Jt kenya

PHILIP BRIGGS Philip Briggs is a travel and environmental writer specialising in Africa. Born in Britain and raised in South Africa, he has backpacked through many African countries, researching editions of the Bradt Guides, returning regularly to update his material. He has also led wildlife and bird watching tours. He is the author of a dozen travel guides, Journey through Uganda, with photographer David Pluth, and the spectacular coffeetable book, Africa: Continent of Contrasts in collaboration with photographers Martin Harvey and Ariadne Van Zandbergen.

He has contributed more than 100 magazine features to the likes of Wanderlust, BBC Wildlife, Travel Africa, Africa Geographic and Africa Birds and Birding. For Journey through Kenya (which was first published in 1982) Philip carried out major revisions and updates to Brian Tetley’s original text, bringing the book completely up to date.

AMIN • WILLETTS • TETLEY

BRIAN TETLEY Born in Birmingham, England, in 1934, Brian Tetley was an internationally known travel writer with a keen interest in wildlife and cultures, who worked for many years in Britain’s Fleet Street. He was a popular columnist on Kenya’s Nation newspaper during the late 1960s and worked regularly with Mohamed Amin from 1970 until his death in 1995. He was Editorial Director at Camerapix and wrote the text for Cradle of Mankind, Journey through Kenya, Karachi, Journey through Nepal, Defenders of Pakistan, Mo: Front-line Cameraman, The Roof of The World and On God’s Mountain: the story of Mount Kenya.

KENYA

DUNCAN WILLETTS One of Africa and Europe’s major creative photographers Duncan Willetts was born in England in 1945. A regular contributor to Time-Life, Newsweek, and other major magazines and newspapers around the world, his books with Mohamed Amin include Journey through Pakistan, Journey through Kenya, Journey through Tanzania, Karachi, The Last of the Maasai, Railway Across the Equator, Journey through Nepal, Lahore, Kenya: The Magic Land, Roof of the World, Journey through Zimbabwe, On God’s Mountain: the story of Mount Kenya, Pakistan: From Mountains to Sea, Journey through Maldives, Journey through Namibia, Journey through Jordan, Journey through Seychelles and Spectrum Guides to African Wildlife Safaris, Kenya, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Seychelles, Tanzania, Maldives, Namibia, Jordan, South Africa and Ethiopia.

JOURNEY THROUGH

MOHAMED AMIN Long acknowledged Africa’s greatest photographer cameraman, the late Mohamed Amin recorded and filmed the major events of Africa, Asia and the Middle East from the late 1950s until his untimely death in 1996.

He was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II in Britain’s 1992 honours to add to the many coveted individual awards he holds, including the University of California’s Theodore E. Kruglak Special Award, the USA George Polk Award, Overseas Press Club of America Award, Britain’s Valiant for Truth Award, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, the Royal Television Society’s Judge’s Award, and the Guild of Television ‘Cameramen’s Cameraman‘ award.

Mohamed Amin was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1943, and was the chief executive of Camerapix group of television and publishing companies based in Nairobi. He was also the Africa bureau chief of Reuters Television, the world’s largest television news agency.

A fellow of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, he also held one of Pakistan’s highest civil honours — the TamghaiImtiaz — and in 1994 the President of Kenya honoured him with the Order of the Grand Warrior..

His books include Pilgrimage to Mecca (1978), Mecca (1980), Cradle of Mankind (1981), Run Rhino Run (1982), Ivory Crisis (1983), Portraits of Africa (1983), Railway across the Equator (1986), Defenders of Pakistan (1988), and others with Duncan Willetts (see below).

J ourney through

KENYA MOHAMED AMIN • DUNCAN WILLETTS • BRIAN TETLEY

N

ature has been generous to Kenya. Like pearls upon a string its natural wonders spill out across the landscape, from fiery desert to snowcapped tropical peak through volcanoes, inland seas, the mighty Rift Valley itself and finally down to an azure coral coast.

Over this spectacular setting wander the last of the earth’s great concentrations of plains game — the wildebeest and zebra herds, graceful gazelles, elephants, rhinos, buffaloes, stately giraffes and the predators who live on them, the lions, leopards, cheetahs and hyenas.

Many rare species roam in this great natural wilderness, clinging to a tenuous existence.

This ancient land has also recently yielded up invaluable secrets about the origin of mankind itself. Tectonic movements in the earth’s plates have revealed rich treasures of fossil remains, which have helped scientists date the emergence of earliest man.

Overlaid on this garden of Eden is modern Kenya, a country of neat tea plantations, busy factories, skyscrapered city and bustling tourist resorts. Uniformed chauffeurs driving mini-vans to take international businessmen to stare at zebras.

Such contrasts, and the spirit of this remarkable country, are brilliantly captured in Journey through Kenya, a book written and photographed by people who have made their lives there, and illustrated with 150 outstanding colour photographs.

Journey through Kenya is a volume in the Journey series of illustrated books produced by Camerapix Publishers International.

Other titles in this series: Journey through Ethiopia Journey through Jordan Journey through Maldives Journey through Namibia Journey through Nepal Journey through Pakistan Journey through Seychelles Journey through Tanzania Journey through Uganda Journey through Zimbabwe

Jacket photographs: (front) Majestic elephant in Maasai Mara National Park; (back) Wildebeest at sunset in Maasai Mara National Park.

PO Box 45048, 00100 GPO, Nairobi, Kenya

Price: UK£34.99

JO URNEY THRO UG H

KENYA

J O URNEY THRO UG H

KENYA

• MOHAMED AMIN • DUNCAN WILLETTS • BRIAN TETLEY •

This book was designed and produced by Camerapix Publishers International PO Box 45048, 00100 GPO Nairobi, Kenya Revised edition 2017 © Camerapix 2017 ISBN: 978-1-904722-63-2 Production Director: Rukhsana Haq Revised Text: Philip Briggs Editor: Roger Barnard Editorial Assistant: Cecilia Gaitho Design: Rachel Musyimi Picture Research: Abdul Rehman and Sam Kimani All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in Singapore.

All pictures by Camerapix except the following:Ariadne Van Zandbergen: Pages 35, 38-39, 94, 96, 152, 156-157, 170-171, 175, 178-179.

David Pluth: Pages 32 (top left), 56-57, 74-75.

Hassan Chaudhry: Page 31.

Karl Ammaan: Pages 2-3, 17, 64-65, 110, 115, 121, 132, 133, 134-135, 138

(top and bottom), 147.

Kenya Airport Authority: Page 25.

Kenya National Highways Authority: Page 71.

Nairobi Railway Museum: Page 27.

Robert Harding: Pages 30, 44-45, 46, 47, 76, 117, 142, 149, 160, 164, 166, 167, 181, 185, 190.

Shutterstock: Cover, Backcover, Endpapers, Title page, Contents page, 6-7, 8-9, 14, 15, 22-23, 48, 51, 59, 111, 159, 168, 184, 188.

Half-title: Colourful beads used as decoration by the Maasai tribe of Kenya.

Title page: The impala is perhaps the most graceful of the plains antelopes.

The zigzagging leaps and bounds of its escape make it difficult for a predator to select a victim.

Contents: Male leopard resting on a tree branch in Nakuru National Park.

Following pages: Aerial view of Mount Kenya covered with snow and white puffy clouds. It is Kenya’s highest mountain at 3,199 metres (17,058 feet) and Africa’s second-highest, after Kilimanjaro.

CONTENTS 1. Journey through Kenya

9

2. Nairobi — City in the Sun

23

3. Through the Great Rift Valley

39

4. Westward Ho!

57

5. The Deserts and the Lake

81

6. Mountain Greenery

105

7. Elephant Country

129

8. The Coral Coast

157

9. The North Coast

179

1. Journey through Kenya

10

Previous pages: The wildebeest without a doubt, remain the star of the world’s greatest animal spectacular – the annual migration from Serengeti to Maasai Mara.

Right: An early morning game flight in a hot-air balloon is the high point of a Maasai Mara visit for some.

K

enya is the archetypal safari destination. Scenically, it represents Africa on the grandest imaginable scale: a land of bejewelled palm-fringed Indian Ocean beaches and vast freshwater inland seas, of snow-capped mountains and parched boulder-strewn deserts, of wide open plains and cloistered rainforests, of bustling modern cities and timeworn Swahili backwaters, of modern skyscrapers and jungle bound-ruins.

Kenya is dominated in geographical terms by the Great Rift Valley, a vast kilometre-deep trough that bisects the country from north to south, its floor studded with dormant cones, smoking craters and other volcanic relics. Latitudinally, it is one of a dozen countries worldwide to span both hemispheres, and unique among them in that the jagged peaks of Mount Kenya support permanent glacial activity within a few kilometres of the equator.

As diverse culturally as it is scenically, Kenya is home to dozens of different indigenous ethnic groups, each with its own language, customs and history. These range from the coastal Swahili, whose laid-back Islamic culture is strongly informed by a millennium of maritime trade and interaction with Arabia, to the pastoralist and staunchly traditionalist Maasai and Samburu, to the El Molo fishermen of the Turkana region and agricultural Kikuyu of the central highlands.

Above all, however, Kenya is renowned for its wildlife. It is here that you’ll find the devastatingly wild and beautiful African landscapes celebrated by the likes of Hemingway and Karen ‘Out of Africa’ Blixen in the early 20th century; here that you can come face-to-face with the fabulous beasts beamed around the world in television documentaries such as the BBC’s Big Cat Diary, and in reality programmes such as Survivor Africa.

Big Cat Diary was filmed in Kenya’s Maasai Mara Wildlife Reserve, also the site of the legendary annual migration of up to two million wildebeest, which arrive from the Serengeti Plains in neighbouring Tanzania every August, and stick around for a couple of months before traipsing back southwards. Survivor, by contrast, was set in the remote Shaba National Reserve, which together with the near-contiguous Samburu-Buffalo Springs complex protects a host of dry-country speci species whose range is now practically confined to Kenya — the bulky Grevy’s zebra, singularly handsome reticulated giraffe and stately Beisa oryx among them.

You don’t need to travel long distances to see wildlife here. Most journeys through Kenya start in Nairobi, a bustling modern capital of four million people, one that boasts genuinely world-class amenities

11

12

13

and packs an economic punch matched by a mere handful of cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, where the capital’s industrial belt ends, practically within 10 minutes’ walk of East Africa’s busiest international airport, so begins the extraordinary Nairobi National Park, a unique sanctuary, unfenced on three sides, where lions and cheetahs are frequently seen in action below the shimmering skyscrapers of the central business district. There are few other places in the world, perhaps none, where the ancient rhythms of untamed nature co-exist in such close geographic proximity to a modern city.

To a first-time visitor to Kenya there is magic at night, when every tree becomes an elephant and every rock a rhino. In most national parks there are lodges where these animals parade under the light of electric moons. These performances were staged long ago — before modern man took his first footsteps, perhaps near the shores of Lake Turkana at a palaeontological site called Koobi Fora, where some of the oldest known human fossils have been unearthed, signifying an occupancy that spans several million years.

The incredible wildlife that inhabits Kenya’s wild places should never be taken for granted. Indeed, were it not for the dedication to conservation — and its potential to attract the big tourist dollars — exhibited by successive governments, there might be very little left today.

Contrast that to the situation in the late 19th century when the first Europeans arrived in the East African interior, to find it inhabited by a seemingly inexhaustible stock of large mammals. This wildlife had coexisted with, and even supported, hominid populations for millions of years before this, yet within a matter of decades, much of it was gone. The Mombasa railway, dubbed ‘Iron Snake’ by the Maasai and the Kikuyu, brought the first tourists, a Victorian and Edwardian elite of dukes and earls, peers and princes, and high-born ‘sport’ hunters who took a heavy toll of Eden’s beasts. In I909, President Roosevelt, in the name of science, killed hundreds of rare specimens for American natural history collections. Did the Smithsonian Institution really need 13 stuffed rhinoceroses?

The wildlife massacres reached a first peak during World War Two when Kenya accommodated — and fed — thousands of prisoners from the world conflict. They were mainly Italians from neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia. Kenya was also a supply point for ships en route to other imperial possessions that required food. The herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats in the Highlands were supplemented with Thomson’s gazelle, impala, zebra, eland and other antelopes.

The war’s end, however, brought a reaction to the slaughter of the previous 50 years. Prior to that, when conservationists had proposed

14

15

Above: The Thomson’s Gazelle, named after Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson, inhabits Africa’s savannah and grassland. In the background is a safari car.

Left: A shepherd leads a flock of goats in the dusty semi-arid savannah.

16

Left: ‘An ancient, outdated animal, complex and fiercely territorial’. Amboseli was once famous for its rhino population, but the animal’s future is now under threat.

a national parks system connecting a network of animal kingdoms by the threads of ages-old game trails, rivers and lakes, the idea had aroused scorn from officialdom. Then, in 1946, against the opposition of farmer, sportsman and hunter, Kenya’s first national park was inaugurated under the administration of a wildlife zealot, Mervyn Cowie.

Attitudes changed swiftly after that. Post independence, Jomo Kenyatta, who became Kenya’s first head of state in 1963, declared: ‘The natural resources of this country — its wildlife which offers such an attraction to visitors from all over the world, the beautiful places in which these animals live, the mighty forests which guard the water catchment areas so vital to the survival of man and beast — are a priceless heritage for the future.’ Since 1963 the network of 12 national parks and reserves created in the late colonial era have been boosted by a further 39 reserves set aside permanently for the conservation of animals and marine life. Together with existing forest reserves, more

17

Above: Aggressive Grevy’s zebras in an explosion of action.

Zebras have a call which sounds like high-pitched bark of a dog.

than 10 percent of Kenya’s total land area is now lawfully exempt from settlers, timber dealers and speculators.

Kenya’s leaders long ago recognised the true value of wildlife. If that wildlife could be preserved then the curiosity that first attracted the world’s elite at the beginning of the century might attract millions of ordinary people in the future. They could come more quickly by aeroplane and at a much lower cost. And they would bring with them the foreign exchange that Kenya needed to fund its human development.

Kenya’s tourist industry went from strength to strength in the first 20 years of independence, and by the late 1970s the country’s name had become practically synonymous with the word ‘safari’. Then disaster struck in the form of an unprecedented influx of commercial poachers, mostly from neighbouring Somalia, targeting the country’s dense population of elephant and rhino, the former prized for its ivory, the latter for the reputed aphrodisiac properties of its horn.

18

19

Opposite: The king of Amboseli proudly surveys his domain.

Following pages: With what appears to be little effort, the dances of Samburu moran include exuberant straightlegged leaps from the ground.

All Kenya’s parks and reserves were affected to some degree, but none more so than Tsavo West and East, whose black rhino population was reduced from several thousands to fewer than 50 in the space of a few years, while its once prodigious elephant herds were poached at a rate of 1,000 animals annually. By the late 1980s, visitors to Tsavo were less likely to see living elephants than they were noxious heaps of cadavers representing entire herds that had been gunned down for the sake of a few adults tusks. It was a bleak time for conservation in Kenya; many people justifiably feared that rhino and elephant would be extirpated before the start of the 21st century.

Fortunately, the government was able to reverse the trend in the early 1990s. One turning point was the controversial CITES ban on the sale of ivory, and another the merging of Kenya’s disparate and ineffectual conservation bodies into the unified Kenya Wildlife Service. The symbolic burning of the Kenya government’s entire ivory stock by President Daniel arap Moi in 1992 drew much criticism from conservationists at the time, while his ‘shoot on sight’ policy towards poachers did little to endear him to human rights activists. But the result was the virtual elimination of commercial poaching. Kenya today supports one of the most prolific elephant populations in Africa, it is the second most important stronghold for rhino (after South Africa) — and its safari industry is stronger than ever.

Kenya’s variety is reflected in the aureole of pink shrouded mist that swirls among the loftiest, ice-clad spires of Africa’s second tallest mountain, and is distilled in the crystal cool waters of Lake Naivasha.

The country’s vivacity bubbles on the waters of the 700-kilometrelong Tana River as it jumps, newborn, down the shoulders of Mount Kenya on its long run to the Indian Ocean, to emerge amidst the coconut palms that line the Swahili Coast. Its humanity is etched in the sun-wizened faces of the Maasai elders who tread the plains clad only in a traditional red robe, and it bursts from the mouths of the uniformed children who erupt giggling from schoolyards in suburban Nakuru or Nairobi.

As for the spectacular wildlife, it can be seen, well, literally everywhere — from the lions that hunt gazelles on the plains of the Maasai Mara to the elephants that drink at the waterholes of Tsavo, from the mischievous monkeys that chatter in the coastal and montane forests to the pink-hued flamingos that aggregate in their millions in the shallows of Lakes Nakuru and Bogoria, from the kaleidoscopic variety fish that swirl through the offshore reefs of Watamu to the killer crocodiles that breed in the waters of Lake Turkana … Kenya is today, as ever, the ultimate safari destination.

2. Nairobi — City in the Sun

24

Previous pages: Nairobi’s skyline enjoys an eclectic view of fine tall buildings including the 105 metres (344 feet) high rotunda of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) which dominates the heart of the city.

Below: Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

P

ractically all roads in Kenya lead to Nairobi. So, for that matter, do most railway tracks and domestic, regional and international flights. The Kenyan capital is East Africa’s most populous city, supporting an estimated three million people, and its most important commercial hub, as signified by the presence of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the main United Nations (UN) Office for Africa, not to mention the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the continent’s fourth-largest.

The main international gateway not only to Kenya but also to the rest of East Africa, Nairobi is home to the region’s two busiest airports.

Outlying Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, named after the founding father of independent Kenya.

There are two terminals. Terminal 1A covers 26,000 square metres.

It was designed to handle both arriving and departing passengers.

Commissioning of the new facility is a key milestone in the authority’s efforts to expand and modernise Jomo Kenyatta International Airport with the goal of enhancing customer experience, and to become the main hub in the region.

The new terminal has massively improved the experience of customers at the Airport, besides guaranteeing operational efficiency, boosting security by separating departing and arriving passengers, and improved quality of service to airport users. It has the capacity of handling 7.5 million passengers annually from Africa, Asia and Europe.

Terminal 2 is used by low cost carriers and the original terminal, located on the north side of the runway, is used by the Kenya Air force, and is sometimes referred to as Old Embakasi Airport. While the more central Wilson Airport is the main hub for regional flights.

It’s remarkable to think that little more than a century ago no permanent settlement stood where Nairobi does today, only a swamp where the Maasai who inhabited the nearby Athi Plains brought their cattle to drink. The Maasai knew the area as Enkare Nyirobi (‘Place of Cool Waters’), from which the modern name Nairobi derives, but they chose not to settle there due to the prevalence of mosquitoes, snakes, rodents and diseases.

The story of Nairobi begins in 1899, when the site was chosen as a railway depot on the so-called “Lunatic Express” that was eventually to link Mombasa to Kampala. Situated at an altitude of 1,800 metres on the northernmost edge of the Athi Plains, Nairobi in its early days was unbelievably squalid, a shanty slum tied to the world by the single thread of the railway line. But the location proved to be convenient for commerce, and the comfortable malaria-free climate appealed greatly to settlers, so that the railhead quickly grew into a small town, one that became the capital of British East Africa in 1907, a mere eight years after it was founded.

25

26

Nairobi to Mombasa by rail covers 530 kilometres (329 miles) on the old narrow-gauge ‘Lunatic Line’. For more than a century the overnight train has been the classic and memorable way to travel between these cities. Spotting wildlife from the train has been one of Kenya's great travel experiences.

An overnight sleeper called the ‘Jambo Kenya Deluxe’ runs three times a week all year round. The train has 1st class 2-berth sleepers, 2nd class 4-berth sleepers, a restaurant car, and 3rd class seats. There is also a twice-weekly rail service between Nairobi and Kisumu. Passengers are advised to check with www.riftvalleyrail.com before booking since the schedule can be subject to change. Advance reservation is required.

Nairobi is 1,662 metres (5,453 feet) above sea level and the train descends to the coast, Mombasa being just 59 feet above sea level.

In the Mombasa to Nairobi direction, look out for impala, giraffe, ostrich and other game whilst eating breakfast in the restaurant car.

The days of the colonial-era metre-gauge train taking 12 hours or more are numbered, however, as a new standard-gauge line is nearing completion between Nairobi and Mombasa. The new line will cut the journey time for passenger services to four hours or so from late 2017.

The railway will operate high quality rolling stock and state-of-theart passenger stations are being built at Mombasa and Nairobi as well as five other intermediate stations at Mariakani, Voi, Mtito Andei, Sultan Hamud and Athi River. Much of the new track runs alongside the old alignment and the spectacular game-watching opportunities from the train will remain!

The Mombasa-Nairobi section is only the first part of a much larger project. The standard gauge railway is planned to run between Mombasa and Malaba (in west Kenya) and eventually link to other major east African cities, namely Kampala (Uganda), Kigali (Rwanda) and Juba (South Sudan).

Since its inauspicious beginnings, Nairobi has grown to become a graceful, green city of broad streets, open spaces and wooded hills.

There are nightclubs, casinos, restaurants, cinemas and theatres, flowerdecked parks with forest walks, and many golf courses and sports grounds, while only 10 minutes’ drive from the city centre, stands what has been described as the ‘loveliest race-course in the Commonwealth’.

A polyglot mix of cultures and faiths add zest to life in the capital’s sunny streets, whose sense of harmony seems to increase with its prosperity. The majority of the city’s residents are, of course, indigenous Africans, with the Kikuyu of the bordering central highlands being especially prominent in numeric terms and in business affairs. But the cosmopolitan face of Nairobi is attested to by its superb selection of international restaurants — Italian, Chinese,

Below: When the East African railway was built in the last decade of the 19th century, the largest obstacle facing the engineers was the sudden drop from the Limuru Escarpment to the floor of the Rift Valley. Ron Preston solved the problem with an ingenious ramp device. Later route changes, however, have made the gradient more gradual and it now follows the alignment along which this Kenya Railways diesel climbs to the escarpment summit.

27

28

29

Opposite: The towering minarets of Nairobi’s Jamia Mosque symbolise the variety of faiths and the freedom of worship to be found in Kenya.

French, Japanese, Indian and African cuisines are all well represented.

And in the city centre and suburbs, Sikh temples rise alongside the minarets of Islam, which in turn might face the temple of a Hindu sect, all within sight of a Catholic cathedral and an Anglican church and only a walk away from the city synagogue.

The focal point of Nairobi is the triangular Central Business District (CBD), bounded by Uhuru Highway in the west, Moi Avenue to the northeast, and Haile Selassie Avenue to the southeast. A few relics of early colonial days still scatter the CBD, among them the National Archives, Nairobi Gallery and City Hall, which date from 1906, 1913 and 1934 respectively. It is also home to Parliament Building, where 290 democratically elected 47 county women representatives and 12 nominated members meet to debate the issues facing Kenya.

For the most part, however, central Nairobi is distinguished by its modern architecture, with a skyline that looks like a scaled-down version of a large Asian or American city. Built in the early 1970s, the striking Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), 28 storeys and 105 metres high, dominated the city’s skyline for decades.

Since then, several other fine, tall buildings have sprung up in the city centre to compete for attention, among them the 140-metre high Times Tower and 120-metre Teleposta Tower.

Near the junction of Moi and Haile Selassie Avenues, the tragic 1998 terrorist attack on the former United States (US) Embassy, in which 218 people were killed and thousands injured, is commemorated by an unadorned memorial in August 7th Memorial Park.

The Railway Station, on Station Road, houses the small Railway Museum, where displays relating to the construction of the ‘Lunatic Line’ evoke the associated foundation of Nairobi. Here, too, the Maneaters of Tsavo come to life again, while the melodrama of Police Inspector Charles Ryall’s death in June 1900 — when he was dragged by a lion from a railway carriage at Kima — becomes more credible inside the actual wagon preserved in the museum.

Tourism also plays a large role in Nairobi’s economy, and while the city is not so much a destination in its own right as a springboard for exploration further afield, it boasts some interesting suburban sites that justify an extended stay. One such place is the Nairobi National Museum, which has stood on Museum Hill in 1929, but reopened in 2008 after extensive expansion and modernisation. The prehistory section explores hominid evolution and ancient rock art in East Africa, while the ethnographic displays include paintings by Joy Adamson and another gallery details coastal history from the 9th to the 19th century.

Contemporary Kenyan sculptures dot the lush gardens, which have hosted a snake park since 1959.

30

In the leafy southern suburb of Karen, the AFEW Giraffe Centre was established in 1979 as part of a programme to breed the endangered Rothschild giraffe, a five-horned race confined to northern Uganda and western Kenya, for release into high profile protected areas such as Lake Nakuru National Park. Popular with children, the Giraffe Centre also has an elevated viewing platform from where you can eyeball a giraffe up close. Thanks to the work of AFEW, the national population of Rothschild giraffe has risen from a nadir of 130 to around 300 today.

Running towards the forested footslopes of the Ngong Hills, Karen is of course named after Karen Blixen, the Danish Baroness who (under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen) published the book Out of Africa in 1937, and was the subject of the Oscar-winning 1985 movie starring Meryl Streep. And it is in Karen that you’ll find the impressive 1912 colonial homestead where Blixen lived from 1918 to 1931. Restored and furnished in period style for the filming of Out of Africa, the

Above: Karen Blixen Museum situated in Karen, Nairobi.

It was home to author Karen Blixen between 1917 and 1931.

31

Above: At the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, orphaned and injured elephant and rhino are nurtured and conserved.

Later, they are released into the wild.

homestead opened as the Karen Blixen Museum in 1986, set in forested gardens run through by a lovely nature trail.

For any who climb them, the knuckle-shaped ridges of the Ngong Hills, 30 kilometres southwest of the city, offers breathtaking views directly into the most dramatic portion of the Great Rift Valley.

Maasai legend states that the range was formed when a giant tripped over Kilimanjaro, 240 kilometres away, and clawed up a handful of earth. Despite their proximity to Nairobi and the spread of cultivation along the slopes, the Ngong Hills, peaking at 2,460 metres, somehow remain much as they were when Karen Blixen ran a coffee farm at their foot. Buffalos still roam the thickets in small numbers, skulking leopards occasionally make off with smallholders’ domestic dogs, and lions were occasionally reported as recently as the late 1990s.

Karen Blixen once wrote that Kenya had ‘no fat, and no luxuriance, distilled up through 1,829 metre (6,000 feet) the strong and refined essence of a continent.’ The feeling is captured on a ridge walk along

32

33

The so-called Big Five: the regal bearing of the lion, the fearsome horns of the buffalo, the commanding presence of the elephant, the stealthy alertness of the leopard, the awesome defences of the rhino.

34

the top of the Ngong Hills, now cleared of forest for smallholdings of five acres or less. In the middle of one of these fields stands a monument raised by Karen Blixen to her lover Denys Pinch-Hatton (played by Robert Redford in Out of Africa), who died in an air crash near Voi in 1931. Untended and neglected, surrounded by maize, the obelisk is a sadness commemorating more pioneering, less predictable days.

The Ngong Hills make a fitting backdrop to the 117-square-kilometre Nairobi National Park, the oldest such entity in Kenya, established a mere seven kilometres from the city centre in 1946, and probably the capital’s most enduring tourist attraction. What a remarkable park it is! Fenced only on the sides where it borders the city, the park remains open on its other designated boundaries, allowing wildlife to move in and out at will. Yet, with the notable exception of elephant, the park provides shelter to all the Big Five, frequently offering the unique spectacle of lion, cheetah or rhino standing below a background of shimmering skyscrapers. The park is especially worthwhile between July and August, when the permanent pools attract a mini-migration of wildebeest, plains zebra and gazelle from the adjacent Athi Plains.

At the main national park entrance, seven kilometres southwest of the city centre on Langata Road, the Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) Animal Orphanage, founded in 1964, provides sanctuary to various orphaned and injured animals that are eventually released into the wild. The Safari Walk, which opened here in 2006, runs past modern enclosures harbouring many indigenous species, from the rare mountain bongo to the secretive leopard.

Further out of town, the Mbagathi Entrance Gate doubles as the site of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an animal orphanage that specialises in the hand rearing of elephant and rhino babies for eventual release into the wild. The trust is named for the late David Sheldrick, the founder warden of Tsavo East National Park, and managed by his wife Dame Daphne Sheldrick, subject of the recent BBC documentary Elephant Diaries.

Nairobi’s economy sits solidly on an expanding industrial area in the east, one that encompasses car assembly plants, breweries, paint-making, tyre production, food processing, the manufacture of domestic appliances, printing, packaging, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and much more. And as industry expands, so does Nairobi National Park become an even greater asset to the city — even today, the park’s northern fence is less than 200 metres from a major tyre production factory and car assembly plant.

Below: Spumes of water cascade over the picturesque Fourteen Falls on the Mbagathi River close to the foot of Ol Doinyo Sabuk National Park.

35

36

Industrial growth is spreading southeast towards the industrial town of Athi River, which lies on the eastern perimeter of the national park. Here, the Kitengela Conservation Area, a corridor between the park and the surrounding plain, remains sparsely populated despite some encroachment by Maasai pastoralists, allowing the natural migration of its occupants in and out of the park.

The Mbagathi River, which forms the park’s southern boundary, winds away to the northeast to encircle Ol Doinyo Sabuk, an isolated 2,145-metre-high mountain peak that can sometimes be seen rising out of the haze 50 kilometres from the end of the runway of Jomo Kenyatta Airport. The eponymous centrepiece of a little-known national park, the forested slopes of Ol Doinyo Sabuk are alive with game, particularly buffalo — indeed, the mountain’s Kamba name, Kilimambogo, means ‘Mountain of the Buffalo’.

Halfway up the solitary park road stands the grave of Sir Northrup MacMillan, an American settler whose legendary obesity forced him

Above: On the marble-white surface of Lake Magadi, a dredger digs out from deposits which will be processed into soda ash for use in the manufacture of glass.

37

to walk sideways through most doors, and was too much to bear for the tractor in tended to carry his body to the peak. Outside the small park, the Mbagathi River, now the Athi River, tumbles over 14 individual falls — an undeniable spectacle during the heavy rains — just above a small pool frequented by resident hippos.

The road from Ol Doinyo Sabuk back to Nairobi passes through the busy industrial centre immortalised in the title of Elspeth’s Huxley’s autobiographical book The Flame Trees of Thika. Despite the charming images the title evokes, however, Thika today is something of an industrial satellite town to Nairobi, where textile plants, canning factories and vehicle assembly plants operate 24 hours a day. Thika is also in the centre of Kenya’s pineapple country, and the fertile volcanic soils surrounding the town ensure that Kenya is the world’s third largest producer of this tropical fruit.

On the outskirts of Thika, and older than the town itself, the Blue Post Hotel, founded in 1908, still evokes something of an olde-world atmosphere, with its colonial façades and lushly wooded gardens overlooking two waterfalls. According to Huxley, Winston Churchill, the future British prime minister, once shot a lion close to the Blue Post.

South of Nairobi, after crossing the base of the Ngong Hills, a little used surfaced road descends into a semi-arid stretch of the Rift Valley running down towards the border with Tanzania. It is here, in the heart of Maasailand, only 65 kilometres from Nairobi by road, yet aeons away in mood, that Dr. Louis and Mary Leakey excavated the fascinating Olorgasailie Prehistoric Site in the 1940s. With a small museum and exhibits in situ, Olorgasailie is well laid out for visitors to study the Stone Age cultures of 200,000 years ago, and the surrounding area is also rich in wildlife, especially giraffe and gerenuk.

After another 45 kilometres the road arrives at Lake Magadi, a 105 square kilometres sludge bed of blindingly white salt and soda deposits that have been commercially exploited by the Magadi Soda Company (MSC) since 1911. The deposits regenerate as fast as they are dredged out and pumped to the factory around which a neat little town, complete with golf course, has been built. The town presents an odd contrast to the wilderness and the lake, where flamingos and pelicans proliferate even close to the factory. To the west of Magadi, the virtually impassable Nguruman Escarpment is reached by a winding and difficult foot safari with pack animals, or by a four-wheeldrive vehicle.

3. Through the Great Rift Valley

40

Previous pages: View over the Rift Valley.

Below: Suswa has a deep moat in its crater, surrounding an inner plateau like something from Conan Doyle’s Lost World. In the background at left is the 3,906 metres (12,816 feet) massif of Kinangop in the Aberdare Mountains and, right, in the extreme distance, Mount Kenya’s 5,199 metres (17,058 feet) high Batian peak dominates the sky.

M

ost people’s first encounter with the Great Rift Valley comes about 50 kilometres northwest of Nairobi, a short distance past Limuru, a small uplands town set amidst century-old tea plantations and the birthplace of the acclaimed novelist Ngugi wa Thiongó. About 1,000 metres higher than the capital, Limuru is also an important centre for coffee production, as well as for the growth of pyrethrum, a low toxicity insecticide of which Kenya is a major exporter.

Here, on the left side of the main Naivasha road, a cluster of view-points offers grandstand views over one of the most spectacular stretches of this gargantuan geological scar, which extends over a full 5,632 kilometres, from the Eritrean shores of the Red Sea to the Zambezi Valley in Mozambique.

The Rift’s perspectives are so large there are few scales by which to measure them, but the vertigo felt at the top of a city skyscraper is nothing compared with that felt at the edge of the Limuru escarpment.

The scarp falls almost 1,000 metres, in two sheer stages, to the shimmering plains of the Rift Valley floor, a 100-kilometre sweep of dusty ranches and maize fields hemmed in by the matching escarpment wall — the blue-grey blur of the Mau Summit — on the distant western horizon.

Gazing across this immense and magnificent landscape, one might contemplate the inconceivable geological cataclysm that lay behind its formation some 20-30 million years ago. Following a fault line associated with tectonic plate activity, the Great Rift represents an early phase in the same phenomenon that caused the monolithic landmass of Gondwanaland to start breaking up into our presentday constituents some 200 million years ago. Eventually — several million years from now — the Rift Valley is likely to flood completely, causing Africa to split into two discrete landmasses.

The gradual expansion of the Rift has been accompanied by significant volcanic activity, as subterranean molten magma has surfaced to form a new crust between the drifting plates. Not surprisingly, the valley floor is studded with volcanoes, many now extinct, while several major peaks outside of the valley are volcanic products of the rifting process — the immense Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya among them.

Indeed, the East Africa Rift might be characterised as a chain of sleeping fire. In the 1920s, an earthquake between Lake Baringo and Solai, at the foot of the Laikipia Escarpment beneath Nyahururu, split the earth’s surface open to form a fissure two metres wide, and there was a tumult of activity on the southern shores of Turkana

41

42

43

Opposite: Mount Longonot, 2,776 metres (9,109 feet) high, in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley near Lake Naivasha. The volcano still gives evidence of life; none of the Rift volcanoes can be safely said to be extinct.

Following pages: The 3,048 metres (1,000 feet) high cliffs in Hell’s Gate, a dramatic gorge near Lake Naivasha — ideal for rock climbing.

at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries. More impressive still is Tanzania’s Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Maasai ‘Mountain of God’, which has erupted dozens of times the past country or so, most recently ever 2007/8, when associated tremors were felt as far away as Nairobi.

Two impressive dormant volcanoes can be observed from the escarpment near Limuru. The less well known of these is Mount Suswa, whose 2,356-metre rim encloses twin craters, separated by a 500-metre deep moat, and with a combined girth of more than 10 kilometres.

Less than 50 kilometres from Nairobi as the crow flies, Suswa remained relatively unexplored until the early 1990s, and its central plateau, with its extensive cave system, is a ‘lost world’ experience, with troops of baboons and other normally shy creatures displaying no fear at man’s presence.

Protected within an eponymous national park, Mount Longonot boasts a perfect volcanic outline rising to an elevation of 2,776 metres from the valley floor. It is classified as dormant, though oral tradition confirms that it blew its top as recently as the 1860s, and the smoking fumaroles that stud the crater floor promise fireworks some day in the future.

Volcanoes, even smoking ones, hold a strong appeal to hikers, and Longonot, whose base lies close to the ‘old’ Naivasha Road (laid by Italian prisoners during World War II), has several well-trod paths to its rim. It’s a stiff 90-minute ascent even for the fittest, but you might well encounter gazelle, zebra or giraffe along the way, and the spectacular views — over the forested floor of the intact caldera, and across the Rift Valley to Lake Naivasha — are worth the effort. For ambitious hikers, the walk around the crater rim takes at least three hours.

About 10 kilometres northwest of Longonot stands Lake Naivasha, the highest and purest freshwater lake in the Kenyan Rift Valley.

Encircled by low mountains and ghostly fever trees, this beautiful near-circular lake, only 90 minutes’ drive from the capital, has long been a popular weekend resort for Nairobi residents, and it also makes for a great first stop for visitors to Kenya, both for the lakeshore scenery and opportunity to explore the surrounding area on foot.

A highlight of Naivasha is what one ornithologist memorably described as ‘a bewilderment of birds’. So much so that dedicated Kenya birdwatchers count on identifying 100 species here before breakfast. Masses of water-associated birds can be taken for granted, including Africa’s densest fish eagle population, as well as abundant flotillas of pelicans, and waders in force. And the surrounding scrub is no less rewarding, with the dashing Fischer’s and black-headed loverbirds being especially conspicuous.

46

A central part of Maasailand, the dusty plains around Naivasha is where the Maasai frequently attacked early slave caravans en route between Lake Victoria and the coast, thereby acquiring a fearful reputation that dissuaded early European explorers from passing through the area. The first European to see the lake was Joseph Thomson, who convalesced there after being gored by a buffalo in 1883. Five years later, Count Samuel Teleki von Szek and his companion Lt. Ludwig von Hohnel also passed by the lake on their way to Lake Turkana.

The name Naivasha is a corruption of the Maasai Enaiposha, or ‘Restless Water’, a reference to the waves that rise there in the afternoon. Fed by Gilgil and Malewa Rivers, it has no known surface outlet, so a subterranean outlet is the most likely explanation for why its water stays fresh. Naivasha typically extends over about 130 square kilometres, but it has experienced several mysterious fluctuations in water level since Thomson’s day, almost drying up in the late 1940s.

Above: Hot springs in Lake Bogoria; about 200 alkaline hot springs are present at three onshore sites.

47

Above: The Olkaria Geothermal power plant, the first of its kind in Africa, was established in 1981 and has an electric capacity of 70 MW (megawatts).

For some years, until the early 1950s, Naivasha was the Kenya stop on the London-South Africa flying boat air service. Since then, the lake has grown as an agro-industrial community with a multimillion dollar dried vegetable factory and the lake’s clear water providing irrigation to the Oserian and Sulmac flower farms, the main employers in the area.

Several private game sanctuaries lie around the lake. Accessible by boat from the lakeshore resorts, Crescent Island, an extinct volcanic rim protruding from the deepest part of the lake, is home to giraffes, waterbuck and innumerable birds. On the western shore, the exclusive 100 square kilometres Oserian Wildlife Sanctuary supports everything from leopard and cheetah to herds of introduced Grevy’s zebra and Beisa oryx introduced from northern Kenya.

Not a sanctuary as such, Elsamere is the former home of the late Joy Adamson, and it now operates as a museum dedicated to her

48

Below: Spectacular pink lesser flamingos spotted in Lake Nakuru.

49

memory, with first editions of her books — including Born Free — and several of her paintings on display. Afternoon tea at Elsamere is a real treat, set amid acacia thorns, splendid lawns and colourful flower beds that attract plentiful birds and monkeys, and enjoying the view of Ol Doinyo Eburu on the opposite shore.

A few kilometres west of Lake Naivasha, the underrated Crater Lake Game Sanctuary is set around a spectacular crater lake whose algaerich green waters attract large numbers of lesser flamingo from June to August. There’s a lovely tented camp on the forested crater rim, where troops of black-and-white colobus monkey cavort in the canopy.

Lady Diana Delamere, of White Mischief fame, once owned this property and was buried on a nearby hilltop after her death in 1987.

The most popular reserve in the Naivasha area is Hell’s Gate National Park, named for a gorge whose towering 200-metre sandstone cliffs are frequented by birds of prey and is popular with rock climbers. One of the few savannah reserves in Kenya where visitors can walk or cycle freely, Hell’s Gate also supports plenty of wildlife, most visibly buffalo, giraffe, zebra and gazelle, but lions and elephants pass through from time to time. At the southern end of the gorge are the hot springs and geysers that feed a geothermal energy plant built with the United Nations’ help.

Arid ranchland divides Naivasha from the Lake Elmentaita, a soda lake that provides episodic sanctuary to large numbers of greater and lesser flamingos, and was declared a Ramsar wetland in 2005.

The storyteller, H. Rider Haggard, fancied that the path past Lake Elmentaita was the road to King Solomon’s Mines, the classic adventure yarn inspired by Kenya’s landscapes. In truth, an old caravan trail used by Arab traders to haul out a wealth of ivory passed via Naivasha close to what is now the dusty small town of Gilgil — arguably justifying the author’s literary licence.

Elmentaita forms part of the Soysambu Estate, which was founded in 1906 by the first Lord Delamere to settle in Africa, and remains in the family today. Today, a large part of the estate is given over to the Soysambu Conservancy, which protects more than half the shoreline and supports more than 10,000 head of game. As a result, the shore is inaccessible to casual visitors, but there’s a good viewpoint over Elmentaita from a ridge above the southern shore, site of a hilltop cairn erected in 1929 in memory of the fourth Earl of Enniskillen.

The former Enniskillen homestead is now the Lake Elmentaita Lodge, which offers guided walks and horseback trips in the vicinity.

Near Gilgil, on the edge of a small escarpment, is a diatomite mine and factory, producing filters from these ancient deposits. This lies close to Kariandusi Prehistoric Site, where the indefatigable Leakeys

50

excavated a plethora of relics of Stone Age hunters in the 1920s.

There are other important sites of early man near the lake. Another historic location is Mbaruk: more than a century ago the Maasai eliminated an entire slave caravan at this spot, now the Elmentaita entrance to Lake Nakuru National Park.

The largest town in the Rift Valley — and fourth largest in Kenya — is Nakuru, which boasts a population of more than 300,000. The self-proclaimed farming capital of Kenya, Nakuru is quite amiable and pretty, especially in November when its jacaranda-lined avenues come into bloom, and the town centre has decent amenities, but there’s little else to detain visitors, unless you count the colonial architecture around the junction of Kenyatta and Moi Avenues.

Bordering Nakuru town is one of Kenya’s most enduringly popular national parks. Its centrepiece is Lake Nakuru, hailed as the site of the greatest bird spectacle in the world. At certain times of the year, two million lesser flamingos — more than a third of the earth’s population — flaunt their delicate pink dance on its algae-rich waters.

It’s the birds that earned Nakuru its status as a national park, with more than 450 species recorded in total. But this fenced sanctuary has become equally renowned as a successful breeding ground for rhino, both species of which are present and more easily seen here than anywhere in Kenya, as well as the localised Rothschild’s giraffe.

Above the lake rises the green wall of a large volcanic crater, the 89 square kilometres of Menengai. The view of the sudden plunge from the rim to the Rift floor is startling. Oral tradition states that the rim was the site of an ancient battle between two Maasai clans.

Locals still believe the soughing of the wind through the pipes and ravins of Menengai’s caldera are the cries of lost souls felled in the battle.

Hyrax Hill, another prehistoric site excavated by the late Dr. Leakey, stands on the east slopes of Menengai, signposted from the main road from Naivasha. Inhabited around 5,000 years ago, the site has thrown up some of the region’s oldest Iron Age artefacts, and there’s also a Neolithic burial mound and a set of 13 bao games cut into the rocks. To the north, on the lower slopes of Menengai, is a land rich with coffee and grain, a world of disciplined beauty before the ravaged disorder of the Rift.

The Rift Valley north of Nakuru becomes lower lying, hotter, and more sparsely inhabited, and it supports a cover of dry thorny scrub transitional to the arid badlands of the far north. Set below the towering cliffs of the eastern Rift Escarpment, is also a very

Below: Pair of white rhinoceros, bigger and more placid than the black rhinoceros. In the background are vast flocks of pink flamingos on the shoreline of Lake Nakuru.

51

52

memorable area scenically, with an aura of brooding austerity offset by the glistening waters of Lake Bogoria and Baringo, which lie barely 20 kilometres, apart about 90 minutes’ drive from Nakuru.

A Ramsar wetland since 2000, Lake Bogoria was formerly named Hannington, after the Scottish bishop who first documented its existence in 1885 (and was killed by the King of Buganda shortly afterwards). Like Nakuru, Bogoria is a strongly alkaline lake, and it supports immense numbers of flamingos when conditions are favourable. Scenically, the lake is at its primaeval best in the early morning, when the pale blush of early dawn, colours the thick mists that hover above the cluster of 18 steaming geysers that erupt from the western shore. An area of 107 square kilometres was proclaimed as Lake Bogoria National Reserve in 1973, and supports a thin scattering of ungulates, notably the magnificent greater kudu, which is rare elsewhere in Kenya.

Above and left: Ilchamus (Njemps) fishermen, in coracle-like raft made from the stems of the ambatch tree bound together by sansevieria fibre, with the day’s catch on Lake Baringo.

53

Above: African fish eagle snatching a fish from the water using its big clawed talons.

Following pages: Crocodile, Lake Baringo. Up to five metres in length, the crocodile is a design success story; it is little changed from the creature that terrorised primaeval swamps millions of years ago.

The larger, cooler Lake Baringo, an hour’s drive from Bogoria, is one of Kenya’s more remote and secluded retreats for jaded city-dwellers.

A luxury tented camp on the large island in the middle of the lake is an excellent spot to watch a group of people called the Njemps, cousins of the Maasai, practise their ages-old way of fishing. Swimming and waterskiing are also popular despite the presence of crocodile, which seldom attack human beings because they feed on fish.

Along with Naivasha, Baringo is one of only two freshwater lakes in the Kenyan rift, so it also supports healthy numbers of hippo, along with two-metre long monitor lizards. More than 500 bird species have been recorded in the area: African fish eagle and goliath heron are plentiful and the nearby cliffs are a good place to seek localised northern specials such as Jackson’s hornbill and white-crested turaco.