Tsavo West National Park - Kenya
Location
Built in 1969, the Ngulia Safari Lodge stands within the Tsavo West National Park, on the Ndawe Escarpment overlooking the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary. Tsavo lies some 232 kms from Nairobi and can be reached by road or air (three air strips).
Kenya hotels and accommodation
Amongst the wide range of Kenya hotels, some make the ideal Kenya safari destination. Choose a safari lodge, safari hotel, bush camp, luxury lodge, safari camp, tented camp or bush lodge. National park accommodation usually takes the form of a traditional safari lodge or tented camp, but numerous other options exist on the park boundaries. Luxury lodges and luxury camp options are also offered in the private wildlife conservancies.
The Background
The joint mass of Tsavo West and Tsavo East National Parks forms one of the largest national parks in the world and covers a massive 4% of Kenya's total land area. Tsavo East, one of the last great wilderness landscapes on Earth, offers a vast arena of parched scrub and heat-shimmering bush, which is washed by the azure waters and emerald-fringed meanderings of the Galana River, guarded by the limitless lava reaches of the Yatta Plateau and patrolled by some of the largest elephant herds in the world. Tsavo West, land of lions and lava, is painted on a sprawling canvas of endless skies, emerald hills, liquid lava flows, palm-fringed rivers, teeming wildlife and sparkling oases, where rafts of hippo wallow, snort and blow in the crystal clear melt-waters of Mount Kilimanjaro. Kenya's largest National Park supports all the members of the ‘Big Five' as well as the country's largest elephant population. Tsavo achieved notoriety in the 1900's when ‘the Man-eaters of Tsavo', a pair of rogue man-eating lions, preyed gruesomely on the builders of the Uganda Railway. Today the Park is more famous for the numerous prides of mane-less lion that patrol the plains and police the herbivore herds.
Wildlife highlights: elephant, lion, hippo, rhino, zebra, hartebeest, lesser kudu, eland, waterbuck, Grant's gazelle, impala, gerenuk, giraffe, dik dik and klipspringer. Birds: 600 recorded species.
Accommodation
The Lodge has 52 standard rooms, all with bath and shower and a balcony with a view of the wilderness and floodlit water holes.
Dining and bars
The main buffet restaurant has interior and exterior dining spaces and an open terrace with a view of the water hole, which is visited by a leopard most evening (bait is put out in a tree overlooking the water hole). There is also an interior and exterior bar and a new Leopard View bar, immediately adjacent to the waterhole.
Child-friendly
The lodge welcomes children.
Conference facilities
Ngulia Safari Lodge has one meeting room which can host between 20 -25 pax.
What to see and do
Highlights and special features
Game Drives, nature walks and medicinal plant discovery
Experience the real safari - morning and afternoon game drives through the park with our trained driver-guides. Picnic lunches and sundowners can be provided. Tsavo offers some of the most magnificent game viewing in the world - vast herds of dust-red elephant, fat pods of hippo, giant crocodile, teeming herds of plains game, a fantasia of bird life and some magical flora. All walks accompanied by Kenya Wildlife Service armed rangers.
Visits to the magic of Mzima Springs
The lush, hippo-inhabited pools of Mzima Springs, fed daily by 250 million litres of water gushing from the lava flows of the Chyulu hills, provide an oasis of green, an Under-water hippo-viewing chamber, two nature trails and some unique picnic spots.
Exploring the Shetani caves and lava flows
The Ngulia Hills
30 km from Mzima Springs, along a well-marked track, is the Ngulia escarpment, (upon which stands Ngulia Lodge). Behind it rear the jagged peaks of the Ngulia Hills, a range of sheer cliffs that rise out of the plains, 610m below, to a height of 1825 m above sea level. Not only do the Ngulia hills offer magnificent vistas over the volcanic shoals of Tsavo but also, every year between late September and November, the adjacent Ngulia Bird-ringing Station plays host to one of the greatest avian spectacles in the world.
The Ngulia Rhino sanctuary
In the 1960's Tsavo had the largest population of black rhinos in Africa (between 6,000 and 9,000) and they were a common sighted within the park. By 1981, however, Tsavo's rhino had been poached to the brink of extinction and only 100 animals remained. Today most of Tsavo's surviving rhino, plus numbers of re-located animals have been moved to the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary, close to the Ngulia Lodge where a meter-high electric fence surrounds an area of 70 sq km now designated an official sanctuary for approximately 40 rhinos. The Sanctuary also offers shelter to a broad range of other threatened wildlife to include cheetah and leopard and the rare frog (Afrixalus pygmaeus septentrionalis), which occurs only in the area between Mtito Andei and Voi.
Climbing and trekking in the Ngulia Hills
There are some good technical climbing routes around the Ngulia Hills, the most popular of which is Kichwa Tembo (the elephant's head). Some rewarding trekking can also be arranged.
Around and about
The Park is ideally situated for visits to the massive expanses of sister park, Tsavo East whilst the verdant Taita Hills and the volcanic eruptions of the Chyulu Hills are close by. World-renowned Amboseli National Park is also within easy reach.
Ngulia Safari Lodge - Tsavo West • National Park Lodge • Kenya Hotels, Safari Lodges & Tented Camps
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