Lions Bluff’s Lodge overlooks Lumo Community Wildlife Sanctuary and its neighbour, Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. The privately owned 110 sq km Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary is an abandoned sisal plantation, which failed nearly four decades ago. Comprising savannah plains, a man-made reservoir and a riverine forest that follows the course of the Bura River, this unfenced wilderness has since found new life as a game reserve offering an abundance of zebra, buffalo, impala, gazelle, elephant, eland, waterbuck, reedbuck, giraffe, vervet monkey, lion, jackal and prolific birdlife. Good relations with this sanctuary means that our guests have the freedom to game drive within the sanctuary broadening the terrain and chances of seeing yet more african wildlife.

50 kms from Lions Bluff near the shores of Lake Jipe is a massive white mansion standing on an isolated hill rising abruptly from the plains. Dubbed Grogan’s Castle it was originally built, in the 1930s, as an agricultural training college for local Africans by ‘Cape to Cairo Grogan’ an influential colonial figure who walked from Cape to Cairo to prove his love of a young lady called Gertrude, whom he later married. Once finished however, the ‘college’ was rejected by the colonial administration and was finally turned into Grogan’s home. Colonel Ewart Grogan was a gentleman adventurer dubbed ‘the boldest and baddest of a bold, bad band’ of pioneering Kenyan settlers who arrived in Africa in 1900 to embark upon a lifetime of grand, if somewhat over-ambitious designs, which included founding the country’s timber industry, building Mombasa’s first deep-water port, constructing what was then reckoned to be East Africa’s finest hotel and building Kenya’s first children’s hospital, Gertrude’s Garden.

Secluded within its own 125,000-acre private conservancy, Lumo Community Wildlife Sanctuary, Lions Bluff eco lodge was conceived and built by the local Taita community. Below the lodge runs an ancient elephant migratory corridor, which links Lake Jipe in Tsavo West with the Galana River in Tsavo East. Here large matriarchal herds of dust-red elephant lead their offspring to wallow in the lodge’s waterhole.

The camp features 7 en-suite tents with hot bucket showers and traditional ‘out of Africa’ toilets, fresh linen, towels and drinking water are provided in the tent. At the Lodge we also have a small shop with essential toiletries and locally made soap, T-shirts, hats, bottle coolers and all sorts of other local handicrafts. The camp operates on solar power with occasional generator back up.

There is a dedicated dining mess at the camp serving breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as mid-morning and afternoon tea and coffee. You are welcome at the safari bar in the lodge for drinks any time of the day and evening, or sit at the lounge area, enjoy the view and check out the informative array of books that are available for your perusal.

descendants of the famous Tsavo lions breed amongst the rocky bluffs. No ordinary lions, these brave and highly intelligent lions are the descendants of a pair of notorious lions known as The Ghost and the Darkness. The killers of 30 workers on the so-called ‘Lunatic Express’ railway in 1898, these two man-eaters now stand in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and were lately the inspiration for a film also entitled ‘The Ghost and the Darkness’.

Lumo Community Wildlife Sanctuary’s west is bordered by the southern most part of Tsavo West park in which is situated Lake Jipe. We are currently trying to set up an arrangement with KWS whereby we can access this part of the park without going onto the road and through the Mwakitau gate. This gate is 10km along the road west from Lions Bluff to Taveta.

Lions Bluff Lodge has three types of rooms all taking advantage of the incredible vista stretching over the grass plains of the Lumo Conservancy.Eleven of the rooms are built out from the hill on wooden stilts,with wooden floors, canvas walls and traditional coconut palm thatch roofs, one is built in the same style but with ferrous cement walls and private canvas walled verandah.

The most recent addition is a traditional stone walled cottage with two bedrooms whose exterior walls are painted with the red soils of Tsavo, the interior rooms have high ceilings to keep the room cool and a shared long veranda with a coconut palm thatch roof

Stay in a small, unique lodge of sustainable timber, canvas and traditional coconut thatch. For those that prefer the lodge also has a charming two room cottage built with local stone and decorated with the same red soils as Tsavo’s “red Elephant”

Sleep in a hand-made four poster bed in crisp cotton sheets and awake to Africa’s incredible sunrise ready to enjoy a game drive or bush walk before a hearty breakfast ..perhaps in the bush.. and you have begun to conjure up the magic that is Lions Bluff.

• Battlefield Tours
• Bush Breakfast
• Bush Walks
• Cultural Trips
• Day Game Drives
• Nature Trail
• Night Game Drives
• Ornithological Expeditions
• Photography Workshop
• Sundowner Cocktails
• EGG (Eye Go Game) Spotting - A weekend event of game spotting and competitions