Safari to Mara Governors

a family of historic safari lodges

The Mara Governors area occupies the northwest corner of the main Maasai Mara National Reserve, immediately to the east of the Mara River.

This is a classically beautiful area of sweeping grasslands and undulating hills, with distant views west to the Oloololo Escarpment.

It’s a famously productive area for wildlife and the place in which big film crews tend to operate. Thanks largely to the BBC’s Big Cat Diary, some of the animals here are celebrities in their own right.

The plains in this area host a rich and varied population of grazers year round, including giraffes, zebras, hartebeests and warthogs. These small herds are accompanied by high densities of predators, including lions, cheetahs, hyenas and jackals.

There are also considerable stands of forest along the rivers and seasonal ‘luggas’, which are home to a broader range of species including baboons, elephants, buffaloes, hippos and leopards. There are even a few rare black rhinos in the area.

Although the Mara Governors area does host large migration herds during the Jul-Oct dry season, it’s often necessary to drive south into the adjacent Mara Confluence area for major river crossings.

Mara Governors is also the home of the original balloon safari, which remains an outstanding, if costly, experience.

The Maasai Mara tends to feature in almost all safari trips to Kenya. As well as being the best known reserve, it is also the most productive for wildlife.

The usual stay duration is 4-8 nights split between two camps, less frequently 3-4 nights in just one camp.

Traffic avoidance

In common with the other public access areas of the Maasai Mara, this part of the reserve does suffer from considerable traffic flows.

For subtle reasons the main flow of traffic in and out of the reserve tends to contribute relatively little to the numbers of vehicles in this particular area. Instead the traffic mainly originates from the handful of properties in this area, which put out over fifty safari vehicles between them.

At least the vast majority of these vehicles are from the same operator, Governors Camps, which goes a long way to ensuring a better level of sightings management and is much less offensive than the bun fights that can take place in other areas.

We fear that the only way to reliably avoid other vehicles in this area is to visit during quieter parts of the year.

Seasonality

The best time of year to visit the Maasai Mara is generally considered to be the Jul-Oct dry season, when the weather should be reliably good and the migration herds are likely to be around.

The Nov-Jun green season may be much less dependable for weather, but remains really strong for wildlife viewing and benefits from dramatically lower visitor numbers (except for the busy Dec-Jan holiday fortnight of course).

Getting around

You’re most likely to arrive into the Maasai Mara area via the regular light aircraft services that operate from Nairobi, which means that you will travel around the area with a guide and vehicle from the camp in which you are staying.

It is also possible to travel down to the Maasai Mara by road, which is quite a long and tiresome journey, but not without interest. The trouble is that the better lodges in the Mara will offer you no discount for having your own guide and vehicle along, so you end up paying for both, which works out more expensive than flying down.

Where to stay

The four main camps in this area are all owned by Governors Safaris, one of the longest-established operators in the country.

These camps are all relatively modest and old-fashioned by modern standards, but are nonetheless still quite pricey. The operator’s well deserved good name ensures that occupancy rates remain consistently high.

vehicle traffic generated by the lodges themselves