Saruni Rhino

Sera Conservancy holds Saruni Rhino, a camp of four stone bandas set among doum palms along a dry riverbed in Samburu County. It sits roughly an hour and a half by road from Saruni Samburu in Kalama Conservancy, and functions as the entry point to a 54,000-hectare rhino sanctuary managed with the local community, where black and white rhino have been reintroduced under armed ranger protection. Each banda is built from stone under thatch, with an outdoor bathroom, a verandah, and mosquito nets over the beds; a two-bedroom family banda sleeps up to five. A curved infinity pool traces the line of the riverbed and looks straight onto a waterhole where elephant herds gather to drink, sometimes in numbers above sixty in a single day. Guests can watch from the verandah after dark, when a spotlight picks out the animals at the water. The camp's main draw is tracking black rhino on foot with an expert guide and a trained Sera Conservancy ranger, moving quietly through terrain shared with oryx, gerenuk, Grevy's zebra and other wildlife found almost nowhere else in Kenya. Bush walks, night drives and sundowners fill the rest of the day, and dinners are often laid out in the riverbed itself, under an open sky. It is a small, remote camp, and deliberately so.