Kenya holiday highlights
With over 40 national parks and reserves, Kenya offers some of the best wildlife viewing opportunities in the world. The most well-known of all its game parks is, of course, the Maasai Mara – the subject of many wildlife documentaries, with its wide open savannah and majestic big cats. People also flock here to see the ‘greatest show on earth’; the annual migration. The largest mass movement of land mammals on earth, the Great Migration sees over one million stampeding wildebeest and other grazing herbivores journey the 300 miles from the Serengeti in Tanzania to Kenya’s Maasai Mara. A rough pattern occurs each year as the herds follow the rains to secure a good water supply and fertile grass – usually gracing the Maasai Mara between August and October. But there's more to Kenya than the migration and the Mara, with just as much on offer for experienced wildlife enthusiasts as first-time safari goers. Venture to the giants of Tsavo East and Tsavo West for wonderfully varied landscapes. Visit beautiful Amboseli National Park, home to herds of elephants dwarfed by magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro, or seek out the unique wildlife of Samburu National Reserve, such as the long-necked gerenuk or reticulated giraffe. Bird lovers will delight in the Great Rift Valley’s lakes. In Kenya you’ll have a great chance of seeing the Big Five (a phrase coined by African hunters to group the five most difficult and dangerous animals to hunt on foot: the lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and rhino). Magnificent though they are – and they really are – don’t forget to appreciate the other species that inhabit this incredible country