Ngong Hills

Where it sits. The Ngong Hills form a narrow green ridge running roughly north-west to south-east along the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley, immediately south-west of Nairobi in Kajiado County. Four rounded summits give the ridge its distinctive profile, the highest reaching 2,460 metres. The two sides could not be less alike: the eastern slopes fall gently toward the suburbs of Karen and Lang'ata and look over Nairobi National Park to the city skyline beyond, while the western scarp drops more than a thousand metres in a single sweep into the Rift, where Maasai settlements and the road toward Magadi are laid out below like a relief map.

The name and the land. "Ngong" is an anglicisation of the Maasai phrase enkong'u emuny, meaning rhinoceros spring, after a spring near the town at the foot of the hills; the neater story that the name means "knuckles", after the four peaks, is folk etymology that has stuck because the shape fits. This is Maasai grazing country, and herds still work the western slopes. The ridge itself is a gazetted forest reserve managed by the Kenya Forest Service, with pockets of indigenous forest in the gullies, planted stands lower down, and open tussock grass along the crest where the wind rarely stops. Buffalo, bushbuck and duiker use the forest edges, which is one reason walking alone is discouraged.

On screen. The hills carry one of the most quoted opening lines in cinema — Meryl Streep's narration in Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985) places Karen Blixen's farm at their foot — and their four peaks appear in the background of several scenes shot around her house in the Karen district. What the film did not do is use the hills for its wide landscape shots: production found them insufficiently photogenic and substituted the Chyulu Hills, a volcanic range some 200 km to the south-east, for the sweeping aerial and horseback sequences. The title sequence compounds the substitution by showing the Mombasa railway running through the Rift on the back side of the ridge, when the real line passes on the other side entirely. The film's most enduring physical trace here is the grave of Denys Finch Hatton, killed in a light aircraft crash at Voi in 1931 and buried on the eastern slopes at a spot he had chosen; the marker is an obelisk in a small garden looking out over Nairobi National Park, and the epitaph is the line from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner that Streep recites in the closing scenes.

The ridge walk. The classic route starts at the Kenya Forest Service gate above Ngong town and follows the crest south-east over the four summits to Corner Baridi on the Kiserian–Magadi road, roughly seven kilometres one way with about 500 metres of cumulative climb, taking three to five hours at a walking pace. It is not technical, but the ground is steep, rutted and slick after rain, when the black cotton soil turns to grease. Wind turbines line the crest: the Ngong Hills Wind Power Station was Kenya's first wind farm, developed by KenGen in stages and completed in 2015, and the machines make a strange, effective foreground against the Rift. Paragliders launch from the western scarp when conditions allow. Rangers are available at the gate and an escort is worth taking, as there have been robberies on the quieter sections in the past; groups and weekend traffic have improved matters considerably.

What the views actually do. On a clear morning the eastern side shows the whole geography of Nairobi at once: the national park's plains with the city towers directly behind them, an arrangement that exists nowhere else on earth. Turn 180 degrees and the Rift opens westward, with the Nguruman escarpment on the far wall and, on the best days, the cone of Mount Suswa and the pale glare of Lake Magadi's soda flats. Cloud builds after midday almost every day of the year, so the visibility that makes the walk worth doing exists mostly before ten in the morning.

Getting there and timing. Ngong town is about 25 km from central Nairobi by the Ngong Road, 45 minutes to well over an hour in traffic, and matatus run the route constantly; from the town a rough track climbs to the forest gate where fees are collected. January to February and June to September are the driest and clearest windows; the long rains from late March make the crest slippery and the views mostly cloud. It is cold and exposed up there — a windproof layer is sensible even when Nairobi is warm. There is no vehicle access along the ridge and no facilities beyond the gate.