Into the Aberdares: Waterfalls and Trout
You need a jacket in the Aberdares, and there is something wonderful about that. After years of Kenya being synonymous in my mind with heat, dust, and sunscreen, arriving in the Aberdare Range - where the mist rolls through the trees and the air is genuinely, properly cold - felt like discovering a secret door in a house I thought I knew completely.
The Aberdare Range is a stretch of high volcanic mountains running north to south west of Mount Kenya, rising to over 4,000 metres at its highest points. Aberdare National Park protects the upper reaches: dense montane forest lower down, giving way to open moorland above the treeline, laced with rivers, waterfalls, and bogs. It is the wettest park in Kenya, and the whole landscape has a cool, saturated, almost Scottish quality that could not feel further from the savanna.
The waterfalls are the headline act. The Aberdares hold some of the tallest and most beautiful waterfalls in Kenya, including the spectacular Karuru Falls, which drops in stages for over 270 metres into a forested gorge. Standing at the viewpoint in the swirling mist, watching the water disappear into cloud below, I understood why the early settlers had been so drawn to these highlands.
This is also mountain elephant country, and the elephants here are different - shy, forest-dwelling, moving through dense vegetation rather than open plains. The park's most famous lodges, Treetops and The Ark, pioneered the concept of the waterhole lodge, where guests watch animals come and go through the night. It was at Treetops, in 1952, that Princess Elizabeth learned of her father's death and became Queen - a piece of history the Aberdares wear lightly.
I had come, somewhat improbably, partly to fish. The cold, clear rivers of the Aberdares were stocked with trout during the colonial era, and fly fishing for trout in the highland streams remains one of the more surreal things you can do in Kenya. I spent a grey, drizzling morning casting into a fast-moving stream with a mountain guide named Njoroge, catching nothing, and enjoying it enormously. Kenya Wildlife Service manages the park and its trout streams together, an unusual pairing.
The moorland above the forest is its own strange world - giant heather, tussock grass, and the same otherworldly giant lobelias and groundsels I had seen on Mount Kenya, thriving in the cold, thin air. Mist moves constantly across it, and the whole plateau has an eerie, timeless stillness broken only by the occasional bushbuck or the distant call of an eagle.
The Aberdares are for travellers who think they have seen Kenya and want to be proven wrong. Bring warm clothes. Chase the waterfalls. Cast a line in a trout stream at 3,000 metres just to say you did. And let the cold, wet, green highlands remind you how astonishingly varied this one country really is.
