As songdoc knows, I'm planning a safari for April/May 2021 - you should tag along!!

CaliNurse, We were there in South Africa and made it to eSwatini, then Swaziland (you can look for our trips on our GeoBeetles page) and Lesotho for a few days too. But I always wanted to go to Kenya. Finally, I made plans to go in March. Seems like a dream come true. In SA, we self-drove inside the parks and game reserves. Is the same thing possible in Kenya? Or is it mandatory to get a tour or safari?
Thanks so much, the information I get here is great!!
GeoBeetles

GeoBeetles, i'm not sure why you addressed you addressed the question to me, but I hope others will reply.

My thoughts: Do not self-drive in the Kenya parks/reserves . Very different from South Africa's game parks.

I don't think it's mandatory to NOT self-drive, but for a bunch of reasons, I would definitely not recommend doing so in Kenya.

Kenya is awesome!!!!!!Good luck with your planning!

CaliNurse,
You're right, I'm not sure either but I'm a new member so I might have just read some of your posts and naturally thought of responding to you. Thanks a lot for those recommendations! We're not going to be driving in the parks then, but will still need to self-drive from Namibia to these parks. Do you recommend I take a safari? Cost was a consideration and since I travel with three young kids, the cost per person adds up real quick real fast. :=(
Or should I just consider hiring a car with a driver? If so, are they available in the hotels?
Thanks, hopefully I'm not bothering you too much and perhaps someone else will help me out as well.
GeoBeetles

Welcome to GeoBeetles: Just a comment - it is better to start a thread of your own instead of tacking questions to an ongoing thread about a totally different trip.

GeoBeetles, search this forum. There are a few reports from folks who have done self-drive in East Africa, including Kenya. I think you will yield more current information if you post this question on safaritalk.net, though.

Here is Canadian Robin's report from over 10 years ago:
https://www.fodors.com/community/afr...2009-a-804669/

Thanks, janisj, I'm going to do that right now.

Excellent, Leely2, I'll check that out as well. :-)

Thanks for the tip!

Your trip
 

OMG, what now? (For once, the fact that we were so slow in planning turns out to be a good thing, financially-speaking).

sf7307: I'm glad you haven't booked!

My trip is not until September -- 5-1/2 months from now. I am hopeful that things will have settled down enough so that we will be able to do it.
If not, we will all will have bigger problems than my vacation.

I cancelled my April business trip to teach an event in Nashville, and I will do that online. I cancelled my vacation to Zion and Bryce in Utah (late April/early May) and was able to cancel the hotels and rental cars. I was issued credits for the flights. I doubt I will be able to use the Spirit airlines credit, but it's not more than a couple of hundred dollars. I will use the credits on United and SW. I am expecting that my business trips in June to Los Angeles and British Columbia will be canceled -- and they cannot be done online. But thankfully, I am not in the kind of dire position financially that so many are facing.

FYI, ALL passengers arriving in Hawaii are subject to a 14-day quarantine -- including returning residents. If I were willing to risk flying (which I am not) I would have to self-quarantine when I returned. Most of the condos in the development where I live on Kauai are used as vacation rentals. Almost all of them are empty. The virus is being taken very seriously here because there are only (9) ICU beds on the entire island and very limited medical staff.

It;'s a crazy time, but I trust it will pass.

I'm in the same boat songdoc, leaving late August. The only thing is I have the bulk of my payment due 5/24. Unless the lodges cancel or the Zambian government won't allow me to fly there in August, my cancelling won't be covered by trip insurance, so I'll have to decide in May whether to pay the rest and carry on hoping the trip will happen in August. Or cut my losses and "just" lose my deposit.

We were supposed to leave Florida in our RV on April 1st. All our April travel (RV, Mexico, New Orleans) has been cancelled. We're holding off deciding whether we will still head West to the national parks come May (or June or whenever). If it's safe to do so, we'll probably go to DC first to give our kids some relief from having a 3 year old and a 5 year old at home full time.

That's what we ended up doing for New Orleans. We would have had to pay the balance, and at that point we had no idea when JazzFest would be rescheduled, so we ate it. $225 per person. Like songdoc, fortunately we are in a position to do that and not think twice about it.

Well, my deposit is about $3k, so while I wouldn't want to lose that much, it'd be better than losing the entire cost of the safari! It'll be a gamble going ahead with it if we don't know more in May.

It would surely be harder to lose that much! Ours was kind of a no-brainer.

Ahh ... the deposit. Mine was more than $3,000. I'll have to make my decision in July.

amyb, I don't envy you having to make that decision in May. You need a crystal ball. Under these extraordinary circumstances, I wonder if the companies might be willing to delay receipt of the balance of the payment to maybe one month before the trip. They would probably rather have the chance of making the full amount than only the deposit.

I’ll have a little of on the ground intelligence as 2 of my 4 camps don’t exist in the offseason and they’d need to start building them in May for the season. I follow them online and remember last year the excitement of watching the staff turn up to build the camps. If their bookings are significantly down, I wonder if they’ll bother? Also, I’ll have a better sense of Zambia’s virus situation, whether they’ve let people in and whether Emirates and the internal flights are moving again. A few barometers anyway. I’m trying not to obsess because a lot can happen in 2 months, but I so want to go, not just not to lose the deposit. Maybe Africa Travel Resource will let me use the deposit toward another trip later in 2020 or early 2021. It’s not like I’ll never want to go on safari again!!

We were considering next spring anyway, so we really ought to just keep planning. At worst, we'd put it off until fall of 2021. That assumes things don't continue the way they are for the long-term.

Songdoc, whatever happened - did you get to go on that safari? We stopped planning “back then” but have just planned a trip for mid-August 2022. We used Rick at Gamewatchers. Ultimately we decided on 2 nights in Nairobi (not the park), 3 nights at Elewana Sand River in the Mara, 3 nights at Porini Amboseli and 2 nights at Porini Rhino. After the safari, we’ll spend 3 nights at Diani Beach. Ultimately, it came down to availability.

We will be spending two weeks in Europe first, and the flight from London to Nairobi is a day flight, so we’re flying Premium Economy. Coming back to London is overnight and we snagged business class seats. Our flights between the east coast and London are both Premium Economy. All on points, all with exorbitant British Air/UK fees on top of the points.

im so happy to have this part of the planning done!

sf7307: I'm jealous that you've got your planning done. It sounds like you've made it work well. That's awesome and it sounds like a fantastic trip!
We postponed our Safari when we heard that less than 2% of Kenya was vaccinated.
I'm now making myself crazy trying to book flights for August or September '22. I'm using AA FF miles and trying to book the long legs in Qatar Q-Suites.
I'm doing my best to avoid going through London because of the fees you mentioned.

I've been dealing with Wayne at Gamewatchers and he has been terrific. Wouldn't it be wild if we wound up at the same camp at the same time!?

Keep me posted - we’ll be in Kenya August 12-25.