A rhino sanctuary that happens to have a lake in it

Rhino

Both species. White rhino are often in open grassland near the shore and are the reason most people leave happy. Black rhino are present in good numbers but favour thicker cover, so they take more looking for.

Nakuru is fenced, which makes it function as a sanctuary. That is the whole reason rhino here are close to reliable when they are genuinely scarce elsewhere in Kenya.

Rothschild’s giraffe

Translocated here decades ago and now well established. They are a distinct subspecies — paler, with white stockings and no patterning below the knee — and you will not see them in the Mara or Amboseli.

The fever tree forest

Yellow-barked acacia, growing in stands along the lake edge. It is genuinely beautiful and completely unlike anything else on a standard Kenya itinerary, which is a large part of why Nakuru is worth the night when you are passing anyway.

Everything else

• Lion — present, and seen reasonably often given the park’s size
• Leopard — in the forest and along the escarpment; harder
• Buffalo, waterbuck, eland, impala and zebra in numbers
• Very large baboon troops, which children find far more entertaining than the rhino
• Over 400 bird species — pelicans, cormorants, storks, raptors on the cliffs
• Flamingos, variably — see what happened to them

The view from the escarpment

Baboon Cliff and the viewpoints above the lake give you the whole basin at once — the water, the fever trees, the flats. It is the photograph people actually go home with, and it takes twenty minutes.

Add Nakuru to a route