Lake Nakuru is a shallow soda lake on the floor of Kenya's Great Rift Valley, too caustic for any fish, and nothing that arrives in it ever leaves. Water runs in off the volcanic slopes and goes out only as vapour, so every mineral stays and concentrates into a brine strong enough to sting a cut. About the only thing that thrives in it is a blue-green algae called spirulina, which happens to be what lesser flamingos eat. For decades that drew more than a million of them into the shallows and turned the shoreline pink. Since the water began rising in 2010 nobody can promise you the flocks; fresher, deeper water thins the algae out, and the birds may be at Bogoria or Elementaita instead. When it blooms they still come, in shifting bands of pink along the flats, and if you are out in the first calm hour the shallows go glass-still and every bird standing in them has a twin. Great white pelicans gather here in the hundreds, drifting in tight rafts and lifting off together to fish.
The park around the lake is fenced, which is unusual in Kenya and was done for one animal. Poaching gutted the country's rhino numbers through the 1970s and 80s, and Nakuru was closed off in 1987 as one of the first rhino sanctuaries. It worked: the park has since restocked others. Both black and white rhino graze the open grass by the shore, where you pick them out far more easily than in tangled bush. Rare Rothschild's giraffe step through the acacias, and lions lie up in the fever trees with their legs hanging off the branches. The dark slopes on the eastern side carry one of Africa's largest stands of candelabra euphorbia, cactus-like trees twenty metres tall. From Baboon Cliffs on the western ridge you get the whole basin. What you notice from up there is the old shoreline: whole stands of acacia standing bleached and leafless out in the shallows, where the water came up and stayed.