I like to classify myself an ‘Adventure Traveller’. Not for me an Overland truck where you book up, climb in and get driven. No; all I need is my guide book, and only then to tell me where all the tourists flock, so I can avoid it. Intrepid? I think so. Snobby? Definitely.
The problem is I am, in my brother’s words, ‘completely impractical’. I’ve cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats but I still can’t repair a puncture (This bit, a freezing cold Orlando snarled as I hopped about, is NOT ‘a wiggly worm’). I’ve camped in the Andes, the Rockies and the Rift Valley but I still can’t put up a tent (Aurelia….my friend Lucy hazarded at a campsite in West Sussex, I think that’s inside out). I’ve interrailed across Eastern Europe but I still can’t read a train timetable (I’m not sure this definitely is the right way, my companion Spain turned to me after three hours clattering through Romania – The sea…isn’t it on the wrong side?)
So woe betide anyone who entrusts their well-earned holiday to me.
My obsession with ‘doing things differently’ has unwittingly led friends into traps before, normally provoked by my fateful entreaty, Come on, it’ll be fun! A day-long thunderstorm in Budapest spent on a bus wasn’t quite as romantic as the movies would have you believe, an impromptu four hour hike in the Tuscan mountains nearly lost me my best friend and after driving aimlessly for two hours around northern France at night, my friends moaned that ANY campsite will do, and didn’t you do ANY research? We’ll laugh about this one day seems to be a stock phrase of mine.
But there’s nothing like actually living abroad and spending Toothbrush Time gazing at a map of the country to provoke one’s appetite for adventure. And, days, weeks or even months later, to set forth upon that imagined adventure, and watch helplessly as it unravels…
Lake Magadi: Mercury Rising
The guide book describes the environs of Lake Magadi, the most southerly of the Rift Valley lakes, as ‘a remote, lurid inferno’. Come on! I persuaded Tom, Let’s do a day trip. It’ll be fun!
We hired a Land Rover Defender, I stalled it and then hit a bus. Two hours of fingers-over-eyes from Tom later (cursing the day he let his driving license expire), we approached Olorgasailie Prehistoric Site. I read about this, I said, remembering something about the Leakeys and archaeological discoveries. We ought to stop, I insisted, and roared into the compound. As we alighted, Ennio Morricone’s Wild West refrain whistled across the savannah as a man of one hundred and fifty emerged slowly from the dust. Oh my, Tom gasped. It’s so hot. It’s so hot! Is it normally this hot??
Karibu, welcome, the man spoke wearily. We followed him into a small hut, paid our dues and waited expectantly for the tour…a tour which illuminated little more than the fact that Homo Erectus fashioned an awful lot of hand axes half a million years ago, in a place that is jolly hot. This is a hand axe, the man pointed out. This is another hand axe. This, too is a hand axe. That there is a big hand axe. All those there are hand axes. Would you like to see the elephant’s skull?
Tom and I practically ran to the car. Tom grabbed the key off me, threw himself into the driver’s seat, hit the ignition and skidded across the gravel back onto the main (i.e. only) road as I chased after him. No more stop offs! He warned. It was 11am. I was roasting.
It took a further two hours to reach Magadi: progress was slowed by hitching Maasai. Matatus don’t ply this route often, and the locals rely on catching lifts with passing cars (not many wazungu though, judging by their faces each time the car slowed and realisation hit). When we slowed for one couple, giving them view of the two empty benches in the back, they cried out to a tree and a flood of people came running to the car and clambered in. I counted six women, five men and three babies. Tom drove on with me turned 180 degrees, grinning inanely at the crowd as the crowd grinned back at me.
That was the highlight. For Magadi is possibly the most depressing town in Kenya. The Madadi Soda Company has made it home on account of the lake’s soda content, which enables the extraction of sodiums chloride and carbonate; and like Robert Owen at New Lanark two hundred and twenty five years earlier, has built staff accommodation, a school, a restaurant and a recreation hall. For how else could you get people to live here, in the 45 degree heat?
We acquired two ‘guides’: young men who had no useful knowledge beyond which direction to drive between the acacia trees to reach what they promised would be spectacular: a large pond. This is NOT it, Tom warned. I have NOT driven three hours OFF ROAD to see a POND. Upon our silent return across the water, they inexplicably informed us that we were now driving across Lake Magadi. It brought to mind David F Horrobin’s warning in A guide to Kenya and Northern Tanzania (1971): ‘Magadi causeway is worth driving along just to get an impression of what hell must be like’.
Finally, we were persuaded to drive a further fifty minutes to ‘the healing hot springs’, to discover a shallow pool. But Tom had been promised hot springs, and Tom was on a mission. He stripped off, sat in the pool and refused to move, multi-coloured and cross.
After some time and much cajoling, I got him back into the car, and we dumped our guides on the roadside. By now it was getting dark, but the heat refused to abate. We drove back to Nariobi, climbing for hours back up the Rift Valley and stopping only at a roadside duka for water. Like something from Wolf Creek, a man suddenly rapped on the driver’s window while I was waiting for Tom. Aaaaaaargh!! I screamed at his white eyes in the dark. Luckily, he was just drunk, not murderous. Which is more than I can say for Tom…
Going West: a work jaunt
The NGO where I work has offices in Western Kenya. Western Kenya has one of the highest rates of HIV in the country. It is also, promised the guide book, ‘virtually untouched by foreign tourists’. I turned to my colleague Ruth: Let’s do some travelling after work. It’ll be fun!
Things went surprisingly well for the most part. We walked in the last remaining patch of the Guineo-Congolian rainforest at Kakamega; we looked out at Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world, from a rooftop bar in Kisumu city; and we explored the countryside on the route to Uganda. We travelled by ‘road’ (the fact that this was the only bus in Kenya which departs with the back seat empty should have been indication enough of the terrain; the safety handrail came off in my hands during a particularly vigorous stretch) to visit ‘the tiny and rarely visited’ Rusinga and Mfangano Islands, where we wangled three nights in a luxury lodge retailing at $550 per person per night but now being let go for the price of a Bristol Travelodge by a woman who wept over the phone. Not only did we have it to ourselves, we also negotiated free transport in a luxury open-sided jeep, from which I waved magnanimously like some colonial horror to everyone who disinterestedly looked our way.
But it didn’t all go smoothly. Keen to visit Saiwa Swamp Park (‘small and rarely visited’), we attempted the journey in one day from Kakamega: 100km, two matatus and a taxi away. Turns out that just because something is two thumbs away on a map, doesn’t make it close. And that the unpredictability of Kenya’s matatu system increases exponentially in relation to its distance from Nairobi. The journey started ignominiously when the entire sliding door to our matatu fell off while travelling full pelt. Rather than express alarm that a pedestrian might have been felled by the flying hunk of metal, or a passenger fallen out onto the street so tightly were we packed in, the driver was cross; cross in a way which made me think this was not the first time. And quick to somehow jam the door back on with a speed which confirmed my suspicions.
The next matatu stopped in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, halfway to our destination of Kitale. Saying something about there being too few passengers to be worthwhile, the driver harrassed nine of us, luggage and all, into a beaten up car, where we travelled the final 30km with the vehicle’s innards scraping the ground, stopping only at a Police checkpoint (Uh-oh, we’re done for, I thought, as the policeman rapped on the window and, very slowly and deliberately, asked: What are you DOING in here? This is terrible! You must be so uncomfortable! How did you let them put you in here like this?, ignoring our protestations that we were fine. It’s bad, the car driver muttered when we started again, shaking his head – We paid him off on the way).
Our plan was thwarted by the taxi driver not having a clue where Saiwa was and driving for two hours in the dark (the later it got and deeper we drove into the countryside, the more people refused to approach a strange man in a strange car), and the announcement, tardily made, that we were almost out of petrol and possibly worse. The car made it to the outskirts of Kitale, where it lurched onto a petrol forecourt and conked out. Ruth and I gathered a small crowd, wondering at the wazungu out on the streets at 11pm near a small agricultural town.
The car having miraculously started again, we drove for a further thirty minutes looking for the only guest house which answered the phone, enduring another altercation with the police (The people in these houses rang us. They say a strange car is going to rob them) before pleading for the guest house owners to fetch us; the gleaming 4×4, friendly faces and two dishes of leftover takeaway lifted our spirits no end.
The next day, we tried again for Saiwa Swamp. I’d like to say it was all worth it. But after walking about for a bit with a Boy Guide in flip flops and tracksuit trousers and stopping off on the way back to the guest house at a farm for deformed animals (a bull with three eyes and four horns, lots of three-legged things; floppy cows, floppy sheep, floppy cocks, floppy chicks…), I was rather glad to be back in busy, polluted Nairobi the next day…
Lake Turkana and the North: I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto
Despite northern Kenya being truly off the beaten track (the distance from ‘civilisation’, the lack of roads and the inhospitable terrain), I’m not sure that our methods of getting there count as such. I hang my head in shame and declare: it was an organised safari. Upon arrival at the famed Lake Turkana, the largest permanent desert lake in the world, my fantastic recreation of Count Teleki’s 1888 journey to the Jade Sea – the first European to see it after an arduous safari across Eastern Africa – was interrupted by twelve Israelis descending upon the campsite. The differences between myself and the Austrian explorer seemed even more stark when a wizened Brit staggered over to us, having walked 40km across the Chalbi desert to reach the mythical lake; I looked across at our pimped-up Toyota Land Cruiser in dismay, consoling myself that at least I wasn’t an Israeli in a truck.
In our defence, we had only ten days to travel 1800km and had been warned about tribes indulging in cattle rustling who, while not directly interested in cow-less tourists, sometimes like to fire warning shots in their direction. Hiring a driver and a cook was the only option when you have a mother like mine.
But I promise, things still went wrong. Our driver was a borderline alcoholic (no one likes to smell morning whiskey on the breath of someone who is about to drive four hours across a narrow mountain road) who was surprisingly functional until the last two days, when he inexplicably fell apart. He couldn’t be roused for our morning bird walk, kept on asking us the same question and climbed into the tent of our two Belgian companions in the middle of the night, pleading that he ‘just wanted a cuddle’. Our cook was a dour-faced mute whose inner thoughts we constantly tried to guess (Fine-tuning the denouement of his novella? Attempting to deconstruct beauty?)
Part of northern Kenya’s delight is also its difficulty. From deserts to mountains, forests and volcanoes; in other words, from scorching hot to freezing cold, to pouring with rain, to the-chef-and-his-tent-blown-away-in-a-midnight-windstorm (1987’s got nothing on this, Michael Fish): all connected by terrible roads. A rainstorm in the Samburu Valley forced us to seek refuge for the night in the house of a Northern Irish missionary, who regaled us with tales of vandalism and shootings (two attempts in 23 years ain’t bad), before we traversed the world’s worst road (four hours to travel 100km across rocks) to Maralal town.
And some things are off the beaten track for a reason. Take a safari in Marsabit National Park: a dried up lake inaptly named ’Paradise’, a few baboons and a dead elephant. The KWS ranger also assured us that crows live to 300, which indicates the requisite level of training for this posting.
As we entered cattle-rustling territory south of Turkana, two armed guards climbed into the vehicle behind us. Driving ‘in convoy’ meant waving the other car off in the morning, roaring away and meeting up again at nightfall. When we finally got our own askari, our only thought when we saw the ancient man trotting towards us with a toothless grin was – let’s hope he lasts the journey (of course we were proved wrong; he turned out to be incredibly helpful and cheery). I spent much of the journey to Tuum looking down the barrel of his Kalashnikov. Don’t worry, said our driver reassuringly, he probably doesn’t know how to shoot it. I eventually pushed it away, aiming it at the cook’s face instead, which made me feel much better. But not as good as a really hot shower and clean clothes felt after ten nights in a tent.
So what?
Sometimes, when I’m erecting my tent in a thunderstorm, my only pair of socks soaked through and no shelter, I think about a package tour to the Maasai Mara, relaxing on Diani beach or reading the papers in Java coffee shop on a Sunday morning. And I will do all those things (for what better angle from which to scorn than the knowing one?). But would I choose them over Kalacha, where ‘the sense of isolation is magnificent’? Over North Horr, which has attained ‘a mythical status akin to Timbuktu’ given its sudden appearance out of the relentless desert? Over Ruma National Park, where you will experience ‘utter seclusion all to yourself’? Not a chance. And if things go wrong, it’s all part of the adventure. All I can say is: Tom, Ruth, Taz, everyone – We’ll laugh about this one day…
Without wanting to sound too corny, you have a very likable and charming writing style.
Take care.
R
Fabulous!! I enjoyed that very much indeed Aurelia, but am so glad to be reading about it rather than having to do it myself!
I’ve only just discovered this tale : found myself!!!! 🙂 xxxx