lake turkana and the north

What a trip this was! Totally different from our hike up Mount Kenya, but just as amazing and worth while. Tho it lacked the physical stress of the mountain, our safari to northern Kenya was certainly strenuous in other ways. To start off with, I should mention that we were with this great safari company called Gametrackers. The group is highly recommended by multiple Kenya books and guides, as well as being the Whitfield’s safari company of choice. The trips Gametrackers goes on tend to be full of more adventurous people, and less about gaping at animals. Secondly, I should also add that I could probably write an entire book just about the people who came on this trip with us. There were nine of us tourists in total (including Laur and me) plus a driver and a cook. We drove in a big Land Rover that had three rows of three seats each, all of which were covered in a leopard printed fabric. This was obviously to get us in the mood for the safari. O man did it work! The rows, unfortunately, were set up on a tiered system, I have no idea why they designed the truck like this, but it made it so that if you were sitting in the back seats you couldn’t see anything unless you were short or scrunched down or leaned out the window. Not the best of design if you are more than 5’2 if you ask me.

Who ever said that the roads up to Lake Turkana are the worst in Kenya was right. They were terrible: always really bumpy. One day we were driving along deserted bandit roads, the next we were going thru sand deserts. Then it would become wet and muddy and we almost got stuck in the mud. But always, the roads had huge holes and ditches that made it impossible to go in a straight line. Instead cars before us had created new roads off to the side to avoid the pits. Every day we got totally bumped around and jostled up. Things we had in our bag on the floor would end up splayed all over the floor of the car because they had been shaken out. Also there was an incredible amount of dust all the time so each day when we got out of the car, we looked like a different race than when we had gotten in.

Back to the people on the trip. First there’s Helen. Helen was a 19 year old redhead from Bath, England (go on say it with the accent). She was taking her gap year between finishing her A-levels and starting at University. She is going to Liverpool next year to become a doctor. As we soon found out, Helen had previously been in France for 6 months working as a chalet girl (or if you’re like me and didn’t know what a chalet girl is, she was a personal cook for a different guests each week). I have a feeling that Helen has never met a single person who did not like her. She is English to a T, but there is something about her that is really warm (not to say that most English people aren’t warm). She absolutely loved children and I would bet $100 dollars that, had no one stopped her, she would have adopted 10 children over the course of the entire trip. She waved to every single—and I mean every single—person we passed. She would even wave across other people’s laps. Helen was the right amount of nice. By that I mean that had she been any nicer, I would have had to kill her. But as she was, she was great, most especially because she had an edge to her, and she was really quite amazingly smart.

Alright. After Helen there’s Bev and Lee, who were somewhere in their early 70’s, were sisters, with four year between them. These two women are probably the greatest people I have ever met. They are both originally from New Zealand, tho Bev now lives in Florida. Bev has literally been to ¾ of the countries in the world: she spends 6 months of every year traveling to crazy cool places, like Lake Turkana, Exhibit A. She’s fantastic. She says things like “Aww fuck it!” and “He’s a reaaal baaastard!” She boogies to the showers at 6am, and drinks brandy heavily, beginning at 4pm and ending, who knows when. Lee is a bit more subdued. She has a really amazing history with husbands and boyfriends, and when it comes to traveling she is almost as experienced as she older sister. Just seeing them on this trip together obviously made me think about what margsie and I are going to be doing when we are 70. Hopefully we will be bumping along in some leopard patterned Land Rover to see an amazing new place in the Mediterranean.

So, then there was Jim. Jim was 33 from Texas. He used to live in Russia for a while and as such likes hard liquor and was very proud of the going away presents his Russian friends had given him. He was kind of weird. But cool. He didn’t like lots of noise because he wanted to enjoy the peacefulness of the wilderness in silence. That experience might have been easier had he not been snapping photos of literally every single thing we saw. He also had a leaning problem, but he leaned across you to get the photo of the 100th gazelle we saw. Hand in hand with Jim, was Jeff. It must be noted that before this trip these two men did not know each other, tho they have some amazing similarities. Jeff was a 41 year old single (never been married) psychiatrist from Seattle. He had some serious OCD qualities—for example, always putting his camera perfectly back into its case after EACH picture— and tho he never said as much, Jeff seemed totally baffled by the fact that he was 41 and not married. Jim and Jeff, or JJ as we named them, both had the exact same super zoom canon powershot camera! With matching straps too! Both also had this hysterical habit of making everyone else take pictures of them with their own camera. Here’s how it would work:

Jim (or Jeff): Hey would you mind taking a picture of me with my camera?
One of the rest of us: Sure why not.
JJ hands over the camera and then walks off towards the selected scene. Then a few different things might happen. The first is that he would say, “Now this is an action shot so just take it while I’m walking towards you” or he might sit down and look off into the far distance (not at the camera) and we were to take the picture of him being pensive. After a few photos I couldn’t keep the camera steady I was laughing too hard, so they started asking someone else. What I don’t understand about the whole thing was, what on earth are they going to tell everyone back home when showing these photos…“o this is me at the lake, and this is me again at the forest…yea someone else took the photos of me…o and in this one, my friend just. HAPPENED to get a picture of me looking off into the distance…”

To finish off the list of our fellow passengers there was Daniela (Dani) and Caroline. Caroline is 29 and, as she quite thoroughly told us the first day, has a Swedish passport, but her mother thinks she is English, her father thinks she is Swedish, and she thinks she is Portuguese. She works at Heathrow Airport, has a weird English accent and also pronounces her “th’s” like “F’s”. Caroline is an actress in the same way my grandmother is an actress. Pretty much every second of every day is a chance, in her mind, to tell another story (which of course inevitably turns into a full fledged play) or make a comment on the goings on of our trip. Literally, and I am not kidding about this, on our 7th day of traveling we drove from 8am to 6pm and Caroline did not let a single bump, person, animal, or pile of shit pass us by without informing the rest of the car that said item was coming up. I listened to my ipod the entire day. Despite being annoying and irritating, her stories were sometimes lifesavers. I mean this in the sense that there were times when the driving was so bad and we had been going for so long that listening mindlessly to her talk about her ex-husband, or her childhood as near-Swedish royalty became quite captivating. Jim was most annoyed by Caroline, for obvious reasons.

In case you were wondering, because I know I certainly was at the time, Caroline was married when we was 19 to a 46 year old English man who tried to lock her in her room and wouldn’t let her drink or have any fun. So she decided to piss him off by traveling around the world. This led to their divorce 2 years ago. Dani, also 29, was Caroline’s sea diving instructor when Caroline was in Thailand during this world trip. Dani is from Malta and is a quite blah. She hates beer but loves vodka. Also, our driver had a raving crush on her.

Our driver’s baptized christian name was Joseph but his Kikuyu name was Kamunge, so we all called him that. He was a really genuinely nice guy, who did a lot of really scary driving for us. We gave him a big tip. Our cook’s name was Boxson, tho everyone called him Bosco because we all thought that was his name until the very last day. I helped him with a few meals and he gave me the Kikuyu name Wangico.

Now, for what we actually did each day. There were 8 days in total. Some more exciting than others. Here goes…

Day 1: Our first day was meant to begin when we met the rest of the group in Nanyuki around 2pm. Instead, at noon we got a call saying that the vehicle had been in a crash and wouldn’t be there until night. We met everyone at a local lodge and drove a few hours in the dark to the Riverside lodge (or something like that). Had dinner and went to bed early because we had to get up early the next morning.

Day 2: Woke up at 4am and drove north to the Samburu National Park. We went on two game drives where we saws elephants, cheetahs eating a gazelle, tons of different birds, these little miniature deer-like animals called dik-diks. I know what a great name! It was neat to see all them all, these diverse strange animals like giraffe and stuff, tho honestly that was not why we were on the trip so it was a bit worrisome at first. But the safari really only centered around animals for a day or so, and then we moved on to the people and culture of the north which was great.
Day 3: We drove from Samburu to Marsabit. This took quite a while, passed lots of little, very isolated towns, full of people wearing authentic kikuyu or samburu clothes. This was the first time we came across people who wouldn’t let us take pictures of them. The reasons vary. Some people say that taking a picture will bring bad luck, others that the camera is the evil eye. Others, quite smartly if you ask me, realize that what tourists want more than anything else are pictures and therefore they now charge us to take their photo. We camped that night in this beautiful forest clearing on the edge of the village. Besides the picture thing, the people in these villages are really interested in us. Though most of them can’t actually communicate with us beyond “hello” on both sides, they seemed to like how much we were interested in them and in their culture. They always ask our names, and interestingly, each time I told them I was Sophia everyone would ask me if I was Muslim. I guess Sophia is a Muslim name around here…? We went on a game drive through the forest nearby and we saw a leopard which was really neat. Other than that we didn’t see many more animals, but it actually gave me the chance to really look at the trees and other parts of the forest. There were these trees that had begun growing out of another tree’s branch. It was really cool.

Day 4: Drove from Marsabit through the desert to Kalacha. The desert is just infinitely big and vast and never-ending and HOT. As we drove we realized that literally we were surrounded b y mirages of huge lakes. Off in the distance it looked like the trees were floating in rivers. But it was all just from the heat. Pretty cool. The most insane part was that we would have been driving for a few hours through hot desert and suddenly come across a cluster of huts. Right there in the middle of nowhere. And there was no water nearby, or that I could see. It was just so remote and isolated. As we were driving through these different parts of Kenya I noticed how each town has built their houses out of totally different materials, which of course were dependent on what was around the town. For example, in the desert the houses were made out of branches and big pieced of cloth. At Lake Turkana they were made out of reeds. Near Maralal they were made from stones wedged between beams, and at another place they were made entire from grass. It was really neat to see all these different, yet very simple, homes that had been constructed out of what was available. When we got to the campsite we discovered that there was a swimming pool! Basically this missionary preacher man (or something) had brought in a windmill thingy that brought water to the village. In the process the water went through a water tank, which was our swimming pool. The town of Kalacha is home to some of the most beautiful people I have ever seen in my entire life. These women are so stunningly gorgeous I literally could not stop staring at them. They have the most incredibly high cheekbones and their skin shines and shimmers with the light. Of course I didn’t get any real photos of them because we weren’t allowed. We drove a little outside the village to the edge of the Chalbi desert to watch the sun set. It was amazing. There hasn’t been any rain there for something like 7 years! The ground was so dry that the cracks went down 4 inches in some places. It felt like walking on a giant brownie. That might seem weird, but that’s what it felt like. It wasn’t sand the way a lot of deserts are, instead it was just really dry earth and the cracks made it spongy almost, like the way a brownie feels. As the sun set I literally saw the moment at the very beginning of the Lion King and of course in my head I sang “Ah—sinwenyaa” which made me think of CRI. That night we went skinny dipping in the pool, just the girls. But it was great to have this group of women, youngest being 19 oldest somewhere in their 70s all in the pool swimming under the stars. And o the stars! There are so many out there you wouldn’t believe it. I see the southern cross every night and the big dipper just above the horizon. And scorpio swirls around in its loops. It’s pretty amazing.

Day 5: We drove from Kalacha to Lake Turkana! Stopped for a bit in North Horr, where we still couldn’t take pictures. Lake Turkana is gorgeous; it looks like the sea, it is so big and vast. I had thought that since it was a lake the landscape around it would have been green and lush, but it wasn’t. Instead the desert continued on right up to the water’s edge. We stayed in authentic Turkana huts made out of palm reeds. It was completely amazing, but at times it got unbearably hot. I think the week before it had been 112 degrees. The hardest part of it being so hot was that there was this amazing, cool, beautiful lake right in front of us that just called to us. But it is totally filled with crocodiles, that WILL EAT YOU. So we couldn’t go swimming. Watched the sun set over the lake and I felt like I was living in a postcard, it was just like all those cheesy photos of island paradises. But I was actually there. On our drive into the village that is nearby the lake we had met, as always, tons and tons of the local people. They invited us to come later to watch the football (aka soccer) match, so around 9pm we all piled into the safari truck and bumped along into town. The guys were so thrilled that we had actually come to watch. We all sat in this grass hut where very recently someone had installed a TV set with a satellite. They guys told us that it was only a few months old. It was totally surreal being there, literally in the middle of nowhere with not a light in site, watching the football game with 30 avid fans all screaming in Swahili at the screen. I met and got talking with some really interesting people. One guy, named Sammy talked to me for a while. Earlier that day I had actually bought a necklace from him so I was really glad that he had put business aside and we were just talking like two normal people. But then near the end of the night he asked me if I wanted to come back to his house and look at more necklaces. It was a weird moment of realization that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to break the status that we had set up. The status that said I was a white tourist with money and he was a black native with none.

Day 6: We stayed at the Lake for the whole day. First we all piled into this motor boat (that looked something like the Anna Cady) and went to some islands nearby. The lake is so big that getting to a “nearby island” means an hour in the boat. Anyways we saw these guys who were fishermen, drying their week’s catch out in the sun. There’s a picture up of the fish. We saw some crocodiles swimming around and tried to cheer them on to eat this bird that was in the water near them, but no luck. We then went to this tiny island where the turkana people had set up shines and temples and our guide person who was taking us around and explaining the history of the places we were seeing, told us about all these rites and rituals the people perform. One was that every child when they turn 10 must have their bottom two front teeth pulled out. He wouldn’t say why, there was some communication failures I think, but it was true because every person I saw there, didn’t have his or her bottom front two teeth. The other thing they practice is that before any boy is allowed to marry he has to go kill a hippo and bring back its rib. We asked how this was done in modern times and our guide said that they do it once a year now and have to write a letter to the wildlife people to get permission to kill one hippo. It was a weird moment of clashing of the old traditional and the new modernist worlds. Lake Turkana is home to the people who wear all those necklaces around their necks. And as we learned the necklaces signify that a girl is engaged. Girls can become engaged at birth, but most start wearing the beads when they are 11 or so. After that we went to a village on another island. Again like the photos, these people have become really smart and now charge tourists to come walk around their village. The price itself wasn’t that much (about $7 a person) but there was something unsettling about the whole thing that made both me and Lauren decide not to partake. I think it had something to do with the fact that it reminded us both too much of Plymouth Plantation. That is not to say that these people were putting on an act and pretending to be authentic and poor and hungry (because they actually were all these things), but there certinaly was something a bit contrived about the whole thing. Anyway, Lauren and I sat in the boat and just enjoyed the landscapes and talked and then some of the kids waded out to our boat and we had a good time with them. It’s interesting what kind of communication passes between adults (I am an adult in the eyes of these kids at least) and children when language is not an option. Instead of talking everyone just smiles a lot at each other, and plays in the water, makes faces at each other, or claps and plays hand games. Or course then came some men who tried to sell us things…as always white = money. That night this guy from Texas named Chris (everyone in town called him Doctor Chris) came to our little campsite for dinner. Chris was 32 and was working for Doctors without Boarders and had been in the north of Kenya for a month. He plans to be there another 2 months. He was working with children who are malnourished and handing out supplemental food packages to starving children. He was a really cool guy.

Day 7: This day marked our return journey. We traveled a different route home than on the way there, but it was just as bumpy and shaky, if not more so, than before. Caroline spent the entire day commenting on every single thing we passed and I spent the entire day listening to my ipod. When we stopped for lunch we ran into this other safari group. They were also using a Gametrackers vehicle. We found out they were actually missionaries all from America, on their way to built a house in some remote town up north. They were completely hysterical. One guy had Jesus tattooed on his arm, and another was decked out in a FULL safari outfit. And I mean full. I don’t think he was missing a single article of clothing that could be used for the stereotypical safarigoer. There is a picture of him up online. We spent the night in Maralel at this campsite where there was a pen of racing camels and a bar and restaurant. It was fun.

Day 8: The plan for the actual trip is to drive from Maralel all the way back to Nairobi. But for Lauren and I it made more sense for us to get off before Nairobi at a town called Nyaharuru, or T-Falls. Yesterday was such a crazy day in itself I think I will write about it in a separate entry.

Overall, the trip was incredible. Mostly because we saw parts of Kenya that were totally different from what we have been living in. It was dry and hot and isolated. And the people were different and didn’t speak English. If we hadn’t gone I wouldn’t know Kenya really. I would know Nairobi and Nanyuki and the Highlands. I would certainly know the mountain. But by going we saw a totally different side of this country, one which most tourists don’t get a chance to see.

there are two new albums up online. one from the ball and the other is from this trip.

www.sophieskenyapictures.shutterfly.com
password: sophie

much love to all

sophiebess