Tsavo East doesn’t try to impress you with variety, it impresses you with scale. At close to 13,750 square kilometres, it’s one of the largest national parks on the planet, open, semi-arid plains running out toward a horizon interrupted only by the Yatta Plateau, a single lava flow that stretches nearly 300 kilometres along the park’s western edge, the longest of its kind anywhere in the world.
That scale suits the wildlife that lives here. Tsavo East holds some of Africa’s largest elephant herds, the same red-dust colouring found on Tsavo West’s elephants shows up here too, sometimes across herds numbering in the hundreds rather than the dozens. The Galana River cuts through the park’s flatter ground, tumbling briefly over rock at Lugard Falls, and Aruba Dam gathers wildlife to its waters through the dry months the way permanent water always does in Tsavo.
This is also, quietly, one of the more important conservation addresses in Kenya. A safeguard population of hirola, the world’s rarest antelope, lives protected inside the park, and orphaned elephants raised at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s Nairobi nursery are released back into the wild here once they’re ready, at the Ithumba Reintegration Unit in the park’s north.
