About Ukingo

Ukingo began as a farmhouse and a few fields at the top of a murram road, where the cultivated land stops and the Mount Kenya forest begins. The name is the Swahili word for an edge, and it is the simplest description of where we are.

The place

The lodge stands at 2,180 metres. Behind it, cedar and olive forest climbs to the bamboo, the moorland and the peaks. In front, the land falls away north and west to the Laikipia plains. The equator runs a few kilometres to the south.

Mornings are bright and cold. Colobus monkeys cross the cedars beside the cottages, and elephants use the forest paths at night. By ten the sun is warm enough for breakfast outside. Evenings need a jersey and a fire, which is why every room has one.

The lodge

There are twelve rooms: five stone cottages along the tree line, four tents on decks at the top of the meadow, two family cottages, and the old farmhouse, which is booked whole. The main house has the dining room, a sitting room with a long fire, and a veranda that faces the mountain.

The kitchen cooks from the garden and from farms nearby. Bread is baked each morning. Most of our team come from the villages below the forest, and several of the guides learned these paths as children.

How we run it

Water is heated by the sun and by the kitchen's wood stoves. Fires burn off-cuts and fallen cedar from managed plots, never the forest. We keep the lodge small on purpose, so that the edge stays quiet.