The north of Kenya comprises a network of incredibly rough dirt roads, which we had the pleasure of riding upon for various journeys on arriving in the country. Our first experience of these was on leaving Moyale where I remain certain the bus driver was trying to flip the bus. The second experience was starting our day with about 20 Kenyans on top of the cage across an Isuzu truck with about 70 goats underneath us. The truck then proceeded to careen down incredibly bumpy roads at high speeds while we hung on to the truck for dear life and on to our luggage to prevent it flying off into oblivion for several hours. Not OSH compliant. However, we did see a herd of elephants (first elephant sighting in Africa, so, pretty, pretty excited!) on the road and zebras grazing in pasture land while working our way south – not all bad.
We went to Maralal for our first Kenyan experience: The Annual Maralal International Camel Derby. This event basically summed up Africa for myself and Thomas and the five minutes at the start of the amateur race was worth going out of our way to see. The organizers spent about three hours arranging the contestants and observers and finally the contestants lined up at the start line. This involved the camels being in no particular order (some still facing the wrong direction) and various officials wandering up and down the lines of spectators threatening to hit them with a stick if they crossed an imaginary line. As the starting horn sounded some camels took off like bats out of hell, others stood still, some ran in the other direction, and still others turned in circles. Quickly, about a quarter of the contestants fell off their camels (this seemed largely due to the fact that the saddles had not been properly attached to the camels in the previous three hours). The general response by the minders to getting a camel to do anything is to whack it with a stick, which they proceeded to do liberally (“Hit with a stick, my brother. Then it will go faster“). At this point several of the camels went AWOL and (quite understandably) started to chase their minders down the road and, occasionally, whichever spectators were in their way. The police then decided to join the fray and chase the camels down the road. At making this ace decision, they sprung into their vehicles, flung the sirens into play (to make the camels move faster maybe?) and took off blaring down the road after the camels. We were left standing completely stunned and basically in stitches at this spectacle. TIA.
We spent a while in Nairobi and ended up staying in the area of the city the guide books specifically warned against, but it was fine and we did not get mugged. We did see lots of ladies of the night hanging out in front of our hotel – but then the hotels in Ethiopia all rented rooms by the hour and could arrange special friends for people, so it was not that big of a deal. Most people probably find Nairobi fairly boring. We were a bit starved for modernities (in the last month in Ethiopia we were showering approximately every four days and living out of Herman’s landrover), so were just satisfied when we found a supermarket. Also, Thomas acquired a mild addiction to badly translated Mexican soap operas during our time in Kenya developed strong opinions on various characters in something call “Days of Love”. We did go and see a baby elephant orphanage one of the days though and they were amazingly cute.
As most people that visit Kenya, we visited a bunch of game parks. The best of these were probably the Masaai Mara and Nakuru National Park. The Masaai Mara was a plains park and what most people probably imagine when they think about African safaris. As we had our own car we could drive around where we wanted, which was pretty good although we also managed to get thoroughly lost fairly frequently. Nakuru was possibly my favorite as the lake was spectacular with mist, great birdlife, acacia trees growing out the middle and lots of animals.
The other exciting thing to report about Nakuru was that we found a restaurant with the dish “Whole fish looks like squirrel” on the menu. Sadly we did not order this so it will forever remain a mystery as to what would have arrived if we had taken the plunge. It is clearly another of our major regrets thus far on this trip.
We decided that we wanted to head north so began by driving through to Kitale in the Western Highlands. The most exciting thing about that day was that the cops stopped us and, as most of Kenya’s police force is totally corrupt (there are actually ads about this on Kenyan television), we had to pay a bribe. The most expensive we have ever paid (this is actually a bit embarrassing as it was much much more than it should have been). The fat cow probably went and bought cream cakes with it and we are now safe in the knowledge that we have contributed to Kenya’s diabetes epidemic. Yes, having to bribe people makes me nasty.
From Kitale, we drove north to Lodwar on the western side of Lake Turkana. Having heard that there were bandits along that road, we decided to research the situation before taking off. On doing so, Thomas received the following advice:
Kenyan advisor: “No, it is no problem brother. There are no bandits.”
Thomas: “Oh, but we heard there were bandits.”
Kenyan advisor: “Oh, yes, sometimes there are bandits. But it is no problem. Just drive past them very fast.”
Thomas: “But what if they have guns?”
Kenyan advisor: “Oh, if they have guns, probably you should stop.”
Excellent advice. Clearly. We were a touch nervous, but took off nonetheless. Thankfully, we did not run into any bandits and after ten hours driving to cover 285km of the worst roads ever, we reached Lodwar without having employed a military escort and (more importantly) without being hijacked. Lodwar had a frontier town feel and a heap of indigenous Turkana people with excellent outfits and haircuts. It also had the most crazy people in a single town that we have found thus far. Suffice to say, it was a touch rough (although it did not quite beat Omerate for the title of existing at the ass-end of the universe). The ladies below (Turkana and Pokot) were very nice though.
Lake Turkana itself was amazing. It appears as a large splash in the semi-arid desert surroundings and is fringed with long white beaches and swaying palms. We stayed at a place called Eliye Springs for a couple of nights, which was basically a rustic resort.
The main tourist activity in the region is a trip to Central Island National Park in the middle of the lake (as the name would suggest). The island is made up of a bunch of volcanic craters, one of which is empty, one of which is filled with crocodiles and another of which is filled flocks of hundreds of pink flamingoes. The craters were stunning jade slashes against the otherwise desert and volcanic landscape and we spent several hours hiking around the crater rims.
We also spent a bit of time in the Turkana area checking out the local villages and hanging out with the Turkana people – both the villages and the people were great.
After another bandit free ride back to Kitale we made our way over to Lake Baringo in the Rift Valley. Lake Baringo was recommended to us by a variety of sources however it is likely that they would have found it different than they left it when they visited previously. The lake has risen about ten feet in the past eight months and as a result, most of Robert’s Camp where we stayed is now under water. It made for a pretty atmospheric stay though with the edge of the lake sitting about half a meter from the restaurant. There were two meter crocs hunting just off of the restaurant platform and nesting about a meter away from our banda at night and hippos swimming by about ten meters away from us.
We also headed back up to Maralal and spent a couple of days wandering about in Samburu country. The people get very dressed up with a lot of beadwork and are generally pretty fantastic looking. My favorite were the young men who were fairly respected and generally referred to was “warriors” for their duty to protect the community. These guys were incredibly done up like magpies with everything they could find, and looked like total pretty peacocks – they did not particularly inspire confidence (or fear for that matter). They also did not appear to do anything useful with themselves. I think this was probably the main reason that the Pokot (a next door tribe) spent a lot of time cattle raiding the Samburu and not too much raiding the Turkana who actually made an effort to fight back and not spend most of their time playing an elaborate game of dress-up.
Anyway, we finally made it back to Nairobi to hand back the car and, luckily, our car rental man was not too concerned about our accidental customizations. We also managed to finish the family trip on a bang!
September 2013