Camp at Lake Naivasha

Sunday, August 28, 2005



We rumble off the main road into "Fisherman's Camp" on Lake Naivasha by early afternoon.

It's a place shaded by tall acacia trees and sprawling masses of bougainvillea flowers.

There are birds everywhere, chirping and whistling. Brown ibises stalk warily about and iridescent-blue starlings hop near us as we set out the makings of a late lunch on a long table by the truck.

Sitting on camp stools over sandwiches and Tusker beer, we have a general camp meeting.

More formal introductions are made: our family of four are the only Canadians. Everybody else is either English, Scottish, Irish, or South African.

General camp and safety rules are laid out. I think the prospect of camping in Africa made everbody quite attentive.

For instance, you wouldn't want to break the rule of going down to the lake-front at night. There is a small electric fence there now because a camper was killed by a hippopotamus at this same campsite this past spring. Hippos often wander up onto the shore near our camp to graze at night.

Peering down the lake's shoreline with our binoculars, we could see massive boulder-like objects snoozing in the mud, occasionally lifting a broad head to look placidly around. The resident hippos are peaceful enough from a distance but notoriously ill-tempered and dangerous when their escape route to water is cut off. Their bite can chomp a human in half.

Aside from this word of caution, our camp looked like a nice place to stay. The showers were in a wooden enclosure, the water warmed by a wood-stove. And the toilets flushed, after a fashion, when you pulled a long chain.

We shared the campground with a few other African families. One was a group of black-robed Muslim women who had brought a few red cattle along with them.

Along a Country Road in Kenya

Sunday August 28, 2005
We are heading towards tonight's campsite in a truck called George. We are going to be camping way out in the middle of nowhwere.

The road we are travelling is pocked with potholes, covered in craters. It is slow going as George is forced to weave back and forth across the dusty ground, seeking the parts which are less likely to bounce our heads against the roof. My teeth knock together as I laugh in disbelief.

These are holes which are several feet deep in places. The dust rises in clouds around us. Jeff and I are sitting up in "first class" which has more padding. I am grateful.

The roads pictured in these photos are from slightly further on. I swear I was holding on too tightly to keep from falling off my seat to take photographs! :)

Someone points up. Screws are actually working their way loose from the truck's ceiling. Occasionally someone will jump out of their seat to rescue a loaf of bread or a bag from the grocery-supplies shelf from upending itself on our heads.

The reason that this road is in such bad condition is that it is used by the export rose business. There is an enormous amount of shipping traffic along this route, although we didn't see any. A huge amount of the world's roses are shipped from this part of Africa, their propagation causing all sorts of water-use and irrigation problems.

Apparently the water-level in nearby lakes has dropped precipitously. For instance, the nearby Crescent Island, where the movie 'Out of Africa' was filmed is no longer an island sanctuary because the lake level dropped so much that it became a peninsula and the animals there wandered away. We see modern-looking greenhouses from the road.

Sometime on this jouncing ride we spot our first wild African animal--some zebras grazing in the distance.

After an hour or so the roads become more even again and the going is faster. Before the road was nearly deserted of habitation. Now we see lots of people walking and bicycling, animals and various small buildings by the roadside. A few children wave as we go by.

The sun has come out and the day has grown hot. I love that the sides of the truck are open. We can see so much.

Rift Valley Look-out

Sunday, August 28, 2005

The air immediately freshens as we leave the city and head up a hilly road. Our first stop is a look-out point over the countryside of the Rift Valley where merchants are gathered to sell sheepskins, colourful blankets, and wooden animals.


Ah, tourists! The merchants beam as we dismount from our vehicle.

I have firmly resolved not to buy souvenirs the first day--I want to buy wooden elephants after I've seen a live one and not before. Besides, the nature of the little lockers in the truck give us a natural restriction on how much shopping we'll be able to do.

One of the merchants, an elderly man dressed in layers of blankets, joins me at the look-out balcony. He shows me three Canadian pins he has collected from people passing through.

The pilings for these look-out buildings look as if they might crumble down the hillside at any moment, but they hold firm long enough to see us on our way again.

An Ugly Drive Through Nairobi

Sunday, August 28, 2005


There is a space up in the front cab in the truck if one of us wants to sit there for a while. I hop up in front with Wayne. Its a big wide slippery seat with no seat-belts, but an enormously wide view of whats up ahead.

East Africans drive on the same side of the road as the British at enormous speed. It seems like every other car on the road is jam-packed with people though not to the extent that I was to see later.

At first we drove on a modern highway through the kind of semi-rural area that always seems to surround airports, but soon we came to the city outskirts where the main road became littered with potholes.

I saw people living in broken-down shacks only feet apart. I looked down crowded and dusty alleyways, littered in garbage, and felt a pang of guilt and shock as I did in Morocco when I saw the poverty people can live in. People in ragged clothes and bare feet walked by the side of the road carrying bags and buckets.

I didn't want to gawk but couldn't tear my eyes away.

The slums of Nairobi are famed for their atrociousness and I know we weren't even in the worst part of it. It looked like an unhealthy place to live. Wayne said that many, many people in this city die of malaria every year because they cannot afford the price of the medication to prevent it. Imagine dying because you can't afford twenty dollars.

We headed into a less run-down area known as "Karen", after Karen Blixen of "Out of Africa" fame, and stopped at the modern Silver Springs Hotel to pick up two girls who were the last to join the group. We are advised to use the bathroom here as its the last Western one we'll see in a while.

We are also joined by Pete, a shy fellow from Mombasa who will be our cook on this trip. We will soon realize that Pete is a national secret in gourmet- safari circles, as well as having uncanny animal-spotting powers.

We make a brief stop at a Nairobi corner store which is both the same and totally different from convenience stores in my neck of the woods. The shelves are half-empty and the brand-names are mostly unfamiliar, but wouldn't you know it, Coca-Cola and Pringles chips are available just about everywhere on the planet.

The pollution is thick and smelly in the air as we drive through busy, rumbling city streets. I'm glad we're leaving the city, driving up into the hills of Kenya's Rift Valley.

To Nairobi

Sunday, August 28, 2005

As the sun rose through pink clouds we crossed the equator and flew over the plains of Kenya towards Nairobi. There were glimpses of lakes down below and here and there a hilltop poked its head out of the mist.

As we came in for a landing over the outskirts of Nairobi the pretty dawn dissipated and left the landscape flat and yellow under drear skies. We didn't see much of the city, just some tin shacks and sprawling slums. The sky glowered; it looked like it was going to rain. I was glad I'd brought something warm to wear.

The passport control area at Jomo Kenyatta International was painted in depressing high-school hallway shades of orange.

Swarms of people formed uncertain lines that moved haphazardly forward, sometimes stopping and reforming in other places as Kenyan officials grinned merrily as they spontaneously disappeared from various wickets, leaving the people in front of it scrambling to join another line.


I think if there is a Hell it will probably involve frustrating airport line-ups. My family finally emerges with African entry stamps in our passports.

Our bags have all miraculously arrived as well. On this trip we are loaded down with sleeping bags and mats as well as back-packs. This is my first trip where I've had to check baggage. I prefer to travel as lightly as possible, but at least we don't have to bring our own tents.

It wasn't difficult to find the safari group leader. He was a young and cheerful Australian fellow named Wayne. As soon as the group had assembled and had changed some money to Kenyan schillings, he led us out to the parking lot where our overland vehicle awaited us.

It was right out of Mad Max --a lumbering truck-bus-tank. We were assigned narrow lockers that we poured our neatly-packed baggage into willy-nilly. Sleeping bags were stowed. Twenty strangers introduced themselves to one another and we were off.