kenya: big tuskers safari

A tusker is an elephant carrying at least one tusk of 100 pounds, about 45 kilograms, and there are very few left.

One count published in December 2024 put the figure across Africa at more than 85, with about ten of them among the 2,000 or so elephants of the Amboseli ecosystem. Craig, the best known of those bulls, died in January 2026, which leaves nine named animals.

So four nights here should give you elephants in real numbers, and a particular tusker is luck rather than a plan. The odds are better than they sound because these bulls spend much of their lives outside the park, on the community land this route stays on, moving between the Amboseli basin and the Chyulu Hills.

Guides here know which bulls are being seen that week, and the morning through Kimana Gate into the park is the other good chance.

Three things above all: leave the track for a sighting, drive after dark, and get out and walk on foot.

Tawi has its own 3,000 acre private conservancy at Amboseli, Mara North is 73,000 acres put together with more than 800 Maasai landowners, and Borana runs to 28,000 acres, and each sets its own rules rather than the park's.

Mara North has the tightest ones and they are worth knowing in advance:

• No more than five vehicles at a sighting
• Ten minutes before giving way to others waiting
• Off the track only to approach big game, and then no closer than twenty metres
• Night drives in designated areas, on red filters, back in camp by 10pm

That is why a leopard here is usually watched by one or two vehicles rather than a queue of them.

Good over four nights, although nobody can promise a wild animal.

The fence between Borana and Lewa came down from 2014, and the two are now run as a single range of 93,000 acres carrying more than 280 rhino, which is 14 per cent of all the rhino in Kenya. Borana's own 28,000 acres took in 21 black rhino in 2013 and has bred well since.

Going out on foot means joining the people who account for those animals, learning to read a track and a dung midden, then walking the last stretch downwind while the rangers judge how close is sensible. Expect more time spent finding than watching.

Black rhino keep to thick bush and take the most work, and they are also the ones most people come to Laikipia hoping to meet.

By air.

The three regions sit a long way apart, and the legs between them are short flights rather than whole days in a vehicle. Kenya's main safari airline lists Amboseli, the Mara airstrips and Lewa Downs, which is the strip for Borana, among its scheduled destinations, and the services work out of Wilson Airport in Nairobi.

Plan on 15 kilograms each, in soft bags, hand luggage counted inside that figure, because a wheeled hard case will not go into these holds at all.

Departure times shift on the day and an aircraft can call at another strip before yours, so we leave the first morning after a flight loose rather than promising a game drive on it.

Where your dates or the size of your party make the schedule awkward, we put a leg on a private charter instead, typically a Cessna Caravan or a Pilatus PC-12.

January and February, then July to September, carry our top rating at every stop on this route:

• Short grass at Amboseli, with Kilimanjaro showing at dawn and dusk
• Firm ground in the Laikipia highlands
• Wildebeest on the Mara plains from July

October is nearly as good, with Laikipia and Nairobi the two we mark as in-between.

Two periods need thought. April and May are the long rains, when tracks soften and this route is at its hardest. We rate November challenging in Laikipia, and March challenging in the Mara.

The greener weeks still repay a photographer, with air washed clear of dust, storm light, newborn animals, migrant birds from November to April, fewer vehicles and lower prices. Elephants are resident on all three conservancies, so that does not depend on the month you pick.

Thirteen nights reads as a lot and does not feel like it: four nights in each of three regions and one in Nairobi, which is enough to settle into a place rather than pack every second morning.

Most of the route can be changed. Borana shares its range with Lewa, so the last stop can be split between the two or swapped over; a morning in Nairobi National Park can be added at the start; and a balloon flight over the Mara is an optional extra we reserve for you when you book.

Two things set the dates rather than you. The camps are small, ten tents at the Mara camp and eight cottages at Borana, and they fill first for July to October.

Tell us what matters most to your party and we will move the nights to suit it.