About Laikipia Wilderness

Laikipia Wilderness: Our full report

Laikipia Wilderness opened in 2012 on the Ol Doinyo Lemboro Ranch about 2 hours drive north of Nanyuki.

The camp has now split into three divisions: Main Camp, River Camp, and Palm Camp - all spaciously spread to offer an intimate safari experience supported by a small team of excellent staff. It specialises in game walks as much as game drives, with fly-fishing, mountain biking, and river rafting and swimming also available.

Main camp's central areas consist of a large lounge/dining tent (the “mess") with cane furniture and a small library of reading material, leading out to a raised deck area where breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea normally takes place. Dining is typically communal unless there are distinct groups, with the guides and camp managers joining guests.

The six guest tents in the Main Camp are a good size, simply furnished with comfortable beds, bedside tables and lamps, storage shelves, and verandas with cane chairs and day beds looking out across the bush. Four of them are designed for families, with twin beds in a clever additional wing (which can be zipped off so the tents can also be used as a conventional double). We love the large, open bathrooms that are accessed via a zip-up canvas wall at night (and left open during the day), with plumbed-in, super-hot, high-pressure showers heated by kuni boilers (wood fire boilers) that are located behind each tent.

Behind the very simple kitchen and back-of-house area, a nearby rocky bluff looks north across the Ewaso Narok river (which flows north to join the Ewaso Nyiro a few miles downstream), and on this beautiful vantage point you'll often have sundowners or dinners around the fire.

There's a deliberately basic infrastructure at Laikipia Wilderness that keeps it all very real, and very “bush". There's been virtually no landscaping of the camp area, so the narrow footpaths between the mess and the guest tents lead through natural scrub. It's a largely natural environment, welcoming to the local wildlife. You will certainly see dik-diks in camp and may well have cause to be grateful for the night-time askari who ensures that the local buffalos and leopards don't become too comfortable here.

If you're staying for more than a couple of nights (as nearly every guest does), fly-camping is usually offered, a few miles from camp, with small tents and bedrolls. This often takes place either around the campfire or on one of the camp's elevated sleepout decks (equipped with a discreet drop-loo), overlooking watering holes and dams that are usually frequented by hippos and elephants. You will always be accompanied by a trained firearms holder with a .375 rifle.

Animal “hosts" at camp include three friendly dogs. The dogs sometimes accompany game drives and walks and seem to have a calming effect on wild dog packs. They can be rumbustious and very playful, so guests need to have a positive attitude to man's best friend. The whole camp has a very relaxed feel, as if you were staying with friends at their makeshift rural homestead.

Close to the river, Laikipia Wilderness has an annexe in the shape of "River Camp", consisting of a mess area and kitchen, with five simple, ensuite guest cottages. River Camp is usually booked by large groups on an exclusive-use basis, but can also be used as an overflow camp on occasions.

The third branch of Laikipia Wilderness is the newer "Palm Camp", also consisting of a large open-plan mess area with bar, comfortable chairs, and dining area. The five rooms here are elevated on stilts, offering a front-row view over the river that runs right in front of camp. As with River Camp, Palm Camp is booked on an exclusive-use basis with a minimum occupancy of four guests, and works especially well for adventurous families or groups looking for a more private experience away from other camp guests.

In some camps, the comforts and atmosphere of the camp itself vie for attention with the out-of-camp activities on offer. That's not the case at Laikipia Wilderness. While the tents, lounge, mess and deck are perfectly comfortable (and the kitchen's output delicious), the most memorable aspects of a stay here are the day and night game drives (they have several Land Cruisers in various formats, including three photography vehicles and first priority black leopard vehicles – you can request a fully open one for game drives), morning and afternoon game walks, and really great guiding.

The typical driving style of the guides means you can make rapid progress through the bush, with game drives often taking place along the ranch's riverbanks where leopard sightings are comparatively frequent – the typically ultra-cautious driver/guide's manner behind the wheel might be a bit slow in the fast-moving world of wild dog packs and melanisitic leopard cubs. With no other camps or visitors across miles of rocky bush, you can go wherever your guide thinks he or she can drive – and then, when the vehicle can go no further, you get out and walk on, briefed in advance to follow the safety rules. This makes for an unusually robust approach to game viewing: you need to be prepared with suitable footwear for getting out of the vehicle at a moment's notice when your guide or spotter sees something interesting (and possibly getting back in again just as quickly). It's an approach to safaris that is a far cry from the slow and gentle style that is particularly common in small camps in the Mara. When tracking the dogs and cats, you need to be prepared to acquire the odd bruise and knock along the way.

The rewards of this rather rough and ready style include good opportunities to see the area's wild dogs. While the population was seriously reduced in 2017 following an outbreak of canine distemper which wiped out one of the two packs in this area, the other pack stabilised and numbers are increasing, and over the course of 2019-2021 two packs once again began denning in the district.

The pack that sometimes dens at Ol Doinyo Lemboro Ranch can range far and wide over hundreds of square kilometres, but it includes collared individuals and the camp usually has radio telemetry tracking equipment, so there's a reasonable likelihood of encounters, if sometimes fleeting ones. During the denning season, which varies each year on a roughly 9-10 month cycle, the den areas are deliberately not approached too closely. Once the pups leave the den, however, approaching the pups becomes easier. Throughout the year, the packs hunt daily and are fluidly mobile, so you can come across the adults almost anywhere and you're almost certain to have the whole experience to yourself.

When the dogs are denning in the neighbouring ranches of Mpala and/or Chololo, they sometimes operate a half-day-visit system (each ranch charges ~US$60 per person) that allows keen travellers to widen their wildlife searches while staying at Laikipia Wilderness. This can be particularly useful during the dogs' denning season, but it does need to be arranged in advance and cannot be guaranteed.

Ol Doinyo Lemboro Ranch includes a sizable dam, where the camp has built a simple raised pavillion, that is ideal for breakfasts, brunches, sundowners and sleepouts. Sitting here to watch nearly 100 elephants drink, bathe and play was an absolute delight.

During our last visit, the wild dogs were hunting in a remote area so we didn't see them, but the female black leopard whose territory falls around Laikipia Wilderness' camps was very much in evidence. In fact, we saw not only her but also three other leopards in the same afternoon game drive that included wonderful and sometimes surprising interactions between the individuals. Melanism in leopards is a recessive gene which generally doesn't favour the animal's life chances (a black leopard stands out by day and even at night under moonlight, while spotted leopards are notoriously hard to see until they move), but there is now a population of at least six black leopards in this part of Kenya, with territories on Ol Doinyo Lemboro and neighbouring Loisaba Conservancy.

Using a discreetly deployed spotlight, our vehicle drove through the bush in the dark to follow both the black leopard as she stalked dik-dik and her territorial rival (a large, spotted male leopard which relies on her hunting skills to steal some of his meals). The excitement of these encounters is intense, though photography is challenging and the camp is keen to keep expectations at a sensible level to allow the cats to behave naturally. The general wildlife we saw included large numbers of elephants (including while we were on foot, at close quarters, from across a dry stream bed), greater kudu, both plains and Grevy's zebras, and numerous giraffe. There are dik-diks everywhere – the wild dogs' and leopards' favourite prey – and the area certainly feels richly endowed with wildlife.

Keen birders will be delighted with the area, which has hundreds of northern species as well as those ranging across Kenya, and Palearctic migrants. Local specialities include rosy-patched bush-shrikes, vulturine guinea-fowls and impressive range of raptors, including black eagles, attracted by the area's rocky outcrops. Steve Carey knows all the birds, and their calls (and does a fair few passable imitations himself).