Two wet seasons, two dry ones, no winter

The four seasons Kenya actually has

The equator gets two passes of the sun overhead each year rather than one, and the rain belt follows it. That gives Kenya two wet seasons and two dry ones instead of the single summer-and-winter pattern most visitors are used to.

Why there is no summer or winter

Day length barely changes here. Sunrise and sunset sit close to six o’clock, morning and evening, all year round — which is why safari days everywhere in Kenya start before dawn and why the light goes so abruptly at the end of a game drive.

What changes through the year is rain, not daylight and not really temperature. When Kenyans talk about seasons, they are talking about water.

Altitude does more than latitude

The thing that surprises first-time visitors most is the cold. Much of Kenya’s safari country sits high — Nairobi is well over a mile above sea level, and the Mara, Laikipia and the central highlands are all at altitude — so mornings on an open vehicle in June and July are genuinely cold, and every camp hands out blankets and hot water bottles for a reason.

The rains are no longer a timetable

Everything above describes an average. Over the last couple of decades East African rainfall has become noticeably less dependable: rains that arrive weeks late, rains that fail, and rains that dump a season’s worth in a fortnight. The broader climate signals that push them around — the state of the Indian Ocean, El Niño and La Niña — shift from year to year.

We would rather tell you that than sell you a month. Plan around the pattern, because the pattern is still the best information available. But do not build a trip whose only good outcome depends on the pattern holding exactly.

What rain actually looks like here

Visitors picture grey days. That is not usually what happens. Rain in Kenya, especially in the short rains, tends to build through the afternoon into something dramatic and brief, then clear — and the hour after a storm is the best light you will get all trip.

The long rains in April are the exception: they can settle in for a day or more, and that is the one stretch of the year where a safari can genuinely lose time to weather.

• Game drives run in the rain. Vehicles have covers and guides carry ponchos. A shower is not a cancelled morning.
• Black-cotton soil is the real problem, not the rain itself. Parts of the Mara become hard going when it is wet.
• Dust is the dry-season equivalent. By September and October everything you own is the colour of the road.
• Malaria risk rises after rain. Take advice from a travel clinic well before you go, whatever month you choose.

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