Camping, Hiking and Eating Avocados in the Rift Valley
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010For our last few days in central Kenya, we headed to Lake Naivasha to test out our new camping gear and experience African wildlife from a different perspective in nearby Hell’s Gate National Park, where you can walk or cycle past animals instead of looking at them from a jeep window.
The lake itself was somewhat of a disappointment. We only went in the first place because our friend Lockie had recommended a nearby ‘secret’ lake about 4km away from the shores of Naivasha that nobody knows about and that is teeming with animals. Well, it turned out that, really, nobody knows about it – or at least not the staff at Top Camp (the closest camp to the secret lake), who had no idea what I was talking about when I asked about the lake. We followed Lockie’s vague directions for about an hour but then, getting nowhere and wandering around aimlessly in the African bush, we decided to turn back.
That afternoon we walked about 10km with all of our gear from Top Camp to the campsite within Hell’s Gate NP, which was tiring to say the least but not without its moments. Walking on the main road adjacent to the lake shore, we passed a school only for dozens of delighted kids to run en masse from the playground to the fence, all screaming ‘How are you?’ at the same time. (‘How are you?’ is Kenya’s answer to the Indonesian ‘Hello Mister’ – kids say it to you every time they pass you, and if you answer back, they sometimes become so shy and frightened that they squeal and run off in the other direction.) Later, at a local market, we bought seven small bananas, three avocados and four tomatoes for a total of 70 shillings, or less than a dollar. In fact, at five shillings per avocado, you could literally buy 25 of them for the price of one at the supermarket in Geneva, and they taste better, too. This caused Wendy to invoke a ‘Let’s eat avocados every day in Africa’ rule, but we’ve already broken it.
Having reached the campsite inside the park at about 4pm, we were utterly exhausted and set up our tent without putting the roof on, lay down on our brilliant new inflatable sleeping mats, and watched eagles soar overhead and a group of 13 zebras come within about 40m of our tent. Later that night (with the roof on now), we heard zebras neighing five or 10 metres away, and Wendy heard a panting noise. In the morning, we saw footprints not far from the campsite that looked like those of a big cat – we think it was a leopard or a cheetah. It was a bit frightening camping among the animals, but it was also quite exhilarating and uniquely African – an unforgettable experience. And since the anticipated baboon raid on our food supply didn’t materialise, we retained all our avocados and ate one before every meal.
We woke up at 6am the next morning and (leaving our tent and most of our stuff behind) continued on foot to the gorge at the southern edge of the park, about 6.5km away. It was a brilliant walk as we passed many zebras, about 20 warthogs, a few types of antelope and a couple of giraffes as we made our way through a valley with dramatic escarpments on both sides. Unfortunately, the gorge itself was not as interesting as it’s made out to be, or perhaps we’ve just seen our share of similar but better gorges over the years – the scenery of Petra comes to mind – and weren’t as impressed as we might have been.
We then walked back to our camp, picked up our stuff and walked all the way out of the park to the nearest camp at Lake Naivasha, Crayfish Camp – about 20km in all for the day. We arrived at Crayfish utterly exhausted but, as it was a Saturday, we had to contend with weekending middle-class 20-somethings from Nairobi and their all-night disco.
On Sunday we headed back to Nairobi to watch the World Cup final and on Monday took a reasonable-by-African-standards nine-hour bus ride to Mombasa and the Swahili Coast.
Nick