Travel Guide Tsavo East National Park

Tsavo was originally a single, huge park, but is now split in two by the four-lane road and railroad that connect Mombasa to Nairobi. This wilderness area, with its beautiful dry and rugged landscape, is the home of the red elephant. The red color of the Tsavo soil that they happily cover themselves with is what makes them so special. The terrible drought of the 1970's and poaching almost made them disappear. Fortunately, the radical measures taken by the authorities have borne fruit and today one can find a few herds of elephants in Tsavo East. Tsavo was the site of the incredible story of the "man-eating lions", who attacked railway workers in 1898, killing a number of them, before being shot by British Colonel John Henry Patterson. Patterson wrote about his exploits in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (1907). Today, lions no longer attack humans, and despite the increasingly visible human footprint (road and rail infrastructure, high voltage power lines ...), nature is still king. The park has a very large number of animals (buffalos, zebras, antelopes, gazelles, ostriches, lions...), but, scattered in this immensity, they are difficult to observe. In the dry season, they gather in large numbers near the few permanent water points The biggest part of the park, gigantic and desert, north of the Galana River, is closed to the public. The open part remains largely large enough. One quickly finds oneself alone in the middle of the savannah as soon as one deviates from the main circuits around the Voi Wildlife Lodge.