The Rift is the reason East Africa looks the way it does. This journey follows it from end to end.

A tear in the continent, thirty miles wide in places, with a chain of lakes strung along its floor.

You start in Nairobi, then drop down onto that floor at Nakuru, where flamingos work the shallows and black and white rhino come down to the shoreline in the early morning.

North to Baringo, where the water is fresh rather than soda and the lake is alive with hippo and birds. Fish eagles lift off from the shore and sometimes take fish from the surface just metres from the boat.

Then up onto the escarpment. Mukutan sits high above the valley, and you walk it: through gorges and forest, with long views back across the Rift you have spent the last few days travelling through.

The final nights are at Loisaba, sleeping on a star bed, a platform pushed out into the open, with a bed beneath the sky and nothing between you and the night. Below is one of Kenya’s most important wildlife corridors, and the country stretches away in every direction.

It is a journey through the Rift, but also through the landscapes and wildlife it has shaped.