Lake Naivasha

Lake Naivasha is a freshwater lake in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, about 90 km from Nairobi, known for its hippos, more than 400 bird species and the walking safaris on Crescent Island, where you walk among giraffe and zebra. It is not a national park but a Ramsar wetland of international importance, and Hell's Gate National Park, with its gorges, cliffs and cycling trails, is right next door. Most travellers spend a night or two here between Nairobi and the Maasai Mara or Lake Nakuru.

The lake sits at 1,884 metres on the floor of the Rift Valley. Its size rises and falls with the rains: about 139 km² before 2010 and close to 198 km² by 2020, with papyrus swamp around the edges. The name comes from a British attempt to say the Maasai word for the lake, which means 'that which heaves'. Since 1995 Lake Naivasha has been listed under the Ramsar Convention, and flower farms and geothermal power stations now line much of the shore.

Boat trips are the classic way to see it. Early in the morning hippos surface close to the boats, fish eagles hunt from the acacias and the reed beds are full of herons, kingfishers and cormorants. Many trips land at Crescent Island, the rim of an old crater and the deepest point of the lake, for a guided walk among giraffe, zebra, waterbuck and wildebeest.

The shoreline has a long history. In the 1930s and 1940s Imperial Airways flying boats on the route between Britain and South Africa landed on the lake, and passengers came ashore at what is now the Lake Naivasha Country Club. Joy Adamson, author of Born Free, lived at Elsamere on the shore in the 1960s.

Hell's Gate National Park, gazetted in 1984, covers about 68 km² of cliffs, gorges and grassland south of the lake. You can walk or cycle past zebra and buffalo, climb at Fischer's Tower, see the obsidian caves and finish in the Olkaria geothermal spa.