No Hurry in Africa (31 page)

I woke before dawn the next morning, looking forward to an adventurous day ahead. For breakfast, I rustled up a bit of fruit and bread I had bought in the nearby village the day before. I was biting hungrily into a sandwich in the half-light when a monkey bounded past, apparently intent on stealing my belongings. As I jumped up to chase him away, his friend grabbed the sandwich straight out of my hand. Those creatures were proving very cute at creating distractions. As I peeled a banana, another monkey suddenly swiped it from behind, leapt up the tree, and threw the peel back down onto my head. I was being bullied by monkeys of all things!

I had risen before dawn in order to cycle through the long red canyon known as Hell’s Gate, beside Lake Naivasha. I was going to test the theory that the best chance to see game animals is in very early morning and towards dusk. I entered Hell’s Gate to find myself alone; it was still too early for any other visitors, who might arrive later. I found myself in a dramatic landscape of hot steaming springs amid towering columns of red volcanic rock, with vultures circling overhead. It was even more dramatic later in the day, when the searing daytime heat was ripped apart by a thunder and lightning spectacular. Few places on earth more deserve the name ‘Hell’s Gate,’ I thought. Back in 1883, a pioneering German explorer called Gustav Fischer had his entire party of porters massacred by Maasai warriors in this place. Fischer himself survived, however, and later returned to Germany with his tale. His name is commemorated in Fischer’s Tower, a red volcanic column about a hundred feet high.

The very name of the place was the main reason that attracted me to explore Hell’s Gate. It lived up to its other reputation, too; a great place to see a wide variety of African wildlife. The canyon was filled with animals. I dismounted from my hired bicycle from time to time to watch the eland leaping, zebras grazing, ostriches cantering—and the inevitable bickering baboons. The playful warthogs were my favourite; they are very comical in their ugliness. I did not spot a cheetah or a leopard; maybe they spotted me first, and I was happy enough about that because I was the only human around. I sat on the grass, alone amidst near perfect silence, inhaling the beauty of the scene.

At the far end of the canyon, several Maasai men were busy taking a shower underneath a warm waterfall that seemed to spring from the earth on top of one of the cliffs. The hot springs and waterfalls are heated by the Rift Valley volcanic activity. Four months earlier, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale hit the Rift Valley, causing even more chaos than usual in Nairobi. I asked the Maasai about the cheetahs and leopards. One of them spoke Swahili and quite good English.

‘A couple of weeks ago,’ he told me, as he boiled an egg using water from a hot spring, ‘a shepherd near Naivasha stepped into the darkness with only a wooden spear to fight off a leopard that was hunting his goats. The man was very nearly eaten himself when the leopard attacked him—but he is still alive today.’

For the next fortnight—it was now the second half of April— wherever I visited in the Rift Valley I practically had it to myself. There is hardly a tourist in all of Kenya around that time of year, apart from a slow trade at the Mombasa beaches. After a couple of days spent relaxing around Lake Naivasha, I journeyed by bus on to Lake Nakuru National Park, over fifty kilometres further north of Naivasha and one of the best game reserves in the country. The park officials would not accept my genuine Kenyan resident’s card, but took my slightly doctored student’s card instead for discounted admission.

Darkness was approaching as I searched for a suitably flat and secluded position to erect my tent at the designated camping spot within the Park. Waterbucks were obliviously munching nearby. I could just about make out Lake Nakuru itself, the soda lake world famous for its flamingo population. I convinced myself I could detect in the fading light a streak of pink on the distant shoreline. That would be tomorrow’s excitement. Before that, however, a more familiar drama was unfolding, the performers a troupe of baboons.

I had bought enough fruit and bread in Nakuru town to satisfy me while I would be in the Park. As I made preliminary inroads into my rations, I became aware of what I imagined to be an extended family of baboons edging closer all the while. I did not feel in any way threatened; the young and the females were grooming each other and seemed to be in a playful mood. It is fascinating to observe how a clan of baboons has a sentry system with males encircling the females and their young.

All at once, I came under co-ordinated attack from four or five males, a classic smash-and-grab raid on my sandwiches. I had taken trouble to conceal them, but these baboons were more up-front and aggressive than the monkeys of Naivasha. Their tactic was intimidation, hence the numbers. They took every morsel of food I possessed. My token resistance proved as futile as a sand-castle resisting the incoming tide. These were real vandals. They entered the tent and strewed my clothes all over the place. Nancy had been right to warn me about them.

Still reeling from their shock tactics, I was left standing clutching my one solitary sandwich in my hand. The largest baboon advanced on me, snarling. I threw it to him in fright. This seemed to signal a general retreat, mission accomplished. To an observer, the whole scenario might have looked quite funny. For me it was beyond a joke! I was going to have to go hungry for maybe twenty-four hours. Save for a rumbling tummy, it did not bother me at all. I had become kind of used to going hungry in Kenya from time to time.

In the middle of the night, I was startled out of my slumber by loud rustling sounds very near the tent, far too close for comfort. I was picturing a lion about to pounce on the tent and devour me, or envisaging a rhino charging with its horn and trampling the tent while I lay inside. I stayed on my back, perfectly motionless, too terrified to make a move or create a sound. I did not want to excite its attention, whatever
it
might be.

Minutes passed, time stretched out interminably, and my nerves grew taut. Eventually I peeped out with one eye though a gap that I noiselessly established in the front of the tent. Through the veil of darkness, I could just make out a hyena and, worse still, at least three buffalo only yards away. I knew the latter could be among the most dangerous animals in the bush; and I recalled Akamba stories about the viciousness of the trap-jawed hyenas. After an eternity, they moved away. I could breathe again.

Early next morning, the orange sun was setting aglow the eerie mist that was levitating off the soda lake. Nobody else was about, except for a Peace Corp volunteer who had arrived before dawn in his jeep. I had met twenty-six year old Glenn the day before in Nakuru town, and we arranged to go together to view the flamingos. For hours, we were rewarded with an unforgettable spectacle; a vast bright pink carpet of maybe two million long-legged flamingos spread around the edge of the lake. We tried to think of a collective term for the birds; we settled in the end for a ‘blush’ of flamingos.

These birds, the so-called ‘lesser’ flamingos of East Africa, were mainly breakfasting on the algae soup that forms on the surface of the lake. Nakuru’s soda lake is an alkaline brew with a high volcanic ash content. These soda lake waters are poisonous to virtually all other creatures, thus protecting the birds from predators like the hyena. I was most surprised by the din that they created, a loud ceaseless nattering as they conducted their noisy early morning business. We watched with pleasure their characteristic running take-offs, and gradual descents as they came in to land. It resembled a vast flamingo airport. It was a truly wonderful sight.

After three hours or so, we dragged ourselves away from one of Nature’s most colourful spectacles. Our departure was delayed by Glenn’s jeep becoming entrenched in the soft silt at the lake-shore, but we had the rest of the day to revel in the wildlife of the Park. We were mentally ticking off the species: the rare black rhinoceros, the Thompson’s gazelles, the giraffes towering above the acacia trees, the herds of buffaloes and zebras, the comedy of warthogs mating … and wildlife I never even knew existed before. It was absolutely exhilarating to observe such diversity. Sometimes, it resembled an untouched Garden of Eden, or maybe the concentration of animals being rounded up for Noah’s Ark. They were nearly a bit too easy to find at times. Sometimes, I was conscious that the animals of Lake Nakuru Park are enclosed, like a humongous outdoor zoo.

It was onwards for me after that. Glenn dropped me off at the bustling bus station in Nakuru town (the fourth-largest urban centre in Kenya), where one of the many conductors loudly pounding the side of the buses persuaded me to travel to Lake Baringo on the other side of the equator. I had not really been planning on going there, but, on impulse, I decided that I might as well explore further.

On the bus, I found myself wedged between two drunken old women, wizened with age, who were sharing a bottle of something potent. They motioned the bottle to me a good few times to take a swig. I gestured back: not a chance! By now, the fertile farmlands were gradually giving way to a Turkana-type desert landscape. Nearer Lake Baringo—which is about 100km north of Nakuru—the bridges were long washed away, necessitating a hazardous crawl through the rock-strewn riverbeds. Men were hanging off the sides of the bus hollering and gesticulating at the people on bicycles who were holding on to the rear of moving lorries. The lorries themselves were crammed with people standing on the back, and were puffing out monstrous clouds of black exhaust just like every other vehicle on Kenya’s roads. During one of the many breakdowns on the journey, fruit sellers stormed the bus pounding loudly at the sides trying to sell melons and peanuts through the open windows. Every journey in Africa is an adventure; passenger boredom is unknown.

Lake Baringo turned out to be one of my favourite places in the whole of Kenya. The freshwater lake, which is picturesquely encircled by cliffs and dotted with islands, appeared to have taken on an unusual red-purple hue from the silt on the bed of the lake. The campsite, right on the water’s edge, was really just the grassy lawn of a modest colonial-era house. It belonged to an old-stager, an upper-class white-Kenyan lady named Betty. The afternoon I arrived, a party of white-Kenyan visitors came to stay for a few days. We met up at the lakeshore shortly afterwards and bonded almost immediately. Having been virtually alone in the previous campsites, I was glad of their company and the laugh we were having together.

This is hippopotamus country. My very first night there, I was woken up in my tent by really loud chomping coming from literally feet away. Here we go again, was my first fearful thought. But I soon relaxed because I had been forewarned that the hippos would graze close to the tents at night. They are unlikely to attack unless scared by bright lights or loud noises. I was more excited than scared this time, though still not entirely at ease. I knew that hippos are vegetarians, but I could imagine that a mutant carnivore might want me for dessert. It is
not knowing
what is out there in the darkness that is really scary.

Lake Baringo is also ornithological heaven. The stillness of dawn is delightfully disturbed by the singing, sweet as harp music, of hundreds upon hundreds of birds, most of them spectacularly painted species of every size and shape.

‘There are nearly five hundred different species here,’ old Betty told me as we breakfasted at first light.

She herself was an avid ‘twitcher.’

While I was keeping a beady eye on the crocodiles, sunbathing on the grass at the lakeshore beside my tent—I was pretty sure they were keeping several beady eyes on me—I encountered Ruarí. At 6”9’ tall, it would have been hard to miss this outgoing Scot who was doing voluntary service in Kenya. He had grown up on the Isle of Skye, and had just completed training in Edinburgh to be a teacher. For the last six months, he had been working in a school a few kilometres outside Nairobi. We traded stories about our respective adventures and experiences.

On the second afternoon, Ruarí and I climbed up the near vertical cliffs set about two kilometres back from the lake, clambering up the scree with great difficulty. At the top we were rewarded by spectacular views of the lake beneath, with its many picturesque islands, some of them inhabited, to judge from the tell-tale trickles of smoke.

We encountered a barefoot herdsman tending his goats, the only human being around on the high plateau. He was carrying a bow and arrow. He could speak English surprisingly well, and seemed glad to have someone to talk to.

‘Do you see that island there?’ he asked us, as he pointed with his arm to one of the islands with a line of smoke rising from it. ‘It’s called Devil’s Island. That one is uninhabited, but there has always been a fire on the island. It never goes out.’

I could not quite follow his explanation.

Ruarí and I had difficulty finding a safe way back down the cliff again. After some time, our friendly herdsman, who was watching our predicament from above, came to our rescue and, with his nimble-footed flock in tow, benevolently guided us part of the way down.

‘It will rain later on today,’ he predicted.

As it was about forty-degrees Celsius at the time and there were unblemished blue skies to the far horizon, Ruarí and I exchanged glances of disbelief.

‘I have already lost fifty-four goats in the drought out of my total herd of sixty-eight,’ he lamented.

We could only sympathise. His fourteen remaining goats were making music, the bells around their necks clinking merrily. When we stopped to take our bearings, I pointed to a pristinely tarred stretch of wide road below, apparently coming from nowhere and leading nowhere.

‘Aye, probably the best road in all of Kenya,’ Ruarí agreed in his Highlands burr.

During an entire hour of our descent, there were at most only a dozen people walking on it, and one cyclist—not a solitary vehicle.

‘That stretch of road leads to former President Moi’s home village,’ Betty explained, back at the campsite. ‘Moi was a typical “Big Man” of Africa; a virtual dictator with a fondness for his own name. In the Rift Valley, for example, he changed “Hoyes Bridge” to “Moi’s Bridge.” That took great imagination, boys!’