2 Days: Olorgesailie Museum/Lake Magadi

About Olorgesailie

Olorgesailie Prehistoric Museum is Located along Magadi road, an hour’s drive, and 70kms away from Nairobi.
Olorgesailie pre-historic site is world renown as the “factory of stone tools” and the only place in the world with the largest number; the site has excellently preserved biological and cultural evidence about the evolution of man. Activities around the museum include the museum visit, bird watching, and mountain climbing on Olorgesailie Mountain.
It takes about 2.5 hours to climb on this mountain. Unless doing mountain climbing, a visit to the museum should take not more than 3 hours and later drive to Lake Magadi for overnight, hot springs bath and bird watching.

About Lake Magadi

Lake Magadi is an amazingly unique and serene destination for nature lovers, bird lovers, and adventure camping tourists. Endowed with a wide variety of bird species, the lake’s spectacular geographical landscape to the northern part serves as the main attraction to many visitors in search of pristine camping grounds in the vast wilderness.

Lake Magadi is well known for its wading birds, including flamingos and Pelicans. Some wildlife is also found around the lake; this includes giraffes, antelopes, ostriches, zebras, wildebeests, hyenas, and a few lion families are only seen very early in the morning or at night when the temperatures are low. Elephants and buffalos can be seen at the conservancy to the south of the lake.

The Lake occupies the lowest level of the vast rift valley depression, approximately 100 square kilometers and its bed consist almost entirely of solid or semisolid soda; crispy caked crust, dyeing the waters vivid pink. This is the southernmost lake in the Kenyan Rift Valley, lying in a catchment of faulted volcanic rocks, north of Tanzania’s Lake Natron. During the dry season, the lake is mainly covered by soda (sodium carbonate).

A single species of fish, a cichlid Alcolapia grahami, inhabits the hot, highly alkaline waters of this lake basin and is commonly seen in some of the hot spring pools around the shoreline, where the water temperature is less than 45°C. An amazing view of the lake that fascinates many travelers is on top of a hill next to the bird rock where many bird species gather for warmth in the early and late hours of the day.

A causeway that crosses the lake provides access to the area west of the lake to Nguruman Escarpment where visitors can enjoy an amazing landscape views and swim at the pool below the escarpment’s waterfalls. Trekking up the escarpment takes about an hour preferably early morning when the temperatures are low.

Lake Magadi is featured in Fernando Meirelles’s film The Constant Gardener, which is based on the book of the same name by John le Carré.