Where you can watch wildlife from front porch

You have about 16kms to drive to Lake Nakuru Lodge from the main park gate. Think of it as a game-drive.

You will pass carcasses of dead buffaloes - lions’ leftover lunch from the previous week. You will drive under the canopy of yellow-back acacias. Look up, you might spot a leopard lounging on a branch, after all, this is the land of leopards.

Lake Nakuru, swollen now, will trot alongside you. Finally, there will be Lake Nakuru Lodge perched at the top of a hill, overlooking the glorious vista of the National Park. The lodge is about 36-years-old. Where it stands is Nderit farm, where Lord Delamere’s guest wing stood…still stands, actually. (A bit on this later).

The lodge is wound around nature. Around trees. The cottages, 90 of them, made from stone and wood, are surrounded by running pathways that cut and wind around trees and shrubs. There are cactii, many different species of them.

Bird species

There are clusters of dry grass outside a cottage. Numerous bird drinking spots, from where the about 40 species of birds will drink. Lake Nakuru itself is a birders paradise, with about 150 species. Mountains hyrax will skit into the brush as you amble by.

Harry Porter

There are rustic lamps sticking from trees, and some lining the footpaths. A dried up tree, with peeling bark curl towards the sky, at night with a soft glow of a light beaming upwards to its branches, it will look like something out of Harry Porter.

In the lawn, fenced off from the footpath, are trees and seedlings with the names who planted them: Mike Sonko (Nairobi senator), Wang Zhaoguo (Vice Chairman Republic of China) Fr Ray Thomas and a number of guests. Banana trees sway near the swimming pool. A line of bamboo trees rustle by the gift shop.

A large yellow bark acacia with two massive branches punch through the roof of the main bar, because they didn’t want to interrupt its growth so they build around it. This is the home of indigenous trees.

Captain Long

To the right of the main entrance is a charismatic building that looks like an old cathedral. Turns out that’s the same house that belonged to Captain Long, who was one Lord Delamere’s top managers. This was the guest house where Lord Delamere’s guests would hang their hats, transported by their by ox-driven chariots. It’s the oldest building in the park.

Captain Long later settled his mother in Naishi farmhouse south of the park, which is now the Rhino headquarters and a KWS guesthouse.

The owner of the lodge, Joseph A Muya, an enthused conservationist says his greatest pride is to make sure that the eco-system isn’t tampered with and that nature thrives with man.

To echo this, you will see a wooden signage nailed to a tree; “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.”

Watering hole

The beauty of Lake Nakuru Lodge is simply the fact that it’s one of the only lodges in this park that you will watch game from the comfort of most of the 90 rooms.

I saw wild dogs, four of them, and the usual buffalos and antelopes but at night, lions are known to come to the floodlit man-made watering hole just outside the restaurant. If you are into horse riding, you can do that along the perimeter fence bordering the park.

Or you could just sit on your porch, with a glass of whisky and listen to the male Tropical Kudu desperately call out to the females.