Tsavo Kenya Where to stay

Under canvas

Camping in Tsavo East and Tsavo West

At $20 a night against lodge rates that start around $100, camping is the honest way to afford Kenya's biggest park. KWS runs four public campsites and fourteen exclusive-use special sites across the two Tsavos, and because the parks straddle the Nairobi to Mombasa highway, resupply is a town called Voi rather than a leap of faith.

If you only want the answer

You can camp at four KWS public campsites, Ndololo in Tsavo East and Komboyo, Chyulu and Lake Jipe in Tsavo West, for $20 per person per night as a non-resident, with water, toilets and showers on site. Fourteen special campsites at $35 per person give you a bare patch of park to yourself, plus a non-refundable KSh 10,000 weekly reservation fee. Park entry is separate, $80 per adult per park per day, and the gates are cashless: prepay through KWSPay on eCitizen, and book campsites through reservations@kws.go.ke or WhatsApp +254 113 434 304. Remember East and West are two parks with two tickets.

The two kinds of campsite

KWS prices camping the same way in every park on its October 2025 conservation fee card, still current in September 2026: a public campsite is a shared site with basic plumbing, a special campsite is an undeveloped patch booked for your party's exclusive use. Camping fees come on top of the $80 daily conservation fee, not instead of it.

TypeRate pppn (non-resident / East African / Kenya resident)What is actually there
Public campsite$20 / KSh 200 / KSh 300, child $15, KSh 150, KSh 200Water, toilets, showers and a kitchen area, shared with whoever else turns up
Special campsite$35 / KSh 250 / KSh 350, child $20, KSh 200, KSh 250Nothing at all: no water, no toilet, no shade structure, exclusive use per booking
Special campsite reservationKSh 10,000 per week, non-refundableThe fee that holds the site itself, on top of the nightly rate
Kamboyo Guest House (Tsavo West)$300 per night for the whole house, sleeps 8KWS self-catering house at park headquarters, about $38 each when full
Goss House (Tsavo West)$250 per night for the whole house, sleeps 4The smaller KWS self-catering house, Tsavo West only

There are no KWS bandas or guest houses in Tsavo East, only campsites. The KWS reservations portal lists Kamboyo House at KSh 30,000 for residents and KSh 39,600 for non-residents, which does not quite match the USD 300 on the fee card, so confirm the figure when you book.

Where the sites are, park by park

Tsavo East has one public campsite, Ndololo, on the Voi River a short drive inside the main Voi Gate. It is the cheapest bed in either park and the obvious first-night base: water, showers, a kitchen area, and Voi town's fuel, ATMs and supermarkets fourteen minutes back through the gate. The park's seven special campsites split north and south of the Galana River: Makoka and Roka in the remote Northern Area near Ithumba, and Lugards, Epiya Chepeyo, Mbololo, Durusikale and Thabagunji in the southern sector, with Lugards sitting near the falls on the Athi-Galana-Sabaki.

Tsavo West spreads its three public sites across very different corners: Komboyo beside the Kamboyo park headquarters near Mtito Andei Gate, Chyulu in the volcanic north-west, and Lake Jipe down on the Tanzanian border, the best birding base in either park. Its seven special campsites are Kudu, Little Royal, Simba, Palm Tree, Maji ya Chumvi, Kichwa Tembo and Pipeline. Remember the terrain warning that applies to everything in the western park: lava rock and volcanic tracks make a 4x4 effectively essential, where Tsavo East's flat murram circuits will take a high-clearance 2WD in the dry season.

The ticket logic campers get wrong

Tsavo East and Tsavo West are separately gazetted parks with separate tickets at $80 per adult per day, and the fee covers a single entry per 24 hours. For a camper this bites twice. First, the parks: your Ndololo pitch does not buy you an afternoon at Mzima Springs, because crossing to Tsavo West means exiting, driving the highway, and paying a second $80 unless you hold the combination ticket, which covers Tsavo East, Tsavo West and Amboseli for $215 against $250 bought separately.

Second, the single entry: leaving the park to restock in Voi burns it. A camping trip therefore wants to be provisioned like an expedition even though the supermarket is twenty minutes away, because every casual resupply run either costs a fresh entry fee or has to be timed to the day your current 24 hours expires. Buy everything before the gate, and if your plan spans both parks, price the combination ticket before you pay for anything.

How booking works in 2026

KWS moved its park payments onto the KWSPay portal inside Kenya's eCitizen ecosystem in late 2025, and its own FAQ, updated February 2026 and checked September 2026, directs self-organised visitors to prepay at kwspay.ecitizen.go.ke using M-Pesa, a Visa card or a direct bank transfer through Kenya Commercial Bank, ABSA or Equity. The gates are cashless, so arrive with the e-ticket on your phone or on paper. That portal handles entry fees; campsites and the self-catering houses run through the KWS reservations office and its Mbugani Homes booking site instead.

  • 1. Choose your sites: a public campsite needs no reservation drama, but a special campsite must be booked ahead because it is exclusive and someone else may hold it.
  • 2. Email reservations@kws.go.ke, or phone +254 726 610533, or WhatsApp +254 113 434 304. For special campsites you can also go through the park warden on tsavoeast@kws.go.ke. Copy the template below.
  • 3. The office confirms availability and the total. Ask explicitly whether the KSh 10,000 weekly reservation fee and the conservation fees are inside that total; the paperwork does not standardise it. Third-party guides describe a 50 per cent deposit within 48 hours to confirm, which we could not verify on KWS's own pages, so ask.
  • 4. Pay as instructed, then prepay your park entry and vehicle fees separately on kwspay.ecitizen.go.ke so the gate is a formality.
  • 5. Bring every confirmation printed or saved offline. Signal fades fast off the highway, and the gate wants to see the e-ticket.

Book special campsites well ahead for the June to October dry season. Public campsites are first-come in practice, but a heads-up email means the gate expects you.

The email, ready to copy

This is everything the reservations office needs in one message, which saves you a round-trip of questions:

“Hello, I would like to book camping in Tsavo. Park: [Tsavo East / Tsavo West / both]. Sites, in order of preference: [e.g. Ndololo public campsite / Lugards special campsite]. Dates: [arrival] to [departure], [x] nights. Party: [x] adults, [x] children with ages. Vehicles: [x], [type, e.g. Land Cruiser with rooftop tent]. Nationality or residency for the rate: [non-resident / East African citizen / Kenya resident]. Please confirm the total including the special campsite reservation fee if it applies, whether conservation fees are included or paid separately on KWSPay, and how you would like the camping fees paid.”

One useful addition if it applies: ask which special campsites are reachable for your vehicle in your dates, because several of the northern and lava-country sites are honest 4x4 territory and the KSh 10,500 vehicle recovery fee suggests people find that out the hard way.

Water, food and fuel: Voi is your quartermaster

Tsavo's great camping luxury is that the resupply town sits on the park boundary. Voi has supermarkets, fuel, ATMs, a market and a county referral hospital, all fourteen minutes from Tsavo East's main gate, and Mtito Andei on the highway serves the same role for Tsavo West's northern gate. Buy everything there, because there is nothing inside either park: no shop, no fuel, and no drinking water you should trust. The public campsites' taps are washing water; carry your drinking supply and treat anything local as the backup, not the plan.

Two Kenyan specifics change the packing list. All KWS parks are single-use-plastic-free zones, so decant into large refillable containers rather than arriving with a crate of small bottles. And assume you cannot collect firewood inside the park; bring a gas stove as the default and buy charcoal or firewood in town if you want a fire where one is permitted at your site. Plan water at three to four litres of drinking per person per day, plus cooking and washing, and remember the single-entry rule above: the shop being close does not mean you can pop out to it.

Night rules and camp discipline

None of this is decoration. Ndololo's river forest is exactly the kind of cover big animals like, and an unfenced $20 campsite in Tsavo gives you the same nights a $1,000 camp sells, on the condition that you take the discipline seriously.

  • Gates operate 06:00 to 18:00. Driving between gate closing and opening is prohibited; the only legal way to be out after dark is the KWS night game drive at $50 per person, booked as an activity.
  • Be back in camp before dark and plan your last drive to end there, not at the far end of the park.
  • Campsites are unfenced. Elephants, hyenas and lions move through at night; keep the tent zipped, keep a torch by your head, and never sleep in the open.
  • Baboons and vervet monkeys work the Voi River sites in daylight. Food lives in the vehicle, locked and out of sight, never in the tent and never on the table unattended.
  • Stay in your vehicle everywhere except designated points, and keep 20 metres from wildlife; walking safaris exist, but only as a paid, ranger-led activity at $50 per person.
  • No off-road driving, 40 km/h speed limit, and all rubbish leaves the park with you.
  • At special campsites you dig in, pack out and leave nothing: no pit fires outside the designated spot, no waste buried.

Which site suits you

First time camping in big-game country: take Ndololo. It has the plumbing, other campers within shouting distance, the gate and the town close enough that a forgotten gas canister is an annoyance rather than a crisis, and the Voi River wildlife traffic that makes the nights memorable. In Tsavo West the equivalent is Komboyo, next to the park headquarters at Kamboyo, with rangers nearby and Mzima Springs an easy morning's drive. A family or group that wants walls without lodge prices should price the KWS houses: Kamboyo sleeps eight for $300, which beats almost everything else in either park per head.

Fully equipped and self-sufficient, with a real 4x4, recovery gear and your whole water supply on board: the special campsites are the reason to come, and the further from the highway the better they get. Makoka and Roka in Tsavo East's Northern Area are the remotest camping in either park, in a sector most visitors never see. Lake Jipe is the odd one out, a public site that feels special: on the Tanzanian border with a lake full of birds in front of you, far enough from everything that you provision as if it were a special site anyway.

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