Road Safaris

Kenya is a country you can drive. Not everywhere, and not always comfortably, but the road out of Nairobi climbs to the Rift Valley escarpment and stops you at a viewpoint where the floor of the valley runs away for sixty miles, and no light aircraft will ever give you that.

A road safari means one vehicle and one driver-guide for the length of your trip. He meets you at the airport, he is still there ten days later, and by the third morning he knows you would rather sit with a cheetah than tick off a rhino. That continuity is the quiet argument for driving, and it is the one guests mention afterwards.

Who it suits

Longer trips, families, groups, photographers with kit, and anyone travelling on a Kenyan resident budget. The maths is straightforward: a vehicle divided by six is cheap, and six air seats are not. If you have ten nights or more, the road legs stop hurting.

It suits people who like the going as well as the arriving. If that is not obviously you, the question is worth answering properly rather than by mood. Road or flying is where we make that call with you: it sets the two against each other on the things that genuinely differ: the vehicle, the guide, what you can bring, and how the arithmetic moves with the size of your party. It argues for neither.

The vehicle

Every road safari we run is private, in a pop-top Land Cruiser: one vehicle for your party and nobody else in it. We seat six in a car that will take seven, so nobody sits in a middle position. Conservancy stays often add the camp’s own open-sided viewer for drives from camp, and the safari vehicles guide covers both, including which row to ask for.

A day on the road

On park days you are not really travelling at all. You are on a game drive that starts and ends at the same camp, out at six and again at four. Transfer days are the different ones: an early start, a long morning, a lunch stop somewhere with cold drinks and a view, and camp by mid-afternoon with a drive still to come.

A well-built ten-day road itinerary has two or three transfer days in it. If a proposal you have been sent has seven, it is a bus tour with a safari attached.

What it costs

Less than flying, and the gap widens with party size. The cost guide shows where the money actually goes, and the resident rate tables carry the shilling side of it region by region: Diani, Amboseli-Tsavo, Samburu, Laikipia, the Great Lakes and the Watamu coast are all reachable on wheels.

The routes we actually drive

The classics, and roughly what each one asks of you:

• Nairobi to the Maasai Mara: most of a morning on tarmac, then a graded stretch that will remind you where you are.
• Nairobi to Amboseli: a straightforward run south with Kilimanjaro ahead of you for the last hour, cloud permitting.
• Nairobi to Samburu: north past Mount Kenya, and the country changes completely as you drop into the dry country.
• Nairobi through the Rift: Naivasha and Nakuru are close enough for a genuine long weekend, which is why residents drive them.
• Nairobi to the coast: a full day, and the leg we usually tell people to fly.

Ready-made routings live under every itinerary, and the Kenya destination page sets the regions in order.