Amboseli

Declared in 1974, its name comes from the Maasai language and means salty dust, a reference to the bed of an ancient lake that now lies as dusty plains for most of the year. It is celebrated for offering the finest views of Kilimanjaro to be had from Kenyan soil, the mountain — which actually stands in Tanzania — dominating the horizon behind the herds of elephants moving between the swamps fed by meltwater from its glaciers. For decades the park has hosted one of the longest-running studies of free-living elephants in the world, the Amboseli Elephant Trust, begun in 1972, which has identified and followed whole generations of elephants individually, among them a few of the surviving big tuskers — now extraordinarily rare after decades of poaching aimed at exactly those animals with the largest tusks.