kenya: active safari

Happy to walk for several hours a day on rough ground, but you do not need to be an athlete, and almost everything can be shortened.

Borana is the gentle start: the lodge's bush walks go out with a guide and a ranger, beginners are welcome on the horses up to a weight limit of 95 kilograms, and rhino tracking sets out on foot at first light.

Kitich asks the most of you. Nothing beyond the camp can be reached by vehicle, and its trails run from circuits of 10 to 13 kilometres, each with about 500 metres of ascent, to a longest route of some 18 kilometres.

In Naboisho the walks are typically four to five hours at a flexible pace, with game drives whenever you want a rest. The Loita Hills are high country, their forest lying at around 2,300 metres, so expect cooler air there.

Tell us how far you like to walk and we will plan each stop to suit.

The odds are good across three nights, but rhino are wild and nobody can promise one.

Borana shares an unfenced boundary with Lewa and the two are counted as one population: 273 rhino in March 2025, of which 130 were black and 143 white.

What makes them findable is a daily routine. Every morning Borana's scouts head out on foot until each rhino on the conservancy has been found and recorded, and as a guest you can join them, learning how individual animals are recognised and how the team keeps them safe.

How close you get is the scouts' decision on the day, and their word is final.

White rhino graze in the open and are the more readily seen. Black rhino stay in thicker bush and are harder to get a clear look at, so a good view of one on foot is something to prize. You can look for both from a vehicle as well, by day and after dark.

You never walk alone, and the walking is slow and watchful by design.

At Borana the bush walks are accompanied by your guide and a ranger, and the rhino tracking is done with the conservancy's own scouts. In Naboisho every walk is led by one of the camp's senior guides and accompanied by an armed ranger.

The camp's minimum age is seven, with no separate age for its walks, so tell us about any young travellers. In the Mathews Range forest your guides are Samburu and Ndorobo, experienced walking guides who know these mountains intimately.

A walking safari is not an endurance event: the pace is gentle, with frequent stops to read tracks and look at smaller things, and the guide decides how near to go to any animal.

Nobody can remove all risk from walking in wild country, so listen to the briefing and follow the guide's instructions at once.

Simple, by design, and we will describe it to you in detail before you commit.

It is a lightweight mobile camp and not a lodge: it exists only for your two nights and leaves no permanent rooms behind.

Camps of this kind are usually built around a long-drop loo freshly dug for the stay, a bucket shower, and a small walk-in tent with a solid bed and a comfortable mattress, and we will send you the exact set-up for your dates.

The setting is the point. The Loita Hills rise east of the Mara on Maasai community land, and their forest, which the Maasai call Naimina Enkiyio, the Forest of the Lost Child, covers about 330 square kilometres at around 2,300 metres and shelters elephant and buffalo.

Most of it lies above 2,100 metres, with cool weather all year, so pack a warm layer and a waterproof. You arrive by road from Naboisho.

For a route walked as much as this one, pick dry ground: January, February and July to September carry our top rating in every region it crosses, with firm paths in the Mathews Range forest and short grass for walking in Naboisho.

June and October are in-between months, rated highly in the north and in one other region each, though the Laikipia highlands can catch a shower. Keep clear of April and May, when the long rains fall.

Two other months need care: we rate March as challenging in the Mara and November as challenging in Laikipia, and we caution that the roads to Samburu and the Loita Hills may not be dependable in the wet months. December is an in-between month.

The green weeks do bring fewer visitors, lower prices, newborn animals and migrant birds, but slippery forest paths and a simple canvas camp in cool hills under cloud are a high price for them on a walking trip.

Only if you travel between about July and October, and only in the Naboisho part of it.

Those are the months when the wildebeest from Tanzania are normally in the Mara. Even then, the herds cannot be counted on inside the conservancy, and August and September are the likeliest months.

A river crossing is harder still. The Mara River runs through the national reserve and the Mara Triangle, neither of which is part of Naboisho, so you would trade a day of walking and off-track driving for a day in the reserve, with no certainty that a herd will cross while you wait.

We would not plan this route around the migration. Its strengths do not depend on it: the rhino at Borana, the forest at Kitich, and the lion, cheetah and leopard that move through Naboisho, in country you explore on foot as well as by car, with very few other vehicles about.