Ol Tukai Lodge. After breakfast we leave for a full day game drive observing the elephants of Amboseli. We will also visit to the Observation Hill – one of the highest points in Amboseli with breathtaking views over the park and the swamps where elephants love to wallow. We will enjoy picnic lunch before proceeding with an afternoon game drive looking out for more elephants and other wildlife. Dinner and overnight at the Ol Tukai Lodge. After an early breakfast we enjoy morning game drive looking forward to spotting elephants as they move from the forest to the swamps where they spend the day wallowing and feeding. Later we check out of Amboseli and drive to Ithumba Camp in Tsavo East National Park with picnic lunch. Ithumba Camp (run by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust – DSWT)is a self help facility (we carry our own food and drinks) in Northern Tsavo East National Park - a haven for both elephants and elephant lovers! Dinner and overnight at the camp. Ithumba Camp is an exclusive and stylishly rustic self-catering tented camp designed for the intrepid traveler who relishes being off the beaten track in the Northern part of Tsavo East, a remote and relatively safe location to reintroduce the orphaned elephants into their wild habitat. Over a period of more than a decade the elephants are taught to forage for food, learn seasonal water availability, and most importantly, to begin to encounter and interact with the wild elephants that they will eventually live among. Guests at Ithumba Camp get to spend time with different orphans at various stages of this process, and get close to the wild elephants with which they are interacting. Ithumba Camp was built with payment received by DSWT from BBC’s Elephant Diaries Series. Profits from the Camp go directly to the Kenya Wildlife Service in support of conservation in Tsavo. Note: In order to stay at Ithumba camp all guests need to be foster parents After breakfast we will enjoy interactions with the grown orphans and some of their now wild family then checkout of Ithumba for a an extended game drive exploring the Galana river looking out for wildlife. Picnic lunch at the crocodile view point Picnic site. Afternoon game drive as we head to Satao Camp in the Dinka plains. Satao Camp has a waterhole that sometimes attracts up to 300 elephants. Dinner and overnight Early breakfast then checkout of the camp. We traverse the park looking out for more wildlife which include the pachyderms before we check out of the park and drive to MombasaItinerary
Day 1: Nairobi David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust
Day 2: Nairobi to Amboseli National Park
Day 3: Amboseli National Park
Day 4 and 5: Amboseli National Park - Tsavo East National Park
Day 6: Tsavo East National Park
Day 7: Tsavo East - Mombasa or Nairobi
