Tsavo East National Park

At more than 13,700km². Most famous for its huge herds of dust-red elephants, more than 10,000 of them bulldoze their way around this vast park.

Incidentally, although Tsavo East and Tsavo West share a name – and a common border, coinciding with the Mombasa highway – they are two distinct national parks with different eco-systems: the wooded and hilly landscapes, dotted with volcanic cones and dramatic, black lava flows of Tsavo West National Park and the much flatter, more open plains and scattered bush that characterize Tsavo East National Park.

Tsavo East Safaris
The southern part of Tsavo East National Park is a popular destination for short Tsavo East National Park safaris by minibus from the coast. But the park can be visited by safari vehicles coming in all direction (Nairobi, Amboseli, Tsavo west etc).

The geography and wildlife of Tsavo East
Tsavo East is mostly a vast flat plain of sandy soil, split by the shallow trough of the Galana River. Nearly all visits take place south of the Galana, where seasonal streams form tributaries that run into the river, their banks lined by small areas of thicker bush. Another watercourse, the seasonal Voi River, runs east through this part of the park, feeding the shallow Aruba dam and then meandering to the coast.

The Galana, which rises in the central highlands and whose upper reaches are known as the Athi, is one of Kenya’s biggest rivers. Its valley – rocky in much of its western course, sandy and doum-palm fringed further east – is one of Tsavo East National Park’s defining physical features.

Tsavo East landmarks
Mudanda Rock is an Ayer’s Rock-like sandstone inselberg whose bare flanks form a natural water catchment area that feeds into a large, seasonal lake, attracting large numbers of animals.

The Yatta Plateau is a 300km ancient lava flow that stretches along the east and north bank of the Athi-Galana. Its geomagnetic qualities are believed to play a role in guiding migratory birds and large numbers of Palearctic migrants can be seen in the area.

Lugard Falls are a series of short falls and steep rapids on the Galana River, where relatively harder rock has created a bottleneck in the valley and impedes the river’s progress. Crocodile Point, where the big reptiles can often be seen basking in the sun, is just downstream from here. At some point on most Tsavo East safaris, you’re almost bound to stop here to stretch your legs and takes photos.

Flora and fauna of Tsavo East National Park
The plant communities of Tsavo East are dominated by short grasses, thorn bushes and two major species of tree. The baobab is the iconic tree of Tsavo West National Park, across the Mombasa highway, but you still find significant numbers of these compelling trees, with their enormous trunks and stumpy branches. They form important habitats for many species of birds and insects: you’ll often see hornbills using holes in baobabs to nest in. The doum palm is a curious tree, a native of North Africa, with edible dates and kernels, whose southernmost territory is the Galana River. When young, the trees are a mass of bushy fronds, but as they mature and the trunks grow, they bifurcate, sometimes two or three times, to create an arresting visual image of forked palm trees.

On wildlife densities , short-maned Tsavo lions; cheetahs appear often; all the plains grazers and bush browsers are much in evidence; and elephants many with big tusks – surge across the river, wallow in the waterholes and file over the red earth roads in front of bulging baobab trees.

Despite being in south-east Kenya, Tsavo East is zoologically associated with northern Kenya, meaning you’ll see long-necked gerenuk and Somali ostrich, the male of which has a blue neck and legs, and introduced herds of the handsome, fine-striped, Grevy’s zebra. There is also a breeding population of black rhinos, closely monitored by rangers who track them through the bush, though very few travelers on Tsavo East safaris are lucky enough to see them.

The prehistory of the Tsavo region
What is now Tsavo East National Park was home, in prehistoric times, to scattered communities of hunter-gatherers. Pre-dating the arrival of all the present-day peoples of Kenya, these ancient communities, dating back 50,000 to 100,000 years or more, lived a precarious existence along the banks of the Galana river, where some of their cave shelters have been discovered. They scoured the land for wild fruit, seeds, edible flowers and leaves, nuts and berries, and dug the ground for roots and tubers, while catching any small animals they could grab, from locusts to frogs. With training and practice in adolescence, the men grew up to use the technology of their era – primarily simple bows, spears and clubs of wood and bone – and competed for four-legged meat across Tsavo East with the predators of the region: the lions, leopards, hyenas, crocodiles and related species now extinct, which in turn occasionally hunted them.

The exploration of Tsavo East
By the time the Maasai arrived in the Tsavo area with their cattle, in the eighteenth century, Swahili traders from the coast had been trekking across the region for centuries, using the Kamba as middlemen to exchange foreign cloth, alcohol, gold and silver coins and gunpowder for animal skins, ivory, rhino horn and slaves from the far interior. It was Swahili and Kamba traders who led the earliest explorers and missionaries on the world’s first ‘safaris’. In 1849, they showed the German Bible scholar Johann Krapf the snowy peaks of Kilimanjaro and Kirinyaga (later called Mount Kenya), and in the 1880s they guided the eco-conscious Scottish geologist Joseph Thomson – the world’s first explorer to practice something resembling responsible travel (nobody ever lost their life on a Thomson safari) – on his way through Maasai-land.

The early Victorian colonists from Britain saw Tsavo East as a problem area to be fought against: they couldn’t farm there, but they were going to make sure their trains ran on time on the new railway line. Having dealt with two man-eating lions (the ‘Man-Eaters of Tsavo’) after losing dozens of labourers to the hungry pair during the railway’s construction, they were determined to avoid staff shortages over wildlife. Tsavo East’s dense population of black rhinos was considered to be a particular scourge, making footpaths and roads unsafe for pedestrians. As late as the years after World War II, the British employed the suitably named JA Hunter to cull the rhinos, and he quickly lived up to his name, killing 1088 rhinos over the course of a year in the area that is now Tsavo East National Park.