Down the Trans-African Highway

“There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine,” a line from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, aptly described my thoughts the next few days after leaving Lake Turkana. After two nights at the Lake, we set out northeast across the vast Chalbi desert, first making our way to North Horr where we stopped to stretch and buy cold drinks as the entire village watched. Just when I thought it could not get any hotter, dustier or more isolated…we arrived at North Horr, near the Ethiopian border. The northeast of Kenya is an area where drought conditions have persisted since 1996 and the people looked gaunt, and somewhat hostile, staring at us but rarely smiling.

The largest group in northeast Kenya consist of the Boran tribe, pastoral people whose existence began near the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia before they migrated south to northern Kenya. Another group in the northeast, the Gabbra, are also from Ethiopia and have become largely assimilated with the Boran. The Boran and Gabbra have adopted Somali styles in dress and culture, but they do not necessarily practice Islam, as many have been converted to Christianity by the missions in the area. We were told by our drivers not to attempt to take any pictures, as they would throw rocks at the car. And at one point during the drive across the desert, we saw a group of Gabbra men with a herd of camels coming towards our car from the distant horizon. Our drivers, visibly worried, pulled out their machetes from under the seats as we passed the group of men. Again, all stares, no smiles or friendly gestures. Living in such harsh conditions, though, I could not blame them.

By late afternoon, we arrived in Kalacha where we would stay the night at a campsite run by a local Christian mission – the only one there. Kalacha, home mostly to Gabbra people, is considered the “neatest” village in Africa - I guess because its sandy and dusty streets have been defined by meticulously placed rows of white stones. At this point in our trip, we were back to pitching tents, which we all did crowded underneath the only shade tree in the campsite. Afterwards, we immediately headed for the pool set up on top of an irrigation tank, with its water pumped in by a windmill. Yes, this is definitely where I will get cholera, I thought, but its way too damn hot to worry about that now. We soon had other things to worry about…

While we were sitting in the irrigation tank, we heard a lot of noise across the neat little road, then saw smoke and the missionary women, with scarves and skirts flying, all running across the road with buckets of water. A young Gabbra child had tipped over a burning pot in his mother’s kitchen and the hut was on fire. Immediately, we all hopped out of the tank and started grabbing buckets – pans – tins, whatever we had in the camp and, along with the missionaries, ran across the street to put out the fire. We grabbed shovels and helped throw dirt on the fire. We continued running back and forth with water buckets, working side by side with the Gabbra and the missionaries for an hour. In the end, though, the small hut that contained the kitchen burned to the ground, but we were able to save most of the separate hut where the family slept. They lost most of their valuable foodstuffs, so the next morning our group all gave the family money to buy more. In this area of the world, a few bags of maize can mean the difference between life and death.

The next morning after leaving Kalacha we joined up with the Trans-African Highway. This is a road that theoretically should run from Cairo to Cape Town, but does not. Although broken into patches, altogether it still forms the longest road in Africa. The section we hit after leaving Kalacha, which runs from the Ethiopian border down to Nairobi, is thought to be the emptiest and most dangerous part of the road because of Somali refugees in the area, the inter-tribal fighting and the armed bandits that have been known to attack tourists. Paul Theroux in his book Dark Star Safari traveled down this road and described it as “waterless desert and rutted roads and quarrelsome tribes, and a border dispute among the gun-toting Boran, and worst of all the troops of roaming heavily armed Somalis known as ‘shifta.’ Just dropping the word shifta into a proposed itinerary was enough to make traveling Africans go in the opposite direction.”

We encountered no problems, however, and that night stayed in Marsabit – an oasis –hilly town with a mist-covered, forested mountain in the backdrop. Marsabit has an eclectic mix of cultures: Gabbra herdsmen with their goats and cattle, Boran women with Somali-styled printed shawls and wraps, and Rendille boys with skins and ochre-colored braided hair. We drove through the Marsabit forest in the late afternoon and after dinner, sat around a campfire. I was overjoyed that it was cool enough for a campfire and looked forward to a good nights sleep. Not this night though. Our time around the campfire was soon interrupted by a roaming pack of hyenas that had decided to join our camp, sending us to our tents. That alone was enough to keep me up all night, but we had the added pleasure of having pitched our tents under a canopy of trees that served as the home to a group of baboons. All night long the baboons swung from branch to branch above us and fought with each other, howling and wailing as they attacked. Nicole and I sat awake all night, wondering when one of them would land on top of our tent by accident, or decide to attack us on purpose.

Glad to leave the next morning, we continued down the Trans-African Highway, finally hit tarmac road again and spent the next two nights at the Samburu National Park, close to Mt. Kenya. After 8 days, and other than a lot of dust and heat, we made it back to Nairobi – surprisingly, we had very little car trouble, did not encounter any armed bandits, did not have any rocks hurled at us, did not get bit by any scorpions and all made it back with a trip full of a experiences and laughs.

(Pictured: Boran children in North Horr; Fire in Kalacha; Gabbra men walking across the Chalbi desert)

The People Who Eat Fish

We stayed for two days on the shores of Lake Turkana, in the middle of what-seemed-like nowhere, isolated and hot. After a night spent with stampeding donkeys, crawling scorpions and furious winds, our group awoke early the next morning, took cold showers – the first of many during the day – and drove 8 km around the bend of the Lake to the town of Loiyangalani, meaning “place of trees.” And, indeed, there are a few palm and acacia trees scattered around Loiyangalani where, naturally, mud or straw or tin huts clustered. But not many, as mostly the landscape is barren and stoney and littered with livestock carcasses. We needed to buy more water, and the one small store in town had barely enough for our group of 13 – and none cold. There were no newspapers. The beer had run out, as had the cold soda. We still did not have proper roads, or cell coverage. And, with temperatures near 40 C, we were dying.

Loiyangalani came into existence as a town in the 1960s, with the establishment of an Italian mission to the Elmolo people who live there. Today, the mission still plays a strong role and has established a few schools, stores, a health clinic, and of course a church. The Elmolo people, known as the “people who eat fish,” are fishing and hunting people that live along the southeastern shores of Lake Turkana. Kenyans also claim that the Elmolo tribe is the smallest – in terms of numbers –in the world. Today, there are approximately 600 Elmolo people existing. Their language is almost extinct, as the last fluently speaking person died in 1998, and so they mostly speak the language of the Samburu people.

We visited with them on the shore of the Lake. We walked up to a highpoint of the village, trailed by every child there, to observe its smallness – only a few dozen straw huts comprise it all. We bought beaded necklaces from the women and watched men carry in Nile Perch from the Lake. How the Elmolo people survive is beyond my comprehension. As is the idea that in this day and age, a place like New York City, with its wealthy financiers and glamorous fashionistas, can exist on the same planet as a place like Loiyangalani with its Elmolo people.

That afternoon, after a lunch back at the camp and another cold shower, we headed to a partially deserted lodge in town. The owner does not take guests anymore, but keeps the pool open for people like us who will pay a few hundred shillings to sit in cold water during the heat of the day. Although I feared cholera, I and everyone else did just that – sat in a cold swimming pool, looking out over Loiyangalani towards the Lake, until the sun went down.

(Pictured: looking down to the Elmolo village in Loiyangalani, you can see the Italian mission-built school buildings and church in the distant background; Elmolo children; Elmolo fisherman with Nile Perch.)

Lake Turkana

I considered beginning this posting with “A Turkey Visits Turkana,” but thought that would lead to way too much eye-rolling…although that is exactly the way I felt my first few days on the trip to Lake Turkana, in remote northern Kenya. We left on Good Friday - me, my friends Sandra (from Peru) and Isis (from Germany). There were 13 of us in total and we piled into 2 large Land Cruisers, along with 2 driver-guides and a cook. As usual when traveling throughout Africa, I met such interesting people – joining us were a family from England, a woman taking time off from Credit Suisse in Zurich, a Kenyan couple working in wildlife preservation, a Swiss man teaching in Nairobi, a medical student, and a Canadian teaching in Uganda (Nicole, who became my tentmate on the trip).



It takes two long days to drive to the shores of Lake Turkana, near the village of Loiyangalani, on the southeastern shore of the Lake. That would be two days provided you have an army-tank-of-a-car, equipped with several spare tires, all the fuel you would need in case you were to get lost, and every drop of water you would need in case you ran out of fuel. I had been fascinated with Lake Turkana since reading and seeing The Constant Gardener, and hearing stories of its remoteness and the endurance it takes one to reach its shores. For once, it’s just like in the movies – as isolated, barren and majestic as it seemed when Ralph Fiennes visited there.

After leaving Nairobi, we headed north through the Rift Valley and stopped for a picnic lunch in a field of zebras. I could not help but notice all of our vegetables, bread, eggs, etc., for the 8 day trip, piled into dirty crates and placed underneath the Land Cruisers, exposed to all the dust that would be accumulated along the way. Well, this is certainly a different order of trip than the one I last took with my family, I thought, but an adventure! We then drove a few more hours, stopping briefly at touristy Thomson’s Falls, then to fill up some plastic jugs with more fuel (to be placed next to the vegetables, bread, eggs, etc.) in the small town of Rimuruti. Rimuruti is where the tarmac road ended – we did not see real road again for 7 days, until just before arriving back in Nairobi one week later.

After a few more, very bumpy, hours we arrrived at our first campsite, in the town of Maralal. I had been warned that this trip would involve true camping, but I still pictured tents with real furniture or, at the very least, a group of men who would actually pitch the tents. Not this time. Upon unloading, our driver tossed down to Nicole and me our tent. Puzzled, we looked at each other, dumped the contents onto the ground and wondered aloud what we should do with all of the metal spikes? Eventually, although last among the group, we erected our tent…however, upon observation by Peter and Regina (the Kenyan couple who, sorry for them, chose to set their tent up right next to ours), it was quickly taken down and put back up (by Peter and Regina), as they were afraid of being awoken in the middle of the night if our tent blew away.

Actually though, what kept us all awake that first night – until daybreak – was the singing and chanting we heard nearby from the Good Friday celebrations of the Samburu tribe. Like the Maasai, the Samburu wear brilliantly colored blankets and beads, although they seem to wear even brighter colors and more beads. Many of the Samburu have become Catholic, and throughout the night we heard the ecstatic conviction with which they practice their religion mixed with, what seemed to be, elements of their own tribal language and customs.

Maralal, the first of many frontier towns we would drive through, spreads out around a depression in the hills of the Mathews Range, with dusty streets crowded by Samburu people. After Maralal, we climbed into forest, dropped down across a plateau, through plains, then across a scorching valley on our way to Lake Turkana. We encountered constantly changing landscape and I could not stop repeating: we seemed to have reached the end of the earth! We passed through Death Valley – in an area of constant cattle rustling between Maasai, Samburu and Turkana tribes – where these tribes run with stolen cattle and often meet their demise because of the high temperature, lack of water and rough terrain encountered there.

Occasionally, we would pass a thatched hut or, out on the road behind a tree would appear, a herdsman, woman or child. But for hours we drove along without seeing another sign of life. We drove by a few missionary trucks, oddly packed with a priest, a nun and the Samburu. And we would be overtaken by a few lorries – the few that brought goods to northern Kenya each week –overflowing with men on a ride somewhere, probably just anywhere. We stopped to stretch our legs in one-street livestock towns such as Baragoi and South Horr, where everything in town seemed to stop as people stared at us. We continued this way all day long and stopped to have lunch near a dry sandy riverbed. It was so hot and dusty and, for some reason given my position in the open-sided Land Cruiser, I received more dust on my face and body than anyone else. I was filthy and it became quite the joke among everyone!

Eventually, coming over a rocky barren hill after miles of featureless plains of black lava, we saw the jade waters of Lake Turkana, stretching 250 km from Ethiopian border into Kenya – the biggest desert lake in the world. It is beautiful and expansive and empty. No boats. No lakeshore homes. Too many crocodiles so you cannot swim safely.

The loneliness expressed itself to me in the form of a single Turkana woman who, as we stood outside our Land Cruisers to take pictures, walked over the hill, out of nowhere, with her herd of goats. Where did you come from, I thought? And, how do you live here, in the middle of nowhere? Until very recently, the Turkana people had very little contact with the outside world. They are known as an extremely individualistic, bellicose group of people whose daily struggle for survival in the hot, dry area of northern Kenya is legendary. She stood back and just stared at us and I approached her and motioned with my camera, asking if I could take her picture. She nodded ok, and I gave her a bottle of water.

We drove down to the shore past small bunches of round, mushroom-top huts of the Turkana people. Then, we arrived at a grouping of 8 huts on the shore – these look nice I thought, and asked, what village is this? Its ours, the driver said, this is where we will stay for the next two nights! At least we did not have to pitch a tent, I thought, as I dropped my bag into the thatched hut and went to the shore with everyone else to watch the sunset, while a Turkana family brought in our fish for dinner that night…

And, what a night it was. I have never been to a hotter place – without air-conditioning or much water – or seen more crawling things, like scorpions and giant white spiders. Inside the hut was unbearable so in the middle of the night, Nicole and I awoke to move our wooden cots outside. The wind was so strong – and hot, as if someone had a hair dryer aimed at us – that I could not keep a sheet over me and every time I sat up my pillow blew away. Nicole slept with her baseball cap on to keep her hair out of her face. Then, in the middle of the night, we heard the pounding hooves and eeyoring of donkeys. Nicole and I both shot straight up – pillows and sheets flying away – as a herd of donkeys and a few Turkana men went stampeding by only a feet from us. I’m going to die by donkeys, I thought. We sat there in silent awe for a few minutes after they disappeared into the darkness, then looked over at each other and simply started laughing. It was a great feeling, to be there on the shores of Lake Turkana, in the middle of nowhere, laughing so hard we started to cry!

(Pictured: Turkana woman; Nicole and me in front of our hut on the shore of Lake Turkana (if you enlarge this picture, you will see how much dirt I have on my face and clothes); young Turkana boy with our fish for dinner)