5-Day Luxurious Mara - Nakuru - Naivasha And Hells Gate Tour

Arrival and Pickup Masai Mara National Reserve Client's Choice An early morning pickup from Nairobi leads southwest through the dramatic escarpment of the Rift Valley. En route, a brief stop at the viewpoint reveals the vast trough of the valley stretching north and south to the horizon. After checking in to your luxury tented camp inside the Mara ecosystem, a 3-hour afternoon game drive introduces you to the reserve's famous residents: lion prides resting in the afternoon shade, enormous herds of impala and topi, the occasional cheetah scanning from a termite mound. Your bush dinner under a lantern-lit canvas awning sets the tone for the luxury that follows.

Activities : Game Drives

Masai Mara National Reserve Client's Choice The Mara reveals its full drama on a full day of game drives. A 05:30 pre-dawn departure finds the reserve in a different light: lion coalitions moving back from a night's hunt, spotted hyenas giving the whooping calls that signal a pack reunion, and the extraordinary sight of hundreds of wildebeest silhouetted against the rising sun. Morning drives focus on the riverine thickets where leopards spend the heat of the day. A packed gourmet bush lunch is laid out in the field before afternoon drives continue past elephant family groups, massive buffalo herds and the dazzling acrobatics of crowned cranes and superb starlings. The guide's expert knowledge of the Mara's individual animals — named lions, known leopards and regular cheetah families — transforms game viewing into an ongoing story.

Activities : Game Drives

Client's Choice After a final early morning drive and breakfast, the road leads north to Lake Nakuru. The journey crosses the equator — marked by a roadside monument where guides demonstrate the Coriolis effect with water experiments that delight all ages. Lake Nakuru's western entrance gate leads into a park of extraordinary variety: the south and west shores host flamingo concentrations, the Makalia Falls provide a scenic picnic spot, and the elevated Baboon Cliff viewpoint delivers the park's most dramatic panorama. An afternoon drive focuses on rhino tracking — both white and black rhinos can be observed at close quarters in the open woodland — as well as the park's famous tree-climbing lions, which regularly drape themselves across the branches of fever trees in unusual feline behaviour documented by researchers for decades.

Activities : Game Drives

Client's Choice Begin with an early game drive around the lake's southern shore, where the flamingos are at their most spectacular in the morning light and white rhinos graze in the nearby grassland. After breakfast, drive south to Lake Naivasha arriving in time for lunch. The afternoon boat safari is the highlight of this section: your boat drifts silently past pods of hippos, and African fish eagles perch on dead trees just metres away, their haunting cry the defining sound of Africa. Waterbirds are extraordinary in variety and number — the lake hosts over 400 species. After the boat ride, a guided walk among the yellow fever acacias on Crescent Island (a private game sanctuary in the lake) brings you face to face with giraffe, zebra and wildebeest on foot without a fence in sight.

Activities : Game Drives

Departure Hell's Gate National Park offers Kenya's most active safari experience — cycling and walking among free-ranging wildlife in a landscape of ancient volcanic gorges, geothermal steam jets and towering basalt cliffs. Your guide leads a 3-hour cycling circuit past zebra and Thomson's gazelle before you descend into the dramatic gorge carved by millennia of water erosion, its smooth red-rock walls rising 25 metres on either side. Hot geothermal springs at the gorge exit steam through the rock. Fischer's Tower — a 25-metre volcanic plug — is the gorge's most dramatic feature. After a final lunch, the drive returns north to Nairobi, arriving in mid-afternoon.

Activities : Game Drives