The first light spills across the Great Rift Valley escarpment and a long line of acacias throws knife‑sharp shadows across the bonnet of the minivan. You feel the engine’s low thrum more than hear it — five days of road, river crossings, flamingo‑lined shores and wide, singed savanna ahead. From Nairobi the drive unspools through changing soils: the volcanic shoulders of the Rift, a freshwater ribbon at Naivasha, then the rose‑tinted shallows of Nakuru, before the plains open into the Masai Mara where the wildebeest migration writes itself across the horizon.