Information to help you prepare for your holiday or vacation to Kenya courtesy of Rough Guides.
With a wealth of practical and background information, this travel guide is the essential companion for your holiday. Reading up on the places you visit will help you get a little more out of vacations and help you understand local sensitivities better.
On the equator, with the glaciated peaks of Mount Kenya - the second highest mountain in Africa - rising from a natural environment of exceptional beauty, Kenya is a hugely rewarding place to travel on vacation. The country's dramatically diverse geography has resulted in a great range of natural habitats and wildlife, while its history of migration and conquest has brought about a complex social panorama. But if the world-famous national parks with big game safaris, colourful ethnic mix and superb beaches lend an exotic image, the glossy hype of the tourism industry ignores Kenya's post-colonial poverty and deep political tensions.
In any case, treating Kenya as a succession of tourist sights isn't the most stimulating way to spend your holiday. Travelling independently, or at least with eyes open (something this travel guide is designed to facilitate), you can enter the very different world inhabited by most Kenyans: a ceaselessly active landscape of farm and field, of streams and bush paths, of wooden and corrugated-iron shacks, tea shops and lodging houses, of crammed buses and pick-up vans, of overloaded bicycles, and of streets wandered by goats, chickens and toddlers.
On your holiday travel off the heavily trodden tourist routes and you'll find a rewarding degree of warmth, openness and curiosity in Kenya's towns and villages. Travel further out into the wilds and see an abundance of superb scenery enriching the holiday experience - vistas of rolling savannah dotted with Maasai and their herds, high Kikuyu moorlands, dense forests bursting with bird song and insect noise, and stony, shimmering desert - all of which comes crisply into focus when experienced in the context of an economically beleaguered African nation four decades after Independence.
See Kenya for yourself, check out our
Kenya holidays.
