Dettol

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"I love the smell of Dettol in the morning." Paul the driver stares through his shades at another bunch of raw recruits, timid and trembling at their first African dawn.

Ok, so it takes a few days to adjust. The first thing you have to get used to is hygiene. Lots of dettol and no tea towel, so lots of flapping to dry plates, dishes etc. Then you need to understand how the truck and the camp runs which takes a bit of getting used to.

A typical day so far:

Get up at 5.30am, about an hour before dawn. Check around the tent for Lions with my headtorch. The wind rips through the campsite as we are high up on an escarpment above a large platea. Get the charcoal on the chicos (round charcoal burners) and try to get it lit (still struggling with this skill·). At 6.00am my other cook team members join me and we make tea and toast over the fire. As the sun starts to come up Kim offers to take over and I sprint with my tripod to get some photos of the sun coming up over Mount Kenya (apparently a rare sight from this location).

Then it is back to wash up ( hot soapy water then dettol then very hot water then flap ) before the camels arrive. Three camels are saddled up and the rest of us walk (cheap skates) about 3k down off the escarpment to the village of the Turkana tribe. We are only the third tourist visitors since September.

Welcomed by the Turkana women in black tribal dress performing a traditional dance we stand
around like lemons until a few people get dragged in to the melee (strangely the same
thing was repeated in Als bar in Kampala last night). Slowly the British reserve is lost
and we start to get the hang of enjoying ourselves with these welcoming people. Overall
we spent two hours with them and some nearby Samburu villagers. We didn't notice the time
passing.

Then it was back to the escarpment, get lunch ready as we are still on cook duty. A speedy
lunch followed by a swift departure for Lake Baringo, back down in the rift valley.

Paul shows his sense of adventure by taking the short cut route. This ends up being 5 hours of driving on a dusty, potholed, crevice-ridden, washed out hell-hole of a road. Bear in mind this is only day three and we are terrified that the whole trip will be like this - thankfully there has been a lot of tarmac since then.

On the way we don't see a single tourist vehicle, but plenty of Masai in traditional costume herding goats.

Finally we roll out at Lake Baringo and the cook team (with Kim in it) have to get started immediately ( the whole process of cooking the evening meal, eating and washing up takes about four hours ). We still have to wash up from lunch and after showering I join in to give Kim time to get a shower. We see nothing of Lake Baringo until the next morning as we are too busy. The sausages and mash, however, were wonderful.

Around 9.00pm we roll into the campsite bar and after a swifty it is suggested we go to the local bar down the road. The 200m turns into more like 800m but finally we arrive at the corrugated iron shack and the friendly locals entertain us for an hour or so eulogising about the greats of Arsenal and Chelsea.

We miss the campsite entrance due to a discussion with an Astrophysics post-doc about whether the moon landings really did occur. Then its back to the tents, this time checking carefully for hippos (we can hear the rumblings of them all around, but mainly it seems to be coming from the lake) and then off to a well earned sleep.

More blogs to follow ... so far we've been down through Uganda to Rwanda to see the gorillas and are now having an easy day in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, before of to the source of the white nile for rafting and all that jazz.

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Photos

Adrian and Claudia
... enjoy a quiet moment together

Comments

[anonymous]

Beautiful photos
Looks so amazing, maybe will have to go there sometime on my next adventure. it's not getting to hot is it? there always some nice snow and frost back here if you fancy it.... - james w

[Sken like a Ribble fluke]

Wowzers!
"Dawn below Mt Kenya" has got to be one of the best photos I have seen on travelblog. I am a bit jealous! That plus the fact that you don't write like a twelve year old. Keep on truckin'. Ryan.

[anonymous]

Plate flapping
Wow! Dettol, very hot water and plate flapping. You have taken me back 8 years to when Katie and I were in Kenya! I remember the potholes too - ow! - Vicky

[mena]

Wow, Dettol do I remember the smell and boy do I miss it too!!