Nairobi to Lake Victoria

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I passed my first night in Kenya in the dorm of Milimani Backpackers in Nairobi. In the morning a tall dreadlocked German youth was pulling on a spotless pair of white trousers.

"What are your plans for today?" I enquired.

"Oh, I'm getting married" he replied. I recalled the taciturn young African lady in the bunk below him.

"How long have you known her" I asked.

"We met in June", he said. It was now mid August.

" What do your parents think about that?" I continued.

" I haven't told them. They will go mad".



So on the first morning of the trip I attended an inter-racial wedding in the television room of a backpackers hostel.

A local magistrate arrived to conduct the brief service at which I was the only attendee although the hostel was fully booked.

I feared that they might be spending their wedding night back in the dorm, but thankfully they had had the foresight to book one of the tents crammed into the small garden. How romantic.

After the ceremony they made haste into the city to present the young ladies application for German residency. A couple of days later he was on a plane home in time for the new school year.



I spent the next few days wandering around the city, not that there is anything to see but it felt good to be back in Africa.

As planned I got a yellow fever jab at a health centre at a fraction of the price requested in England.



I took a minibus to Nyeri, a bustling market town in the highlands north of Nairobi.

Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts, is buried here along with the ashes of his wife, who founded the Guides (coincidence or what!). I visited his grave which, I was assured, has a commanding view of Mount Kenya whenever the clouds clear.

Following the theme I wandered down to the posh hotel where he lived for his final years and they have preserved his room as a mark of respect and a focus for international scouting anoraks (and the likes of me).

Apparently, in those days you were allowed to put up your own pictures in hotel rooms and BPs walls were covered with line drawings of various places he had been around the world, and very fine they were too.

Back in town I had an unpleasant encounter with the hotel staff when they tried to charge me an extortionate amount for washing my underpants. I'll do them myself in future.


Nanyuki is well used to westerners as there is a British army base situated nearby. Squaddies occasionally come into town to buy gallons of bottled water and sit in the one extortionately priced coffee shop that none of the locals can afford.

I walked in unwittingly to groups of burly squaddies squeezed around the small tables. When I saw the prices I left them to it.

It was in Nanyuki that I discovered the secret of black ladies hairdressing as I frequented a cafe attached to a salon.

I had been impressed by the variety of hairstyles on view and I suppose I imagined that they spend hours with hair straighteners and copious amounts of lacquer.

What they actually do is cut their hair down to a very short length and weave in hair extensions or wear wigs (apologies if you already knew this). Thus they can completely change their image whenever they feel like it.

There are supposedly a few things to see on the outskirts of Nanyuki: a commonwealth war cemetery, a Hindu temple and the Equator.

I looked for the first two without success.

Only the Equator appeared to remain in its designated location.

I had the obligatory photograph taken with the sign and then watched some local boys demonstrating the so-called Coriolis force.

This is based on the belief that water will turn clockwise when it drains on one side of the equator and anti- clockwise when it drains on the other, and relies on the fact that no-one can ever remember if it is a myth or a fact.

The boys take on this was to put 2 matchsticks onto the surface of a bowl of water. On one side of the equator the sticks span vigorously in a clockwise direction, and on the other side of the equator they span vigorously counter-clockwise. Case closed - at least until someone else put their hand in the water.


Nyahururu is Kenya's highest town, at 2360 metres.

Driving up there we left the parched, arid and dusty highlands for the green and verdant, slightly higher highlands.

The town is next to Thomson's Falls, which are nice enough, but I would have been disappointed if I had made a special trip.

As a bonus I found a nice local restaurant (called hotels) which served the standard menu with a degree of panache.

Despite the Kenyan people speaking excellent English, they have decided to use the word 'hotel' to mean restaurant which can get a bit confusing, especially as they may also use the word to mean hotel in the conventional sense.



I crossed the Rift Valley to get to Nakuru.

The contrast with the east where nothing was growing was stark.

The valley was a patchwork of green fields bursting with produce.

I checked into one of those budget hotels that make your heart sink, but I soon got over it.

This is one of the main regional towns and has an energetic vibe.

One lengthy street is devoted to selling clothes donated by charitable folk in Europe and America. Every town has one. I think it must be one of Africa's biggest employers.

I don't suppose people realise that the clothes they provide are actually sold to the African people.

The poorest are still in rags.

Local clothing industries have little chance when cheap clothes from abroad are for sale in every town.


I was beginning to realise that travelling on the cheap was not that rewarding in these parts. There are only so many market towns that one can find of interest.

To improve the quality of the experience I was going to have to spend some money.

Unfortunately, as soon as you do anything touristic in Kenya the costs escalate dramatically.

I booked a half day tour in the Lake Nakuru National Park, just outside the town.

The tour company insisted that we were there at dawn to see the thousands of pink flamingos as the sun rose.

They were indeed impressive and would have been equally impressive after a decent night’s kip and some breakfast.

I also got up close and personal with both black and white rhinos and the driver did some bush driving to get me within camera range of a resting lion.

No giraffes though. Apparently giraffe numbers have dropped by 94% in the last year. As they cannot just disappear there is a conspiracy theory that the government is selling them off for foreign exchange.



I backtracked a bit towards Nairobi to stay on the shores of Lake Naivasha where I rented a wooden chalet nestled amongst the trees.

Just sitting on the veranda bought a host of wildlife to my attention, including vervet and colobus monkeys and a wealth of different birds.

After dusk I tracked the hippos which had come out of the water and were grazing along the perimeter of the campsite.


I hired a bike and went to the nearby Hells Gate National Park, so called by the local tribes because of the hot water geysers that used to be in evidence.

This particular national park has had a power station built within it to take advantage of the geothermal activity. I thought the whole point of national parks is to prevent that type of thing.

At one edge of the park is a narrow ravine which leads through Maasai lands. A pleasant gentleman led me along it and it was much more interesting than the park itself.

That day I cycled about 30km and was too saddle-sore to go far the next day.

Luckily, Joy Adamson's home was just down the road and the thing here is to visit for afternoon tea, so I did.


Before she achieved worldwide fame for her books about the rearing of Elsa, the orphaned lion cub, Joy Adamson was an award winning artist.

She published a book, The Peoples of Kenya, in which she captured the essence of the varieties of tribal people that she knew were going to disappear.

Her magnificent paintings are hung all over the house. Proud people with no idea that they are about to enter the ranks of the worlds poor.

The success of Born Free created a huge momentum for conservation worldwide and bought her millions of pounds which she used for conservation in Kenya, including the establishment of a new national park at Meru.

Meanwhile I had several cups of tea and numerous homemade biscuits and an enjoyable chat with the curator about the lasting effects of the white mans rule.

An interesting case is that of Lord Delamere who appropriated a large area of land around Naivasha to set up a dairy empire.

In 1905 he made an agreement with the local Maasai tribe that they would leave the land for a hundred years. When the Maasai claimed the land back in 2005 there was nothing doing and the High Court did not support their claim.


Lake Naivasha was the favoured haunt of the white colonialists, famed as the happy valley and the location of White Mischief.

There was even a flying boat connection between the lake and Southampton which took 12 stops.



Another day another lake.

This time I went north to Lake Baringo.

Being somewhat remote, I had to do the last stretch by shared taxi.

'We take six passengers, you are number five' said the driver.

We hung around for 30 minutes with nothing much happening then 'right, we go' said the driver, and we all piled in.

I counted 13 people in that car plus loads of shopping and my rucksack.

Somebody would wave us down.
'You'll have to go in the boot' I could tell he was saying.
A look of disappointment would cross their faces but then they would contort themselves in amongst the sacks, jerrycans and current occupants.


Lake Baringo was worth it though.

This time I got a circular wattle & daub hut with a thatched roof.

A walk into the nearby village invited the company of a relay of super friendly locals describing the opportunities for boat trips, nature walks, feeding the crocodiles and performing scorpions(!).

A woman came along with some waste fish intestines so I gave them a few bob to chuck them to the crocs.

This campsite had its own resident hippos that obliged us all by coming out of the water before dusk. Then a full moon rose from behind the mountains across the lake creating a superb photo-opportunity.

The hippos obviously realised this and flounced back into the water like 10-ton primadonnas.

Later that night I was awakened by one of the group grazing right outside my hut.

I don't know what on, as the ground was only dust and leaves.

The ongoing drought has had a negative effect on these creatures. Hunger has made them more aggressive and the has been a remarkable increase in hippo attacks.

I kept well back as only a couple of days previously a western traveller had been gored by a hippo on this very campsite. He survived, but enjoyed a week or two in a local hospital.

The current drought may be a random effect of climate change, but many are starting to believe that it could be self-inflicted to a certain degree.

At independence in 1963 about 14% of the country's area was covered by forests. Today it is less than 2%.

Forests tend to attract rainfall, without them the rains may not come.

The effects of drought are all pervasive. Crops fail and pasture animals die leaving farmers impoverished and destitute.

Less water supports less fish so the catch is down. Hungry hippos -tm- defecate less so there is less natural fertiliser in the ecosystem.

Kenya largely relies on hydroelectric power so low water levels lead to blackouts or an increase in the burning of fossil fuels.


In a country where most people use wood or charcoal to cook their tea, the replenishment of these forests seems a long, but vitally necessary, shot.


It was a hot afternoon when I decided to go for a walk along the lake shore. I had barely got out of the campsite when I was surrounded by a posse of about 15 kids.

We walked a couple of km passing the grown ups with their animals.

'These are all our sheep' said a girl waving her arm expansively over a herd of goats.

I can never quite find the dividing line between goats and sheep in the developing world.

The same flock can contain cute woolly baa lambs and short-haired, big-bollocked billy goats and others which i am just not sure about. I suppose it is all just mutton to them.

The shoreline had been seriously degraded by firewood cutting.

Wandering through a sea of stumps is not too enthralling so eventually I turned back.

At one point I had to detour around a channel of water from the lake. One little girl skipped across the thread of land at the tip of the inlet.

I followed suit but failed to account for the additional 70 kilos of weight I carry over an eight year old child.

I was instantly in a pit of mud up to my calf’s.

Trying to hoist myself out had the opposite effect and I found myself trapped by thick gloop up to my thighs.

You might think that the kids would find this hilarious, but in fact they were seriously concerned.

I cast my mind back to Dick and Doms Survival Guides that I had endured on children’s BBC last summer.

The thing to do is to lie back on the mud and attempt to straighten your legs so that you end up flat on the surface.

It took a few minutes but gradually my legs started to rise as I applied continual pressure.

I was more concerned about losing my trainers than anything as I could feel them being sucked from my feet.

Eventually my legs started to near the surface and the kids darted on and off the mud pack trying to dig them out.

With a final gloop I was free and rolled to the side and solid ground.

Next came the humiliating trudge back to camp encased in drying mud with the children now jubilantly describing the adventure to all the passing goat herders.

Back in camp the usually deserted restaurant was filled with new arrivals and a sea of white faces turned to witness my passing.

I doubt that my face was very white at that moment.

As evidence of the mud’s suction powers the soles of both of my trainers came off over the next couple of days.

A roadside shoe-smith was glad to sew them back on for a small consideration.



Kericho is at the core of the country's tea industry because it gets a lot of rain.

It might also be the nicest town in Kenya since it appears to have had the benefit of planning.

Kenyan tea is an important export crop and there are plantations for miles around.

I took a few pleasant walks around the area and always managed to get back to my hotel before the afternoon downpour.

I had a very interesting conversation with a tea plantation worker which shows the dangers of taking what people say at face value.

For instance, he said 'I am very very poor. I earn little money'.

On further questioning ' I have only two acres of land, two cows, some goats and some hens'.

He could not believe that I have no land and no animals.

Then 'I have five children, all of them are unemployed'.

On further questioning, 'one is a mechanic in Nairobi, one is a hairdresser and the others pick tea'.

'Well, they're not unemployed then, are they' I pointed out.

'None of them are proper jobs' he exclaimed. Though he thoughtfully agreed that we can't all be doctors or lawyers.



The minibus between Kericho and Kisumu was remarkably overfilled due, I eventually realised, to the lack of police checkpoints on the route.

I sat next to a nice lady whose doe-eyed daughter was wedged between us.

This little girl seemed to take a liking to me, lots of smiles and she even sang a little rhyme of some sort. Ahh.

About an hour into the journey she threw up into my lap.

Her mother tried to clean me up but there was little room to move and I spent the remainder of the journey gipping out of the window.

I expected to have to deal with an embarrassing stain on arrival at the bus station but remarkably, since all she had had to eat was maize porridge, it all dried into little balls and brushed off with no lasting effects. I was glad that I was wearing my jeans and not my shorts though.


The first thing I did on arrival in Kisumu was walk to the shores of Lake Victoria. Actually there is only about a 15 metre stretch of shore available as the area is quite industrialised.

There are a load of shack-like cafes selling fried lake fish and again this is one of those things 'to do'. I passed on this occasion as I noticed that they were refrying already cooked fish, not cooking them from fresh.

I found Kisumu to be most pleasant. It has a decent array of cafes and one excellent German restaurant which I frequented nightly.

It is also the only town where you don't get bathed in a cloud of semi-combusted diesel particulates as you walk the streets, as the town centre is set off from the main road.

I visited the town museum, where I got talking to the senior curator who was preparing an exhibition on the ecology of Lake Victoria.

Back in the 1950s some clever bugger introduced Nile perch into the lake for the purpose of sport fishing.

The Nile perch is a fish-eating fish whose appetite brought about the fastest extinction rate of other species in recorded history.

'On the other hand', said the curator, 'the breeding success of the Nile perch has created a new industry where the fish are caught and sold for export, creating employment for local people'.

In smart alec mode, I countered 'aren't these the same local people who used to be able to provide for their needs by catching a few fish every day. Now those fish are gone they are forced to work for the export companies to enable them to buy food instead.'
He had to agree.

Thus the benefits of Lake Victoria have been transferred from the local population to international business. A typical example of the downside of globalisation.

After only a month in Kenya I can see a number of clear themes challenging the country.

Deforestation, leading to lack of rainfall, leading to food shortages and energy insecurity, exacerbated by population growth and rampant corruption. I'm amazed that the people are so cheerful.

Perhaps they are not. I've yet to meet anybody that has any faith in the government.

The high street in Kisumu still has several buildings that were burnt out during the riots following last year’s election.

The reformist opposition party was celebrating certain success until a late block of highly contentious votes kept the incumbent in power.

Joy turned to anger and rioting flared up along tribal lines leading to over a thousand deaths and a couple of hundred thousand people fleeing their homes.

Today you feel that the country is almost embarrassed over this national outburst.

They like to see themselves as a modern, civilised country but on this occasion the mask slipped.

The level of corruption is shocking and clearly visible to the outside observer.

For example, numerous road blocks have been set up with the objective of improving road safety by checking driver’s licences, insurance and vehicle roadworthiness.

Too regularly infractions are overcome by paying a bribe to the police officer.

When I questioned the minibus owner about this he said he was quite happy to pay the policeman as it would be much more expensive to have to bribe a judge.

The policeman thinks that he might as well take the money as if he doesn't it will only end up in the judges pocket. And so it goes.

The newspapers are filled with scandals where those in power have enriched themselves and their friends, and the general public, rightly, have no faith in the political or justice system.


Kenya faces a fistful of important challenges, not dissimilar to those found in some other countries, but cannot move forward due to political infighting and the protection of vested interests.

That is why I have heard the words 'failed state' bandied about and I will not be too surprised if some sort of crisis comes to the attention of an unsuspecting world in the next few years.

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Photos

Nyeri
Baden-Powell's Grave

Equator
Nanyuki

Lake Nakuru National Park
Black Rhino

Lake Nakuru National Park
White Rhino

Kericho
Tea Plantation