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Published: April 17th 2006
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Lake
Morning over Lake Elementaita If you came to Kenya for a two week safari and beach holiday you could leave thinking Kenya was a lovely laid back country of serene beauty where all anyone had to worry about was saying Jambo (hello) and Your Most Welcome to everyone each day. The sad truth though that Kenya is anything but that. Nairobi must be one of the dirtiest, smelliest and most squalid cities I have ever had the displeasure to have been to. A shadow of it's former colonial past, Nairobi is a sprawling metropolis of destitution and violent crime...one very big messy hole. A great introduction to African cities, but not somewhere where you would want to hang around for too long.
Nor did we, as we started our long trip northwards over the top of Lake Victoria. The towns we passed through on the way to the Ugandan border showed all the hallmarks of decay that we had seen in Nairobi. Streets liked dustbowls, shops derelict and abandoned. Men lazed under trees seeking shade but not jobs (there are none), women walked to fetch water or worked their plots of land with tools the UK stopped using 200 years ago. Hawkers crowded round
Lake Baringo Kingfisher
Early morning breakfast for a Kingfisher at Lake Baringo us every time we stopped pressuring us to buy dirty stale samosas or fried chicken and children in rags begged us for clothes and money.
Of course, in many ways, this is what Africa is all about, and whilst by African standards the poverty itself wasn't shocking, what was surprising was this was Kenya, one of the few countries that hasn't been plagued by civil war and unruly despots. It was clear that Kenya has moved backwards, fast, from it's glory days 30 or 40 years ago and I surmised that mismanagement and corruption must be the cause. I congratulated myself on how well I was understanding Africa and it's problems as I looked out the window while sipping a coke and eating pringles that had cost more than an average weeks wages.
Heading up into the mountains the road meandered up onto a ridge overlooking the great expanse of the Rift Valley. Thanks to volcanic activity millions of years ago, a huge valley of savanna was made that stretched all the way to the sea. Without it, we wouldn't have the Serengeti or the Masai Mara games reserves, nor the great soda lakes of Kenya. In fact,
Mean Machine
Someone gets snappy near our tent at Lake Baringo it's unlikely that I would also be here writing this as it's though that it was because of the rift valley that our friends the gorillas ventured down from their jungle habitat and turned into the homos groups from which we are derived.
We bushed camped alongside the shores of Lake Elementaita and watched the sunset over a sea of red flamingos. We slept nervously whilst insects the size of helicopters flew outside our tent.
Onto Lake Buringo a bit further North. We arrived at the campsite and excitedly set up our tents just 50m back from the shoreline so we could get a good view of the Lake when we woke up. It was only later that we saw the warning signs about the hippos and that it was unsafe to venture near the water after dark. A woman had been killed recently when she got in the way of a wayward hippo at the campsite. That night as we camped, the hippos came up onto the bank to feed and we sat in our tent listening to them munch on the grass outside.
But the thing that blew me away about Lake Baringo was the
goliath heron
A Goliath Heron has a stretch on Lake Baringo birds. Most people know I have a soft spot for our feathered friends and I was in my element counting over 50 species in a couple of hours. It's possible to see over 200 in the space of an hour if you know what you are looking at. It was cool to walk along the jetty and watch the kingfishers, fish eagles and herons whilst surrounded by hippos and crocodiles.
We spent an afternoon visiting a local village along the lake as part of an organised tour. The whole thing was pretty humiliating for the villagers and embarrassing and uncomfortable for us. The drought has meant that the villagers cattle has all died and by asking for people to come and visit for a donation is their only means of survival. Unfortunately though they had a warped view of what we wanted to see, and we became subjected to participating in ritual dances, trying on their dirty clothes, holding their chickens and using their spears. The village was part of the Polkot tribe which is actually a really interesting group, not least for their continued practice of female circumcision and urine splashing ceremonies. I'm not sure Kim was too
Pokot
The chief of the Pokot village explains a few rules to his new wife keen to try any of these out and get the true Polkot experience.
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