Ukasi Hill

Garissa is approached on a good road from Nairobi, through Thika and Mwingi Game Reserve, which runs across the northern portions of Kitui and Tana River Counties, and forms the salient line of communication to its capital town of Garissa, 369 km away. Owing to the comparatively low rainfall and to the indigenous practice of overgrazing, the landscape beyond Thika is mainly of the thick thorn-bush type with little grass. Around Mwingi, 127 km east of Thika, where the road crosses the River Kanginga, the ground slopes away eastwards with a handful low-lying hills. Rising abruptly from this plain are three modest hills – Endau (4,387 ft), Engamba (3,100 ft), and the Kandelongwe (1,570 ft). This featureless plain, on which are wide-spaced valleys and scanty inselbergs, continues eastwards and north-eastwards until Garissa Town is reached, set along on its western border. Ukasi, where the Ukasi Hill is found, is a further 61 east of Mwingi Game Reserve. This is more impressive for what it contains than the landscape itself. Ukasi Hill earned its fame through its eerie and rather bizarre residents. Unique to the unassuming 120 ms high Ukasi Hill, near Ngomeni, is that it is home to one of the rarest and oddest looking flies in Kenya: “Scientists first came across the yellow-haired fly in 1933 and again in 1948. Since then, at least half a dozen expeditions have visited the location to find this insect dubbed as the terrible hairy fly – Standard Media. This bizarre fly, unable to fly and partial to breeding in bat feces, is thought to live only in the dark, bat-filled cleft on the isolated Ukasi Hill. It has peculiar non-functional wings resembling miniature belt straps and mingy eyes.

The Ukasi Hill can as well, be explore on your visit to Mwingi Game Reserve.