For hours we pitched and swayed through the vastness where northern Kenya fades into heat and stone. Somali ostriches stared, incredulous. Few travellers take the road to Lake Turkana, and fewer still would regard it as a family fishing trip, but then our hosts, the Carey family, are an unusual crew. We were four adults with four boys who already knew better than to ask if we were nearly there, rolling with the Land Cruiser like sailors.
A day and a half’s drive north of Nairobi, where a sign says “Loiyangalani 232km”, we had turned off the tarmac to follow a lurching track westwards to Turkana, the “Jade Sea”, the world’s largest desert lake. In two vehicles we were equipped for a 10-day expedition around the remotest edge of Kenya, though we would need more water and food. “Camel milk will save us!” said Steve Carey, our leader. His two sons, Ffyn and Rafe, raised on a safari camp on the Laikipia Plateau where we had begun and would end our adventure, had been to Turkana before.
“And fish, Dada,” said Ffyn, 11.
“We need to catch dinner tomorrow, yes,” his father replied.
Our six-year-old was already a disciple of the bigger boys, entranced by their bushcraft and the fearless way they sought out scorpions. “What kinds of fish?”
“Nile perch, tilapia, whatever we can get,” Steve said.
“If the crocodiles don’t get us,” I put in.
My partner Rebecca rolled her eyes. Our friend and guide, Rod Tether, laughed. For him this was a recce before starting to offer the route as a new adventure through his company, Natural High Safaris. Improved roads had made it viable, he said, though an excerpt he had sent me from Kenya: A Natural History had formed my ominous imaginings of Turkana: “Baking hot, shadeless and harsh, the haunt of gigantic crocodiles, scorpions, red spitting cobras, abundant carpet vipers, hyenas, lions and tough nomads . . . ” We beetled on, sustained by the unlikely promise of swimming. “There is one place where the crocodiles don’t go,” said Steve.
On the map, Turkana is a blue rip in the north-west corner of Kenya, one of the hottest and harshest regions of the world. The lake runs 150 miles up to its main source, the Omo river on the Ethiopian side of the border. There is no outflow — water leaves only through evaporation. As you approach it, a distant blue line becomes a burnished expanse, fading towards mountains 20 miles away on the further shore. Until 1885 only the locals knew it was here. Their descendants, the Turkana tribe, are gaunt pastoralists and fishermen. Food is scarce. There have been showers but no real rain for months.
Unesco, which has listed the lake and surroundings among its World Heritage sites, asserts that Turkana is shrinking and becoming more saline as the Omo is choked by the Gilgel Gibe III Dam in Ethiopia. Water levels fluctuate naturally so the influence of Gibe III is hard to prove, but with another dam under construction and massive water extraction in Ethiopia going ahead, the lake and its people are imperilled. Kenya buys electricity generated in Ethiopia. Politicians seem resigned to long-term hunger and drought in this region.
Reaching the shore, we found a fishing community at ease. A grave elder took a camping fee and reminded Steve that we must burn only our own firewood. He carried a staff and a wooden headrest, almost the only possessions we saw among the Turkana people.
We ran into the alkaline and silky water, the children squealing joyfully. There were crocodiles in the next bay but we followed the example of fishermen who swam in from their boats, untroubled. They hauled in a net jumping and threshing with silver. As yet the stocks of tilapia, tiger fish and perch are still strong.
As the stars brightened, we lined up camp beds on the beach and wriggled into our covers. “If it’s a wild night, Steve says that’s normal,” Rod reported. “ ‘Wild’ could mean anything!”
“It means if it’s a howling gale, don’t worry,” said Steve. At first we lay under a balmy and glittering spray of stars, near enough to the equator for the Southern Cross to rise without its pointers and the Plough without Polaris, as though there were no directions here but the wind’s. Later the gale came, hot and dashed with blown sand. The temperature had been around 40C but the lake cools faster than the land, the imbalance creating torrents which rolled through all our dreams.
We woke under a carmine sunrise feeling delightedly well. The children swam, Rebecca practised perhaps the first yoga the crocodiles offshore had ever witnessed and Rod, a devoted ornithologist, studied pratincoles — angular birds that fly with flickering ease. Migrating swallows busied the morning. After camel-milk porridge we drove up and down dunes of shale and scrub, across cobbled stone, past herders sheltering under thorn trees. We could smell small rainstorms that stalked the horizons like djinns.
At the entrance to Sibiloi National Park, a sign welcomes you to the “Cradle of Mankind”, but it feels as though you have found our memorial. In the broken windows of the park office, in the herds of livestock driven down to the lake, regardless of restrictions, and in the absence of visitors (we saw one other vehicle in four days) there is a toppling sensation of wild obscurity.
We erected our beds by a dry river and headed for the lake. Steve does not massage expectations. “We’ll just potter down there” could mean hours of walking or driving but we were learning that battering days resolved into miraculous evenings. Beyond a splay of green where zebra grazed and jackals hunted, the lake lay in immensity. Flamingoes balanced under the towering sky. African skimmers patrolled a shore where stints, stilts, godwits, plovers and storks were feeding. “I could just stay here, right here,” Rod said, as the children tussled with fishing rods and Steve cast his throw-net.
Space expanded like the giant storm clouds over Ethiopia, while time withdrew, becoming as small and tentative as the figure of a shepherd in the distance. On the opposite shore was discovered the skeleton of a boy, Homo erectus, who lived here 1.6m years ago. Five human and pre-human species have been found around the lake, along with the fossils of sabre-toothed cats. Below the shaley hulk of Sibiloi Mountain lie the petrified trunks of a forest. We explored there, our boy riding on my shoulders down a path between coppery stone trunks that were trees 7m years ago. In Turkana you have a child’s feeling that all time exists at once. Our origins and our ends lie scattered around the burning hills, between the water and the thunder where we all
The boys spent the days fishing while we walked. One morning we came across thousands of quelea, the world’s most numerous bird, fleeing in dizzy gusts from a lanner falcon through pristine air. Led by Rod’s 17-year-old son Louis, the fishers landed one huge Nile perch, monstrous-faced and delicious. At nightfall we aimed Rod’s telescope at a huge shining moon. “I’ve never seen it so clear!” Rebecca cried. We adults found we were often either wordless or exclaiming, as if Turkana baffles language, such is its scale and silence, though the children were a constant burble of games and schemes.
We sat around the fire, satellites above the only proof of modernity’s existence, as young Rafe led giggling hunting parties up the riverbed, flashing torches and firing catapults. In the absence of lions and leopards, Sibiloi was an incomparable adventure for the boys. Our Aubrey learned to study ant lions through a reversed pair of binoculars, how to ride the roof of a Land Cruiser and that rain spiders are not dangerous, though I screamed and ran from one in our lake-water shower (they’re big).
There can be few lands more hostile than the territory we crossed, driving eastward to the heat-strangled settlement of North Horr. In flaying sun, ravens panted and swore. We pressed on to Kalacha oasis on the edge of the Chalbi desert. The lines on the map are arbitrary now, governance distant, the rule of the elements absolute. Women wear Somali dress, their heads covered; men sputter from shade to shade on motorbikes, and the evening brings bathers and camels to the Kalacha springs, where water channels and an abandoned lodge are set about with rattling palms. An inexplicably functioning swimming pool stands in front of what was once the dining room. We bathed in the moonlight while the boys caught and released nightjars. In the morning thousands of sand grouse in chittering storms came to drink at the springs and the sun rose like a dragon’s eye opening.
|