Taita Hills

The Taita Hills rise out of the Tsavo plains in Taita-Taveta County, the northernmost block of the Eastern Arc Mountains, a chain of ancient forested massifs running south into Tanzania. They hold cloud forest found nowhere else in Kenya, species that exist on these hills and on no other ground on earth, and about two per cent of the forest they once carried. The safari story here is secondary. The biodiversity story is the reason the place has a page.

Two Different Places Share This Name

Before anything else, a distinction that catches almost every traveller. The phrase Taita Hills is used for two separate things.

• The hills themselves. Three forested massifs, Dawida, Sagalla south of Voi and Kasigau further south, rising above the plains, topped by remnant cloud forest and farmed intensively on their slopes. This is the Eastern Arc site.
• Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. A privately owned sanctuary of about 28,000 acres on the plains below, established in 1972, next to the community-run LUMO Wildlife Sanctuary of about 190 square kilometres near Mwatate, both adjoining Tsavo West. This is savanna game-viewing country and has nothing to do with the cloud forest.

A safari sold as Taita Hills is almost always the sanctuary on the plains. A traveller wanting endemic birds, montane forest and hill walking wants the massifs. The two are within sight of one another and are entirely different trips.

An Eastern Arc Forest, and What Is Left of It

The Eastern Arc Mountains are old, isolated blocks whose forests have persisted while the land around them changed, which is why they accumulate species found nowhere else. Taita is the northern end of that chain and the smallest piece of it.

Roughly 98 per cent of the forest cover here has gone in the last two hundred years. What remains is a scatter of fragments on the highest ground, and the sizes are startling when set out plainly.

The whole key biodiversity area covers 34,931 hectares between roughly 600 and 2,228 metres, of which only about four per cent carries formal protected-area status. Several of the forest blocks are not gazetted at all. A species whose entire world population lives in 92 hectares of trees is in a position no national park system is currently built to handle.

The Endemics, and Why They Matter

These fragments hold the entire known global population of several species. Not most of it. All of it.

• Taita apalis. A small warbler, Critically Endangered, and among Kenya’s most threatened birds. Surveys since 2001 have recorded a steep decline, and an intensive search in 2015 failed to find it in several fragments where it had previously occurred.
• Taita thrush. Critically Endangered, confined to a handful of forest patches, and highly sensitive to the isolation of those patches from one another.
• Taita white-eye. Endangered, and rather more visible than the other two.
• Taita warty frog. An amphibian whose entire known population is here.
• Sagalla caecilian. A burrowing, worm-like, legless amphibian restricted to the Sagalla massif, and one of the more extraordinary animals in Kenya.
• Taita blade-horned chameleon, the Taita Hills purple-glossed snake, a Taita shrew, three endemic butterflies and more than thirteen endemic plants, including a group of African violets found on these hills and nowhere else.

Taita falcon and Abbott’s starling, both Vulnerable, also occur. For the wider picture of Kenyan birding and where the Taita endemics sit in a national itinerary, see birdwatching in Kenya.

Walking the Forest Fragments

Visiting Taita means walking, not driving. Ngangao lies about ten kilometres from Wundanyi on a road that reaches it easily, and it is the fragment most visitors see: a strip of dripping, mossy, cool montane forest standing over farmland, with butterflies, endemic birds and a canopy that feels like a different country from the plains an hour below.

Mbololo is the largest remaining block and the least disturbed. Chawia is more degraded and demonstrates what fragmentation does to a forest. Guides working with the local conservation groups know the bird sites and are worth engaging, because finding a Taita thrush in dense undergrowth without one is unlikely.

Vuria is the highest point of the range, published variously at 2,208 and 2,228 metres, with a bare summit and a long view in every direction. The walk up is done from Mwanda, reached along the road running west from Wundanyi. Forest walks and hiking in Kenya cover how this kind of walking is arranged.

Wundanyi, the Taita People and the Hills as a Place to Stay

Wundanyi is the hill town and the practical base, sitting well above the heat of the plains in a landscape of terraced smallholdings. The Taita are the people of these hills, farming soils that are productive enough to explain why so much of the forest went. Local attractions include Wesu Rock and the skull caves, ancestral sites of real cultural significance that should be visited through local guides and treated accordingly rather than approached as curiosities.

Rainfall ranges from about 500 millimetres on the plains to more than three times that on the massif, which is why the hills are green when Tsavo is dust. The temperature difference is substantial and catches travellers who packed for a savanna safari.

Accommodation in the hills is modest and locally run; the larger lodges are on the plains at the wildlife sanctuaries. That split is another reason the two Taita Hills get confused.

Getting to the Taita Hills

Voi, on the Nairobi to Mombasa road and railway, is the gateway. From Voi the road climbs west to Wundanyi through Mwatate, and the ascent from plains to hill town is short in distance and dramatic in what it changes. Sagalla rises directly south of Voi and is reached separately; Kasigau lies further south again and is the most remote of the three massifs.

Most visitors arrive as part of a Tsavo trip rather than making a dedicated journey. Tsavo East and Tsavo West both sit within easy reach, and the coast at Mombasa or Diani Beach is a straightforward run from Voi.

Where the Taita Hills Fit in a Kenya Trip

These hills are a specialist destination and there is no point pretending otherwise. They will not produce a Big Five day and they are not a substitute for a park. What they offer is a genuinely rare ecosystem, a set of species that exist on a few hundred hectares of ground and nowhere else, cool air, walking and a hill landscape with no safari traffic in it.

Travellers who add a night here usually do so between Tsavo West and the coast, or as a deliberate detour on a birding itinerary. The Chyulu Hills to the north-west are the other upland addition to the same circuit, though they are volcanic and young where Taita is ancient, and the two have almost nothing in common beyond both being green and both being overlooked.

Taita Hills Questions