Tropical Ice Doesn’t Need Gimmicks
We hope everyone had a wonderful festive season! Here at Tropical Ice we certainly did, and where better to spend it than at one of our beautiful Great Walk of Africa camps, Epiya Chapeyu, on the Galana river in Tsavo. We had an amazing time with elephants everywhere, and lions close by.
For those of you who hiked across Tsavo with us last season, and who experienced drought conditions, you will be pleased to know that the rains have finally come to the region. They were about a month late, but they did arrive, and everything is looking fabulously green and alive. As so many of you who have done the Great Walk know, elephants are not good at concealing their feelings; during the final months of the drought - which had persisted for over one year - they were tragically unhappy. Families had fractured as matriarchs were forced to travel widely in search of forage, and most elephants we saw were lone females, with babies who were struggling to keep up. Now the family groups have come together again. We estimate that we have probably lost about 200 elephants to the drought, which is tragic but not the end of the world. We have 15,000 in Tsavo.
Normality has returned to Tsavo.
We have spent a lot of time these past months travelling around Kenya, staying at lodges and hotel camps, seeing what others are doing, and generally observing how Kenya is being projected to international travellers. Trends are natural, and several decades ago we watched as safari camps became hotels under canvas, the infinity pool gained more importance than the animals seen on a game drive, and the view from the dusk sundowner became the focus of the day. This was all very nice...but was it really Africa? Today, we have entered the age of the gimmick, albeit expensive ones; the hotel camp, infinity pool and sundowners are now taken as a given, while helicopter rides and quad bike trails have become the big attractions. It's a far cry from the safaris of Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Beryl Markham, Karen Blixen and Denis Finch-Hatton.
Tropical Ice is Kenya's closest African link to these names because we operate the kind of safaris which they embarked upon. We immerse our clients in an Africa, which has not been modernised, and still remains in the same state as it was when the above names travelled through it. Our visitors have no choice but to immerse themselves within the magnificent grandeur of Africa, and realise that it is all about seeing the wildlife and the landscape in an authentic style...experiencing it on foot in its wildest sense, and feeling the same pulse that the pioneers felt.
We have a rigid criteria when it comes to getting away into the wilds of Africa. Like most places on our planet, Africa's human population is escalating annually, and encroachment into country that was once wild is slowly taking place. We closed our northern Kenya camel safaris last year because the distant noise of motor cycles roaring around on formerly quiet roads was frequently being heard through the night. Tsavo is not like this, we are in the centre of one of the largest national parks in the world, far removed from the madding crowd.
Tropical Ice continues to follow its original course of showing our visitors an Africa, which doesn't require the enhancement of modern gimmicks. We feel that Africa is perfect just as it is, and always has been.
Come and join us on our Great Walk of Africa across the wilds of Tsavo. It will change you forever.
We still have a limited number of spaces remaining in 2023 on the following safaris:
May 28 - June 10 5 spaces remaining
June 25 - July 08 2 spaces remaining
October 03 - 15 1 space remaining
Our 2024 dates are:
January 28 - February 10
February 25 - March 09
May 26 - June 08
June 09 - 22
June 23 - July 06
July 07 - 20
July 21 - August 03
August 04 - 17
August 18 - 31
September 01 - 14
September 15 - 28
September 29 - October 12