JOURNEY TO THE JADE SEA - Lake Turkana, Northern Kenya
Some of Africa's top travel journalists have contributed to our selection of travel features. So, if you're looking for the advice of those who have 'been there, done that', you'll find it in these articles.
Tony Weaver is one of Africa’s most widely published freelance writer-photographers, with a string of awards to his name. He started as a journalist in 1981 as a South African war and political correspondent. By the mid 1980s, he was covering southern Africa for the BBC’s African Service, Irish Radio, Radio New Zealand, and as Southern Africa correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) National Television News.
Tony lives in Cape Town and can be contacted at tonyweaver@iafrica.com or on (27-21) 689-1199
THERE are places in Africa where the journey becomes as much a part of the landscape as the destination itself. Such a place is Lake Turkana, remote, mystical, bleak, forbidding and one of the most breathtakingly beautiful destinations on the continent of Africa.
Turkana is the biggest permanent desert lake in the world, 250km long and on average, 40km wide. Three metres of water evaporate every year and with the partial diversion of its Ethiopian headwaters, the Omo River, it is a shrinking ocean. 10 000 years ago the lake was 150 metres deeper and stretched to Lake Baringo, 190 km to the south. Once a part of the Nile system, it is now a blind lake in the desert, a magnificent jade sea.
You leave Rumuruti, the last town on the edge of the Laikipia Plateau, and leave England behind and drive into Africa. It is a land of potent vistas, the images which inspired the artists behind Disney's "Lion King" and the cinematographers of "Out of Africa".
Maralal is where the great African explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, has chosen to live out his last days, surrounded by his Samburu friends, isolated from the world. The road from Rumuruti to Maralal starts out well, then rapidly deteriorates into a corrugated washboard. The distance is only 112km according to the maps, 123km according to our odometer, but it took us the best part of the day.
A WILD WEST KIND OF PLACE
In the main street of Maralal we had to brake for a herd of zebra. Leopard roam the yellowwood forests and hyenas howl as they scavenge urban detritus by night.
Maralal is a Wild West kind of place, we should have spent days exploring, but the road was long and hard so we left in the pre-dawn light, and 25km out of town, turned left through the village of Poror to the knife-edge rim of the Losiolo Escarpment. As the sun rose, one of the most breathtaking views in Africa unfolded below. The cliffs drop 2 000m sheer into the Suguta Valley, one of the hottest places on earth, with a mean annual temperature of 54degC.
We descended into the Suguta and the road fell apart. The El Barta Plains stretched into the distance, grim and forbidding, boulder strewn and desolate, the track meanders through the rocks, and travel is reduced to a snail's pace as soccer ball sized sump destroyers leap malevolently in the heat haze.
The road improved marginally as we approached Baragoi, a single line collection of tin houses with deep verandas, then it deteriorated again as we ran the gauntlet of the 2 600m Ndoto Mountains to the east and the Samburu Hills (1 300m) to the west. The going gets rougher and rougher on the approach to South Horr. As we neared the head of the precipitous descent into a gorge of the Nyiru Mountains (2 700m), a Somali trader flagged us down.
AN OASIS IN THE DESERT
"Be very careful up ahead," he said, "there has been an accident. And when you get to the bottom of the hill, turn right into the river bed and look for a track out to South Horr, the main road has been washed away."
We engaged second gear, low range for the nerve-grinding descent into the oasis of South Horr, and halfway down found a Range Rover lying on its roof. The driver's brakes failed at the top and he rolled at 120km/h. He was lucky to survive. An outboard engine and a 40kg gas bottle in the back broke loose, reducing the front cab to pulverized metal.
By the time we reached South Horr, it was getting late, and we decided not to head on, having covered the grand total of 157km that day (137km on the map).
South Horr is an astonishing place, a green oasis surrounded by some of the most forbidding deserts in Africa. The village is wedged between two mountains, the Nyiru and Ol Doinyo Mara ranges, a place for exploration.
Six km north of town is the Kurungu camp site, one of the most beautiful in Kenya. The forests conceal elephant, buffalo, zebra, gerenuk, hyena and lion, and the birding is spectacular. An old man called Simbati joined our fire and told of the years he worked for George Adamson. "Bwana George," he said, "was a fine man, but when memsahib Joy came to join him he would go a bit crazy, she was a hard woman."
We left at dawn for the last slog in what was developing into an epic journey to Lake Turkana. The map showed the distance as 70km, a doddle. Our odometer registered 90km. Whichever. It took six hours of hard, tough driving. By 9am, the temperature was 32decC. Lava fields took the place of sand and scrub.
The road is vicious, razor sharp ridges of lava and volcanic rock claw at your tyres, ripping chunks of rubber from the treads and we began to realize why veterans in Nairobi had advised 12 ply tyres. At times we were reduced to speeds of one and two km/h, the chassis screeching and complaining as it twisted from side to side, springs thumping as we climbed down steps of black rock.
NOTHING CAN PREPARE YOU FOR THE JADE SEA
Then the road dropped down in a huge sweep of epic landscape to Lake Turkana.
Nothing can prepare you for the first sight of the Jade Sea.
The lake stretches to the horizon in a sea of forbidding volcanic desert, seared black and red by ancient forces. The water constantly changes colour as the desert light shines down at different angles, azure, then jade, steel-blue in the morning light, green and dark as the dust clouds roll in, soft turquoise shot through with purple when late afternoon brings short relief from the heat of the Northern Frontier District.
At midday, our thermometer registered 40degC in the shade, at midnight it stood at 28degC. Malicious winds raging at gale force sweep down from Mount Kulal, the 2 300m high peak east of the lake. There is a brief period of calm around dawn, and another in the evening. The shores of the lake are rocky and barren, the beaches strewn with lava under which thousands of scorpions and carpet vipers nest. The lake has the largest population of Nile crocodiles in the world, and the water is harsh and alkaline, barely drinkable.
Dust storms rip through, making cooking an ordeal. The heat tormented us until we resorted to showering fully clothed, then sat in our steaming garments as the blown dust turned to mud on our faces. That night we lay huddled as the gales blasted down, bending the poles of our rooftop tent and setting the Land Rover rocking.
Turkana is a compelling destination, one of the wildest, most remote places in East Africa, a place of awesome beauty and bewildering contrasts. On the eastern shores, Loiyangalani -- "the place of the trees" -- is the only oasis, a cluster of round grass huts, a main street with a handful of tin-roofed shacks, a huge wooden cross in the lava rock, a Catholic Mission in the desert, and a line of doum palm trees huddling for survival along the edge of the vaguely sheltering hill.
It's a hell of a place to be.
Copyright © 1999 by Tony Weaver. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without the permission of the author is prohibited.
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