Amboseli National Park

Amboseli National Park is located in the south of Kenya, on the Tanzanian border, and is famous for its spectacular view of Mount Kilimanjaro. Amboseli has fantastic game viewing and is particularly well-known for its elephant population.

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Amboseli National Park Highlights

Amboseli National Park embodies 5 main wildlife habitats: open plains, acacia woodland, rocky thorn bush, swamps and marshlands. The park also covers a part of the Pleistocene lake basin, which is now dry. Within this basin is the temporary Lake Amboseli that floods during heavy rainfall. Although a very dry and arid landscape, Amboseli is quite lush in places.

Famously dusty, Amboseli has a layer of ancient volcanic ash, which characterizes the park during the dry season and droughts. In contrast, periods of heavy rainfall can cause flooding in this famously dry land and the Amboseli takes on swampy marshlands.

This park enjoys the backdrop of Africa's most iconic mountains, Mount Kilimanjaro. The melting snows of Kilimanjaro flow underground into the park and continually feeds water to springs, swamps, and marshes providing a much needed lifeline. This fragile ecosystem displays an impressive wildlife variety, with more than 50 mammal species, including one of the largest populations of free-roaming elephants in the world.

A view from the observation hill

Mystery Gorilla Safaris Says

Amboseli Park is famous for its sightings of huge elephant herds and a dusty dry backdrop in the shadow of Mt Kilimanjaro. With its outstanding views and only ankle-high vegetation, it is the best place in Africa to get close to free-ranging elephants among many other wildlife species.

Amboseli was once a tree-clad savannah, however due to environmental changes and a high number of elephants the trees have died and it is now almost a wetland reserve, providing a home for a diverse range of birdlife.

The local people of the Amboseli are the Maasai, who own and run most of the conservancies. There are rural villages surrounding the park where Maasai people live traditional lives alongside wildlife, working to avoid human-wildlife conflict.

The name of this park comes from the Maasai word 'embosel', which means 'dry, open land'. This is very descriptive of the Amboseli's historical appearance, although, the heavy rains have transformed the landscape somehow.

The Maasai in Amboseli National Park private conservancy

How to Get There

Guests travelling to Kenya for a game-viewing holiday will opt for either a ‘fly-in-fly’ or a ‘fly-in-drive’ safari, which will determine whether they make use of air or road transfers to get to their destination.

All guests will enter Kenya at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, the capital city. This airport is the travel portal for Kenya and can get very busy, so guests will often continue with their domestic flights from Wilson airport, which is 18km away.

Depending on the safari destination, guests will either connect with a charter flight from Wilson or Jomo Kenyatta airports to the reserve, or they will embark on a road journey from Nairobi to the reserve.

Amboseli, located on Kenya's southern border, is accessed via air transfer from Nairobi. Mystery Gorilla Safaris will arrange flights for guests from Wilson airport to Amboseli airport, from where guests will connect with a road transfer to the lodge.

Practical advice

Coming by road, Amboseli is 230 km from Nairobi via Namanga, a drive that includes some heavily corrugated sections and takes about five hours in either direction. Road safaris often combine Amboseli with Tsavo West National Park, which lies about 120 km away along a poor dirt road.

It is also possible to fly in to Amboseli from the likes of Nairobi, Mombasa and the Masai Mara.

Several lodges lie within the national park, and the surrounding conservancies are serviced by some excellent upmarket tented camps.

Amboseli Game Viewing and Activities

The kings of Amboseli are the elephants, which are easy to spot and photograph due to the flat and bare terrain. Amboseli's elephants are said to be the biggest in Kenya and can be found in the swamps where they share the cool waters with the hippos that hide beneath the papyrus.

The park is also home to a large resident population of wildebeest, Burchell's zebra, Thomson's and Grant's gazelle, buffalo, warthog, impala, waterbuck, dik dik, Maasai giraffe and eland. Vervet monkey and yellow baboon inhabit the scarce woodlands, mainly around Ol Tukai Lodge. Lion, spotted hyena, black-backed jackal, wild cat, bat-eared foxes and caracal are also found here, while leopard, cheetah and black rhino are quite rare.

Birdlife is abundant, especially near the lakes and swamps. The yellow weaver bird, Taveta golden weaver, Taita falcon, southern branded Harrier eagle and Superb starling are some of the resident birds found around the park. Bush walks and night drives are offered in private concessions.

Elephants in Amboseli National Park

The wonders of Amboseli National Park

Red-and-yellow barbet

A long-standing highlight of Kenya’s safari circuit, 392 km2 Amboseli was set aside as a wildlife reserve in 1899 and made a national park in 1974. Renowned for its high density of elephants, the park forms the unfenced core of an 8,000 km2 ecosystem that includes large tracts of Maasai community land both in Kenya and across the border in Tanzania. Amboseli lies at the northern base of Kilimanjaro and, clouds permitting, it offers tremendous opportunity to photograph plains wildlife below the snow-capped peak of Africa’s tallest mountain.

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