Rift Valley Lakes

The lakes lie along the floor of the Gregory Rift, and the volcanoes that made the basin still frame the view. Mount Longonot rises above Naivasha, its crater rim walkable in a morning, and the gorges of Hell’s Gate cut into the same volcanic rock nearby. Menengai Crater stands above Nakuru, and the Mau Escarpment closes the western horizon. Naivasha is kept fresh by the Malewa and Gilgil rivers. Elmenteita and Nakuru have no outlet, so evaporation concentrates their salts.

Lesser flamingos filter Spirulina algae from the alkaline water, and they follow it, shifting between Nakuru, Elmenteita, Bogoria and Tanzania’s Lake Natron as the blooms rise and fade. Counts at any one lake swing from tens of thousands to well over a million. Rising water levels through the 2010s diluted the soda lakes, thinned the algae and moved the birds on to other sites in the chain. Nakuru’s rhinos are steadier residents, part of a sanctuary WWF Kenya helped establish, sharing the woodland above the shore with buffalo and waterbuck.

Counts at any one lake swing from tens of thousands to well over a million.

Louis Leakey identified obsidian handaxes roughly a million years old at Kariandusi, near Elmenteita, in 1928. Maasai pastoralists hold the escarpments and grazing land around the lakes today, and around Naivasha the flower farms and a geothermal station draw on the same water as the lodges. The Lake Naivasha Riparian Association, formed in 1929, has worked on that balance ever since. It produced the lake’s first gazetted management plan and won a Ramsar conservation award in 1999, and Imarisha Naivasha now coordinates restoration work across the basin.

Nakuru, Elmenteita and Bogoria are listed together as the Kenya Lake System in the Great Rift Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site managed by the Kenya Wildlife Service. Bogoria, at the northern end of that group, is a national reserve of hot springs and geysers; the Endorois community won a 2009 ruling from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights over their eviction from its shores in the 1970s. The three southern lakes sit close enough together to be covered in three or four nights, an easy opening or closing chapter on a longer Kenyan trip.