Day drive to Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya

​By Roxanne Reid
I love road trips and I love wildlife. So when I get a chance to combine the two, I’m there in a heartbeat. Here’s what went down when we took a day drive to Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya.

There are many things you can do when you stay at the Governors Camp Collection’s Loldia House on Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley (see my post about them here). One is to take a day trip to Lake Nakuru National Park 90km to the west. Although it’s a small park of only about 188 square kilometres, it’s worth doing for many reasons.

The journey
​Perhaps surprisingly, the first reason is the drive there. Although the maximum speed along the highway that connects Nairobi with Nakuru and Uganda is 80km/h, in practice the going is slower, more like 40-50km/h. And we enjoyed it all the more for that, given that there was a lot to see.

The road rumbles through many small settlements crowded with dusty shops. Faded signs announce ‘Blessed Hands Computer Shop’ or ‘Smile Baby Baby Shop’. Lots of ‘hotels’ and guest houses line the road, some of them ramshackle-grand, others little more than a small square bungalow with an evocative name like ‘Sleeping Warrior Lodge’. Our guide Jacob Ngunjiri said truckers love to stop over for good barbecued meat and Tusker beer.

Chinese motor cycles buzz here and there, carrying shoppers about their daily business. These taxis, called boda-boda, share the road with slow-moving trucks, pedestrians, the occasional goat or cow. It’s a muddle that seems to work largely without accident, not even a raised voice or finger. The drivers’ general good humour was astonishing to this South African in Kenya.

​We passed Lake Elementaita, an 18-square-kilometre Rift Valley salt lake whose name derives from a Maasai word meaning ‘dust place’. Here people collect salt and sell it in bags on the side of the road, to be used as salt licks for goats and cows. Together with lakes Bogoria and Nakuru, Elementaita is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the Kenya Lake System.

Good company
Jacob Ngunjiri, our Loldia House guide, was quite a character and we enjoyed his company and insights into the wildlife of Lake Nakuru National Park as well as life in general. He repeated everything at least once for emphasis, would break out into a few words of French that he’d picked up from guests, and loved Zulu music which he sang with abandon. He may have missed his calling to be on stage with his uncanny ability to mimic different nationalities, from their vocabulary to their intonation – definitely an entertaining chap to be with on a road trip.

Lake Nakuru National Park
Lake Nakuru National Park lies on the edge of Nakuru town. It’s a place of ecological diversity, including woodland, bushy areas, ridges and escarpment as well as the lake itself.

Animals
More than 50 mammal species live in the park and we saw heaps of impala, waterbuck, wildebeest, gazelles, warthog, olive baboons, plains zebra, big buffalo herds, a lone white rhino and a dozen Rothschild’s giraffe (an exciting first for us). Lions and leopards also make themselves at home here but there are no elephants because the park is too small.

Birds
If you’re keen on birding, this is a great place for twitching. We saw blue-eared glossy starlings, superb starlings, Ruppell’s long-tailed starlings, crested cranes scratching in the grass for food, a pied kingfisher poised on a dead stump, lilac-breasted rollers, Jackson’s widowbirds, a long-crested eagle and white-fronted bee-eaters, among others. The park’s total species count is a healthy 450.

​Algae that thrive in the soda lake draw pelicans, yellow-billed storks and hundreds of greater and lesser flamingos. For a good idea of the lake’s size you can get out of your vehicle at a viewpoint along its edge. Nearby, the skeletons of trees, drowned by salt water, raise dead arms to the sky.

Scenery
The landscape is attractive, with yellow-bark acacia woodlands against a background of the lake, many umbrella trees on the open plains, and a huge euphorbia forest. Viewpoints like Honeymoon Hill, Out of Africa and Lion Hill Ridge give panoramic views out over the plains and woodlands, where some 550 different plant species grow.

We stopped for a picnic lunch at a shady green campsite near the seasonal Makalia Falls. A narrow veil of water falls some 20m from a cliff into a brown pool that Jacob said was a popular drinking spot with animals because it’s fresh water, more palatable than the salty lake water.​

Note: I was a guest of the Governors Camp Collection’s Loldia House for two nights, but I had free rein to write what I chose.

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