Head keeper Edwin Lucishi calls for quiet as a cloud of red dust rolls over the visitors, settling on sunglasses, camera lenses and sunscreen-sticky noses. The source of this dust is Raha, an orphaned baby black rhino. She shuffles into the enclosure and plops down onto the earth, sending up another cloud. Her tail is missing: the result of a hyena attack.
Sheldrick Wildlife Trust keepers in emerald greatcoats and white hats flick water onto her back and her dust-embedded skin turns from red to brown. They then shovel more dust onto her, and she arches her back in relish.
“Part of it is to protect from the sun and the insects,” says Edwin. “But most of it is for fun.”
After Raha waddles back out, a dozen baby elephants saunter in, whipping up coos in the crowd. As they douse themselves in dust and water, Edwin tells of how each was orphaned. “Parents died due to drought. Back two legs paralysed; we brought them back with massage. Rejected by the bull elephant. Ivory poachers.”
The latter, thankfully, is becoming rarer.
“The only good thing the Covid pandemic did was reduce poaching,” says Edwin. “We can only hope that will continue. Elephant ivory adds no value to human life.”
The elephant nursery at Sheldrick Wildlife Trust was founded in 1987 in Nairobi, Kenya. The trust employs anti-poaching units and vets across Kenya’s national parks; when an orphaned elephant or rhino is spotted, it’s brought to Nairobi for urgent care. Once their health is fully restored, they depart for one of three reintegration units and are reintroduced into the wild.
Daphne Sheldrick founded the trust in 1977 in memory of her husband, David, a prominent naturalist and founder of Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park.
Tsavo, as it happens, is my next stop. I’m in Kenya to experience Audley Travel’s new Kenya by Train itinerary, which connects Nairobi, Voi and Mombasa via the Madaraka Express train. At each stop, and between safaris, we visit community and environmental conservation initiatives. It’s a gratifying way to see exactly where your tourism dollars are going.
A luxury itinerary on the Madaraka Express would have been unthinkable on the pre-2017 train, not-very-affectionately known as the Lunatic Express. It took up to a day to clank over colonial-era rails right through the middle of Tsavo in sweltering heat. Nothing separated the railway from the park; delays due to dead animals were frequent.
Now, though, it’s a four-and-a-half-hour, air-conditioned glide over rails raised on columns, and a safari experience in itself. As the train rolls toward Voi, a town between Tsavo East and Tsavo West, rust-coloured elephants amble past the window in their dozens.
At Voi, I head on to Kipalo Hills: a lodge in the Mbulia Conservancy, just outside Tsavo. There, I meet Richard Corcoran, founder of Secluded Africa, which manages four properties in Kenya.
Richard ploughs the money raised by these properties — plus a few private donors — into conservation and community projects within the conservancy. “We realised that girls were skipping school for one week every month due to their period, so we provided 150,000 sanitary towels,” he tells me.
Girls who continue to struggle academically are provided with a sewing machine and a place at tailoring school; all the cushions at Kipalo Hills are made by them. Boys are sent to mechanic school, then set up with their own workshop and tools; Richard often calls them over to service the safari jeeps. At the nearby rangers’ camp, Richard employs a 12-strong anti-poaching team, who also ride around refilling watering holes to sustain Tsavo’s 12,000 elephants.
“Happy animals, happy community, and most importantly, happy clients; that is my main aim in life,” says Richard. We’re looking down on a pair of buffalo snuffling around one of those watering holes, right outside the lodge. “I want people to leave this place knowing that they have done good by staying here.”
With my Masai guides, Chris Ngotiek and Fred Lenjir, I spend the next two days bouncing around Tsavo National Park: beginning with Tsavo East, home of the biggest game.
It yields slowly. For the first hour, there is little to see, and little to hear but the crack of bleached acacia branches, the rasp of white-billed go-away birds and the peep of black-bellied bustards. A kudu, with its whipped-cream horns, leaps away in a flash of white.
Soon, though, the parched plains give way to a hazy green valley, filled with red-stained warthogs — “Pumbaas,” Fred mutters — and hundreds of buffalo. Elephants huddle under trees for shade. Spindle-legged giraffes flee at a canter.
Tsavo West, conversely, is one for the twitchers. Rattling over black-streaked volcanic earth, we spot superb and yellow-breasted starlings, flashing like jewels. We spot Chris’s favourite bird and the unofficial national bird of Kenya: the lilac-breasted roller. Belying its cartoonishly colourful looks, it zips down like a fluffy grenade to skewer an insect.
Roller, buffalo and giraffe in Tsavo National Park
I hop back on the train at Voi, pressing my nose to the window as the elephants of Tsavo slide by. After a transfer from Mombasa, my final stop in Kenya will be Cardamom House: another of Richard’s properties, overlooking Kuruwitu Beach. There, I intend to spend days rinsing off the red dust of Tsavo in crystalline waters, and afternoons reclining among embroidered cushions with a cup of masala chai, gazing out to sea from my bougainvillea-swaddled tower room.
Even here, though, your fees contribute to community conservation. In 2003, local community members, devastated by overfishing and coral reef decline, united to form the Kuruwitu Conservation & Welfare Association (KCWA) and declared the area a protected marine park, or tengefu in Swahili. A portion of the booking fees at Cardamom House goes towards the marine park.
In 2022, Oceans Alive, a trustee of the KCWA, began a novel sort of rewilding: coral planting. Divers forage for broken-off pieces of mother coral to cultivate in nurseries, aiming to regrow the reef.
“We call it the ‘coral of opportunity’,” says Katana Ngala, Ocean Alive’s coral restoration technician. He’s holding a sand-and-cement plug, into which a two-inch piece of mother coral will be inserted. The plugs will then be planted into steel tables in the shallows. Each table can hold up to 240 plugs.
Cardamom house
“For six months, we attend to them every day, cleaning off the algae and checking how the coral is covering the circumference of the plug,” says Katana. “Once it has covered it completely, it’s ready to be transplanted to the bricks.”
We suit up, grab our snorkels and swim over to the nursery to see said bricks, with holes along their length into which the plugs have been slotted. The coral formations, with their severe geometry, look a little unnatural, but they’re still young. After another month, this coral will be transplanted to the wild to grow free.
We swim on through the new reefs, through rippling shoals of tropical fish. I’m admiring the interplay of the sun’s dying rays with the coral fringes when Katana bursts to the surface, laughing. I come up with him. “You didn’t see the octopus?” he says, incredulous.
Frantic, I dive back down: just in time to see it slither into a hole, one eye winking in reproach. Though conservation may be the focus here, it’s not at the expense of having terribly good fun.
Need to know
Getting there: Kenya Airways, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways offer direct flights to Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta Airport from London Heathrow.
Getting around: The Madaraka Express train is a clean and comfortable journey between Nairobi, Voi and Mombasa. Tour operators will provide transfers from stations
to lodges.
Where to eat: All meals are provided at lodges and make use of local ingredients.
Where to stay: Hemingways and The Emakoko (Nairobi), Kipalo Hills (Tsavo National Park), and Cardamom House (Kuruwitu Beach) are all highly recommended.
Further information: audleytravel.com
