Booking our Kenya Adventure
One of the great pleasures for us on most holidays is planning and booking the different elements of a holiday ourselves.
Having taken the below into consideration it soon became apparent that it would be foolhardy to design and book accommodation and transfers ourselves on our first visit to Kenya.
- Deciding which National Parks to visit.
- Understanding the lay of the land.
- Security in Nairobi.
- Getting to and from the National Parks.
- Would bookings made directly with Safari lodges be honoured.
- We felt Kenya was a long way outside our comfort zone.
Once we have completed our first Safari we will write further as to how we would have booked with the knowledge of hindsight.
The next think we thought of was booking through a travel company based in Kenya. After careful consideration we decided that even this was outside our comfort zone, we decided that we wouldn’t be happy sending money to a company in Nairobi with no guarantee that our holiday would be waiting for us on our arrival in Kenya.
Having decided to book through a UK travel company, we now needed to decide which one. You might have a travel agent you have used before, as for me, I have only once used a travel agent some 15 years ago (before you could do it on the Internet) and that was only to book a flight to the USA.
I remembered an acquaintance I grew up with but hadn’t seen for years that had spent a lot of his childhood in Kenya. I tracked Jonathan down to find he was working for a high-end travel company organising Safari’s in Africa. I realised we couldn’t afford the prices they were charging but decided to reach out to him for help anyway.
We contacted Jonathan through Facebook. Jonathan, although working in London was still living in Lincolnshire where I grew up and where my mother still lives.
On my next visit to my mother’s we arranged a meeting with Jonathan and his wife Helen at what use to be my local pub.
To our surprise Helen turned up with itineraries for 3 Safari’s as it turns out she ran her own travel agency. We had a long discussion over several beers and felt we would be comfortable booking through Helen.
Over the following weeks a lot of emails went backwards and forwards and eventually we decided on the 8 day “Cheetah Safari” offered by Somak Holidays. Flights from Manchester via Amsterdam, we were originally offered flights via Doha, these we decided against for 2 reasons:
- We would have been changing flights in the early hours of the morning. With changing at Amsterdam, we were changing flights in the evening allowing us to hopefully sleep between Amsterdam and Nairobi.
- We were uncomfortable changing flights in the Middle East. Kenya was outside our comfort zone, adding the Doha to the mix was a step too far.
We also decided to add an extra day to our holiday to experience the Giraffe Centre and David Sheldrick elephant orphanage. I was ready to organise this myself, I thought at least I would have organised a bit of our holiday. This was not to be, Helen was super-efficient and included these experiences within the package.
