5-Day Hiking & Safari – Mt Kenya Trek & Ol Pejeta Game Drives

Your Mt Kenya trek safari begins with an early morning departure from Nairobi, heading north through Thika and Nanyuki on the well-maintained highway toward the base of Africa’s second-highest mountain. The 3.5-hour drive passes tea estates, wheat farms, and cattle ranches before the distinctive silhouette of Mount Kenya’s jagged peaks come into view above the equatorial clouds. You arrive at the Sirimon gate on the mountain’s northwest flank at around 2650 metres elevation, where your mountain guide and porter team conducts the park registration and equipment checks. A packed lunch is provided before you begin the afternoon ascent through the lower montane forest zone, where black-and-white colobus monkeys crash through the bamboo canopy overhead and forest buffalo leave deep prints in the soft earth. The trail emerges from the forest into open moorland as you approach your first camp at around 3300 metres, where dinner is served in the mountain hut and your guide conducts an acclimatisation briefing for the following day’s trekking.

After an early high-altitude breakfast, you set out on the main Sirimon track leading through the spectacular open moorland toward Mackinders Valley and the Shipton’s Camp area at 4200 metres. Today’s trek covers approximately 12 kilometres with a significant altitude gain, passing through an extraordinary afro-alpine landscape of giant senecio trees standing like science-fiction sentinels, groundsel rosettes, and vast heather moorlands stretching toward the glaciated peaks. The path winds alongside the Sirimon River through valleys where Cape buffalo sometimes graze the lower meadows and eland are occasionally spotted near the upper moorland. By early afternoon you arrive at Old Moses Hut camp, where you rest, rehydrate, and take short acclimatisation walks around the camp before dinner. Your guide provides a detailed briefing on the pre-dawn summit approach, ensuring you are prepared for the early start, cold temperatures at altitude, and the route to Point Lenana.

The alarm sounds at 2am for the summit push, and you don warm layers, headlamps, and trekking poles before setting out in the starlit darkness toward Point Lenana. The three-hour ascent follows a clear trail through frozen scree and volcanic rock, climbing steeply toward the Lewis Glacier and the final ridge leading to the rocky summit at 4985 metres. As the eastern sky lightens with the first colours of dawn, you arrive at the summit cairn for one of the most spectacular sunrise views in Africa, with the glaciated peaks of Batian and Nelion glowing pink above you and the Laikipia plateau and distant Rift Valley spreading to every horizon far below. After photographs and a brief celebration, you descend the Sirimon route back to the park gate, where your safari vehicle awaits for the transfer to Nanyuki and your overnight accommodation at a comfortable town hotel before the drive to Ol Pejeta the following morning.

After breakfast in Nanyuki, it is a short 45-minute drive to the main gate of Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The contrast with the mountain environment is immediately striking as you enter a landscape of open savannah, acacia woodland, and seasonal marshlands teeming with wildlife. Check in at your conservancy lodge for lunch before your first afternoon game drive. The highlight of any Ol Pejeta visit is the northern white rhino enclosure, where you have an extraordinary close encounter with Najin and Fatu, the last two living members of their subspecies on Earth. Your guide explains the deeply moving conservation story behind these two animals and the scientific efforts to preserve their genetic legacy. The afternoon game drive also visits the conservancy’s remarkable black rhino population, the largest in East Africa, and covers the lion territory where a resident pride is frequently encountered near the Ewaso Nyiro River.

Rise early for a final morning game drive through Ol Pejeta before the heat builds across the savannah. The Laikipia plateau light at dawn is spectacular, with raptors lifting on the first thermals and the conservancy’s resident cheetah often visible on open ground before the midday sun drives them to shade. Your guide takes you through the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Kenya’s only chimpanzee facility, where rescued chimps from across central Africa live in large forested enclosures. After breakfast back at the lodge, check out and begin the two-and-a-half-hour drive south to Nairobi through the Laikipia and central highlands, arriving by early afternoon with the twin satisfactions of a mountain summit reached and Africa’s rarest animals encountered.