Lake Nakuru National Park surrounds a shallow, alkaline lake in the floor of the Great Rift Valley, a short drive from Nakuru town. It began as a bird sanctuary in 1961 and was gazetted as a full national park in 1968, and the whole park is fenced – one of the reasons it has become one of the more secure rhino sanctuaries in Kenya.
The lake itself is best known for flamingos, though numbers and even presence swing with the water level and salinity from year to year; some years bring huge pink flocks along the shoreline, others very few. That variability is worth knowing before you come expecting a guaranteed postcard shot.
What is reliable is the rhino. The park holds both black and white rhino in numbers dense enough that sightings are likely rather than hoped-for, alongside a population of Rothschild’s giraffe translocated here as part of a national conservation programme, and good numbers of lion and leopard in the surrounding acacia woodland.
