Masaai Mara is 275Km southwest of Nairobi and the journey takes at most 5 hours. It is geographically an extension of Tanzania’s renowned Serengeti National Park and is considered by many to be Kenya’s leading game reserve. Masaai Mara is not a national park but a game reserve.
The Mara as it is called gives you the best chance of seeing all the major wild animals, in a superb gentle rolling grassland, traversed by the Mara River and dotted with acacia trees in a riverine forest home of the ‘Big Five’ and an abundance of the plains game. It is arguably the most popular of Kenya’s parks where you find almost every species of animal you can think of in relation to East Africa and where they live on the well-watered plains in this remote part of the country. The Mara is also Masaai country and the Mara in actual fact means ‘spotted’ or ‘mottled’ in Maa – the Masaai language – a reference to the acacia trees dotting the vast plain.