Lake Nakuru and the Pink Shore
I want to talk about something that I only half-believed existed until I saw it with my own eyes: a lake whose entire shoreline appears to be pink. Not metaphorically pink. Not “pink in certain lights.” Genuinely, solidly, unmistakably pink - a continuous band of pale rose colour that rings the water like a brushstroke, visible from kilometres away, which resolves itself, as you get closer, into hundreds of thousands of lesser flamingos standing in the shallows.
Lake Nakuru is about two hours by road from Nairobi in the floor of the Great Rift Valley. The flamingos feed on Spirulina algae that blooms prolifically in the lake's alkaline water. On the day I visited, my guide estimated between 800,000 and a million lesser flamingos in and around the lake. I watched them for a long time trying to find the edges of the flock and could not.
But Nakuru is far more than flamingos, and I spent two full days there rather than the single morning that many visitors give it. The park is completely fenced - the only fully fenced national park in Kenya - which keeps both poaching and human-wildlife conflict at very low levels. Inside the fence, the animal populations are dense and calm.
Nakuru is one of Kenya's key rhino sanctuaries. We found white rhino within twenty minutes of entering the park - a mother and calf grazing on open grassland. The IUCN classifies the black rhino as Critically Endangered, with fewer than 6,500 individuals remaining in the wild. Seeing one in the thick bush of Nakuru's southern end - spotted only because it moved - felt both thrilling and quietly sobering.
Yellow fever trees grow thickly along the southern and western shores - a species of acacia named for the colonial misattribution of malaria outbreaks to the trees' proximity to water. BirdLife International has documented over 450 bird species in and around the lake, including the fish eagles that call from the fever trees and the pelicans working the shallows.
Nakuru Town, just outside the park, is a busy mid-sized Kenyan city, and staying there rather than inside the park gives you access to the genuine daily life of a Rift Valley town. I ate at a local nyama choma restaurant on my second evening - roast meat, ugali, and sukuma wiki, washed down with cold Tusker beer. The restaurant had no menu. You went to the grill, pointed at what you wanted, and waited. It was one of the better meals of the trip.
The drive from Nairobi to Nakuru takes you up and over the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment at a viewpoint that is, in my experience, the single best roadside view in Kenya. If you are building an itinerary and looking for a strong two-day excursion before heading north or south, Lake Nakuru is the answer. There is no such thing as “just flamingos” when there are a million of them and they have turned an entire lake pink.
