A Heavenly Kenyan Safari

We stayed two nights here prior to our stay at Salt Lick Lodge. From speaking to other people who have done the Hilton Safari, we expected to be given a suite on our first night. We had a lovely junior suite with two bathrooms. We were given a welcome amenity of two bottles of water and a fruit basket, plus a welcome note from the general manager. There is a minibar in the room, as well as a safe. We were on the 15th floor and were allowed to use the executive lounge on the 16th floor. Everyone at the hotel warned us not to walk outside at night and to be careful during the day. Even so, we were happy to have a comfy room to get over our jet lag before we went to Salt Lick Lodge. Every staff member we met in the hotel was warm, friendly, and helpful. There is a business center in the hotel with four computers, where you can check your email. They charge on a per minute basis, and it works out to around $14/hour. It's not a high-speed connection, but it's more than adequate. By the way, you need a three-pronged plug here, the type they use in England. We also brought an adaptor to translate the current from 220 to 110 for our laptop and battery charger (see the bad photo below).

This game lodge is located within the Tsavo West National Park. It's out in the middle of nowhere and is a 6-hour drive over bumpy roads, but we forgot all about the long, uncomfortable drive once we arrived. It is truly a sanctuary, both for man and animal.

There are two waterholes that serve as animal magnets during the dry months. Since it had recently rained, not many large animals were around. The rooms here aren't anything to write home about. In fact, they're quite worn. As we were mostly on the deck in the lodge peering through binoculars, we only really used the room to sleep in. There is mosquito netting above the bed, which is necessary, for there are thousands of bugs outside. Just make sure to leave your lights off when you're not in the room and by all means, close the windows and drapes at night. There is an adjustable ceiling fan to keep you cool. Even though the room was dowdy, it was kept clean. The king-size bed in our room was a comfortable place to retire each night. Each and every staff member we met here always greeted us with a hearty, Jambo. While sitting at dinner or on the deck viewing the animals, often staff would come by to check if we needed anything and then would tell us some "tales of the waterhole." I know it's nature in action, but I'm very thankful I didn't witness anything being killed or eaten.

There is only one place to eat at Salt Lick Lodge--the dining room. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served here. Breakfast is always a buffet, with fresh fruits, juices, a good variety of breads, bacon, sausage, cold and hot cereals, and either already prepared scrambled eggs or eggs cooked to order. Depending on the number of people staying in the lodge, lunch and dinner are either served buffet or á la carte. On our first night at the lodge, there were about 30 people staying, so we had a buffet. The last night there were only eight guests, so lunch and dinner were á la carte, with two choices each for an appetizer and main course. There was always a separate vegetarian selection on offer.

I wouldn't call it fine dining, but the food here was always tasty and served piping hot. They had some good wines on the wine list as well. On our second to last night at the lodge, having not seen any elephants at the waterhole due to the rain, we had just sat down to dinner when, suddenly, out of the darkness, about 40 elephants came to drink at the waterhole just below the dining room. It was awesome. Everything in the dining room stopped. Many people ran downstairs to the lobby, where there is no window between you and the elephants. There is a barrier, but no window. I stayed at the window by our table upstairs and opened it quietly. I looked around the room and noticed that everyone was wholly engrossed in the elephants. Even the cooks had come out of the kitchen and stood watching, despite having seen this many times before. There was one baby elephant about a month or two old (so estimated one of the waiters) that couldn't quite get the water from his trunk into his mouth. He kept missing. All at once, the large elephant next to him (his mother, perhaps?) got some water in her trunk and squirted it into his mouth. It was charming. They stood drinking for about 5 or 6 minutes, then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they disappeared into the darkness again. Dinner service resumed shortly thereafter.

Each morning at 6:00am, we would wander sleepy-eyed to the bar in the lodge for some strong Kenyan coffee. By 6:30am, we were energized and ready for the morning game drive. If there are other guests in the lodge, they have either come through a Hilton award or through a 1- or 2-day tour from Mombasa. In any case, everyone goes on the drive with the guide who drove them there. There were some vans with four to six people. Thankfully, ours only had us and our wonderful Kenyan guide, Dominic. Generally, the vans take their own route to try to search for animals, keeping the CB radio on in case someone has spotted something.

As it had rained for a few days, there weren't many animals near the water holes in front of the lodge, making the game drives more important. During our many drives, we came across lions, zebra, baboon, impala, waterbucks, tortoises, ostriches, lots of different birds, smaller animals and even dung beetles. We brought our binoculars and camera with us. I wish we had brought at least 10x binoculars (ours were 7X) and a camera with more zoom. Still, every sighting was a thrilling event. Dominic could spot things very far away with his bare eyes. We got better at spotting as our experience increased. We would drive slowly until someone saw an animal. I learned how to say, "please stop," in Swahili, which is what I'd blurt out when spotting something. You say, "Tafadhali Simama.

After the morning drive, we would return to the lodge for a buffet breakfast, ready to share our sightings with anyone who would listen. The afternoon drives would find us taking a different route than the morning drive, returning after 2 hours and heading straight for the deck outside the bar to have a Tusker beer and spot more animals if they were about.

The drive from Tsavo West to Tsavo East takes about an hour. We drove along bumpy roads through the town of Voi and entered Tsavo East through the main gate just outside of Voi. Since the Hilton package included entrance fees to Tsavo West but not Tsavo East, we had to pay an entrance fee of $40. Normally we would have also had to pay an entrance fee for our guide, but since it was a national holiday in Kenya (December 12 is Jamhuri Day; the day Kenya became an independent nation), all Kenyans were allowed to visit any national park free of charge.

Salt Lick Lodge packed us three lunches, and we planned to stay all day, returning around 6 p.m. to the lodge. We had heard from other guides in Tsavo West that there were more animals to be seen in Tsavo East and indeed there were. We finally saw giraffes; cape buffalo; hippos; crocodiles; Gerenuk, also called gazelle giraffes (gazelles who stand on their hind legs and eat leaves from the trees); and cute little Dikdiks, which are tiny deer-like animals. We hadn't seen any of these animals at Tsavo West.

It had rained heavily at Tsavo East the day before, so many roads were blocked due to flooding. Since it was a holiday, there were quite a lot of cars and safari vans around.

We ate our lunch in the van under a tree at Aruba Dam. The lunch box had a sandwich, a chicken thigh and leg, an orange, an apple, a box of orange juice, a piece of marble cake, and napkins. We were usually never allowed outside the safari vehicle, but at Lugard Falls there is a lookout where you can park and walk about 20 feet to view the falls. It is there that we spotted the hippos and crocodiles. They were across the Galana River, but with the binoculars, they were easily observed.

We ended the day with a visit to Voi Safari Lodge for a Tusker beer (Dominic, however, drank a Coke). This lodge also has a watering hole, but it is further down the hill. There is a beautiful view from the bar and restaurant over the flat landscape below. The drive this day lasted 11 hours from the time we left Salt Lick Lodge until the time we returned. As it was such a long day, we told Dominic that we wouldn't do the early game drive the next day so that we could all sleep in. He was very happy at this news.

We decided to take a day tour to the Karen Blixen House, with a stop at the Langatta Giraffe Center afterwards. The hotel arranged for a tour company in Nairobi to take us there, and the cost of the tour was $40 per person. The cost included entry fees to the Blixen House and the Giraffe Center. The tour to the Blixen House was short; we were there in all of 10 minutes. If you saw Out of Africa, you saw the house. That's about all there is to it.

The Langatta Giraffe Center is about 6 to 7 minutes from Blixen House. This was more interesting. At first I thought it was just going to be a quick stop for a photo opportunity showing us feeding the giraffes. But the guide at the Center was quite knowledgeable, not only on the Rothschild Giraffes, but on a wide variety of flora and fauna. Of course he told us how to hold the food to feed the giraffes, but he also showed me how to hold a piece in my mouth so the giraffe could kiss me. It's not as bad as it sounds. We learned that the giraffe's saliva is antiseptic. The reason for that is that the acacia trees, which they are so fond of, have thorns. When they happen to chomp down on a thorn and it pierces the inside of their mouth or their tongue, their saliva will help heal the wound. There were lots of little warthogs around too, which were funny to watch. They get down on their front knees to eat. The two giraffes that came to greet us were Daisy and Laura. Laura is pregnant, so the male giraffe had to be kept across the road in a different enclosure to keep the baby safe when it is born. We were taken across the road to the Nature Trail, where the guide told us of the different trees and animals. In all, we were there about 45 minutes. Giraffe Manor, the hotel where you can feed these same giraffes from your upstairs bedroom window, was just across a large lawn from the Giraffe Center. I felt this visit alone was worth the time and the cost of the tour.

We noticed that all of the lions we saw didn’t have manes. We naturally assumed they were females or juvenile males. It was kind of difficult to tell because all of the lions we saw were sitting in grass or up on rocks and the evidence wasn’t visible.

Dominic set us straight on this mane misconception. He said the lions in and around Tsavo seem to be a local species of Panthera leo. In fact, he said there were two famous lions called the man-eaters of Tsavo, who killed many workers building a railroad bridge in the area.

On our next visit to the gift shop, we saw the book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and bought it. We started reading this incredible story set in the late 1890s of the lions that ate over 100 workers, sometimes dragging them out of their tents as they slept at night. What a thing to wake up to! The workers even built very thick thorn fences around their camps, but the lions got through. Finally, the lions were shot by Colonel Patterson of the British Army, who was in charge of the building project.

The railroad bridge is not far from Salt Lick Lodge, and on our way back to Nairobi, Dominic drove us by there. We later found out from speaking to one of the guests at the Nairobi Hilton that the man-eaters are on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. If you look at the Field Museum’s website, there is a photo of Colonel Patterson sitting next to one of the dead lions. That lion is huge. See more information on The Field Museum.