About the parks
Tsavo East and Tsavo West: Kenya's vast wild half
Together they cover 22,000 square kilometres, about four per cent of Kenya, split by the Nairobi to Mombasa highway. One is red, flat and enormous. The other is green, volcanic and full of springs.
Two parks, one ecosystem
Tsavo East is Kenya's largest national park at 13,747 square kilometres, and Tsavo West its second at 9,065. Both were gazetted in 1948, and the only thing dividing them is the Nairobi to Mombasa highway and the railway line running alongside it. Together with the surrounding ranches and reserves they form the Tsavo Conservation Area, some 42,000 square kilometres.
They are ticketed separately, which catches people out. If you want both, and Amboseli too, the combination ticket at $215 saves you $35 over buying them one at a time.
Tsavo East: red elephants and the world's longest lava flow
The east is the flat, semi-arid one, and its elephants are famously red: they spray themselves with the park's volcanic soil until they are the colour of terracotta. Kenya Wildlife Service calls it the Theatre of the Wild.
Its landmarks are on a scale that matches the park. The Yatta Plateau is the longest lava flow on earth at 290 kilometres. Mudanda Rock is a 1,600-metre outcrop that catches water and feeds a dam below, so you can stand above it and watch elephants come to drink. Lugard's Falls forces the Galana River through a chasm narrow enough to straddle.
Tsavo West: springs, lava and Kilimanjaro
The west is higher, greener and far more varied: volcanic hills, black lava fields and palm-fringed rivers, with Kilimanjaro on the horizon on a clear morning.
Mzima Springs is its wonder. Fifty million litres a day surge out from beneath the lava, water that fell on the Chyulu Hills and spent perhaps twenty-five years underground travelling fifty kilometres. There is an underwater viewing chamber, hippos and crocodiles, and the springs supply Mombasa's drinking water. Nearby, the Shetani lava flow is recent enough that local tradition held the eruption was the devil emerging from the earth.
The man-eaters of Tsavo
In 1898, while the railway bridge over the Tsavo River was being built, two maneless male lions began killing workers. Construction halted and the workforce fled. Lt-Col John Patterson eventually shot both, in December of that year, and later claimed 135 victims; modern isotope analysis of their remains puts the true figure at around 35.
The lions are now in the Field Museum in Chicago, sold by Patterson in 1924 for five thousand dollars. A 2024 study of hair DNA recovered from their damaged teeth confirmed they were brothers, that one had a badly infected canine which probably impaired normal hunting, and that they had also been eating zebra, oryx and giraffe.
Tsavo's male lions are still characteristically maneless or thinly maned, which is why the man-eaters looked as they did.