Samburu: Where Kenya Gets Strange
I am going to say something that might sound like a complaint but is in fact a compliment: Samburu National Reserve is deeply weird. Not in a bad way. In the way that certain places are when they have evolved in isolation and produced things that exist nowhere else - a Galápagos quality that keeps surprising you just when you think you have taken its measure.
I arrived by road from Nanyuki, a three-hour drive north from Mount Kenya that took us out of highland green and into something increasingly dry and austere. By the time we reached the reserve's gate, I felt properly north - properly remote in a way that even the Mara, with its organised lodge infrastructure, does not quite manage.
The Ewaso Ng'iro River is the spine of Samburu. It runs through the reserve in a wide, sandy-banked course, and every animal that lives in this dry country needs it. But it is the Samburu Special Five that make this reserve famous: the reticulated giraffe, the Grevy's zebra, the Beisa oryx, the Somali ostrich, and the gerenuk. These five species are found here but not in the more southern parks.
The Grevy's zebra is the largest of the zebra species and the most endangered. Its markings are distinctly different from the common plains zebra - the stripes are narrower, more closely spaced, almost fine-lined. I found a stallion and three mares near a waterhole on my second morning and compared them, in my notebook, to a zebra that someone had run through a finer graphic filter.
The gerenuk is smaller but stranger. It is a medium-sized antelope with an improbably long neck and slender legs, and its key anatomical party trick is the ability to stand upright on its hind legs to reach leaves on high branches. I spent twenty minutes watching a female gerenuk, balanced perfectly vertical, reaching into an acacia with her front hooves and eating with complete unhurried concentration.
My guide Lesuuda had grown up in a Samburu community adjacent to the reserve. He explained which plants were used medicinally, pointed out landmarks of spiritual significance, and talked about wildlife in terms of his community's long relationship with these animals. Save the Elephants, the conservation organisation founded by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, is headquartered in Samburu and has been tracking elephant movements here for decades. Lesuuda knew several of the researched elephants personally.
The nights in Samburu are spectacular in the astronomical sense. The reserve is far enough north that light pollution is minimal, and the dry air produces the kind of star density that sends even moderately jaded travellers straight for their cameras. I spent one entire evening after dinner lying on a camp stretcher in the middle of the lodge compound, looking up, trying to find constellations I recognised and mostly failing because there were simply too many stars interfering with the pattern.
If you have been to the southern parks and want to go deeper into Kenya's variety, go north. Go to Samburu. Find a guide who grew up there. Let the weirdness of the gerenuk recalibrate what you think is possible.
