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| Friday, 27-Jan-2006 12:01 |
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The road to Mombasa
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Sometimes it's better to drive off the road...
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Too many heavy trucks on soft tar
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Dodging potholes
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"The first time you go to Mombasa you drive, after that you fly."
That's what everyone says... and it's because of the last 50km into Mombasa. The road surface disappears into a myriad of potholes and the rules of the road (if there are actually any in Kenya), are completely abandoned.  It's a case of find a space between the potholes and between the trucks and just go for it! 
I went down to Diani with my family and some friends from England in the week before Christmas. I took these photos through the car windows while we were on the move... not the best quality but they should give you an idea of what it was like... crazy!!!  
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| Tuesday, 24-Jan-2006 00:00 |
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I don't have malaria
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Ok ok... here's some 2006! There are still quite a lot of Kenya photos (the Masai Mara and the coast), I'll put them up when I get the chance...
So... I'm back from Kenya... these are actually a selection of photos from my 2 weeks in Cape Town. I'm now living in Jo'burg... what a change! Next week's update will tell you all about that... and the subject of this entry 
My stay in Cape Town started with a week in Hout Bay where I met the grown up Pesto (I'm told that all the kittens turned black! The grey was much prettier I think). I spent New Year there and ended up celebrating midnight whilst breaking in as I'd locked myself out...
I then went through to Claremont for a week to stay with a friend (Marie). We had some quality catch up time in between madly rushing through work.  She's handing in her MSc soon and I had papers that needed to get ready for publication. Her flat looks out over Table Mountain so we got some spectacular sunsets.
One Saturday I went down to Muizenberg to meet up with a friend from Zim. We were good friends at high school but I hadn't seen her in the last five and a half years as she now lives in New Zealand. It was great to catch up and see her family as well...  my word do people grow up in that time!
I spent a Sunday afternoon with Vici and Di, catching up over a picnic in the Helderberg Nature Reserve (highly recommended!). We each bought a bit of food and ended up with a feast  . Vics had been in Ireland for many many months so it was cool to hear all her stories. Di's keeping busy in Stellenbosch, I'm not sure I wanted to hear PhD war stories at that point but it was cool to catch up
My second last night in Cape Town was spent in Obs.  Marie and I decided to go for pizza at Divas - I just couldn't leave without one more meal! It was supposed to be a chilled night, but, as usual, plans changed. We had pizza... then we went and played pool (and Stone's was so empty we could actually get a table!)... then we decided to go to Touch of Madness for pudding. If you ever want the world's most enormous serving of really sticky chocolate cake... try Touch of Madness. The two of us struggled to finish it! We then sat chatting to some random strangers (by the names of Stefan, Nigel and Terry) and got home at 1am... 
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| Monday, 19-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Mount Kenya Trip Index
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There are still people out there looking for these photos and they've disappeared into the archives now so if you're struggling:
Day 1: Mount Kenya Hostel to Met Station Huts - bamboo forests and a big rainstorm
Day 2: Met Station Huts to Mackinders Camp - the vertical bog and walk through clouds
Day 3: Mackinders Camp to Old Moses Camp - one of the hardest days of my life, but beautiful tarns
Day 4: Old Moses Camp to Sirimon Gate - a few hours walk and a group photo... the end!
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| Sunday, 18-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Northern Kenya Trip Index - UPDATED 16/01/06
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Everythings up now... all the photos and all the text My fotopage seems to have changed format so you might have to dig a little deeper into the archives to find the older entries, otherwise you can just follow the links below to get directly to the pictures. Enjoy.
Day 1: Nairobi to Samburu National Reserve - the end of the tar road
Day 2: Sunrise to sunset in Samburu National Reserve - to see gerenuks and giraffes
Day 3: Samburu National Reserve to Marsabit National Reserve - a lake in an old volcano
Day 4: Marsabit National Reserve to Kalacha - from a misty morning into an enormous desert
Day 5: Kalacha to Lake Turkana - from one desolate area to another via lots of camels
Day 6: Lake Turkana and Loyangalani - a hot day spent on the shores of the Jade Sea
Day 6 additional post: Faces of Loyangalani - Turkana people at Asmal's village
Day 7: Lake Turkana to Maralal - back to a place with trees and bushes and green grass
Day 8: Maralal to Nairobi - a little bit of culture shock, return to the big city
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| Saturday, 17-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Day 8 - Maralal to Nairobi
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You've got to be tall to be able to give this look
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Which hemisphere am I in if I stand like this?!
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A tall tree to sit under for lunch
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Camels!!! There’s a herd of camels at the campsite in Maralal so I started the day with breakfast and a camel portrait shooting session. It was rather fun! This, the last day, was pretty much a driving day. We stopped in Nyahururu to see the Thompson Falls but I didn’t take any photos. The next stop was at the equator for the expected tourist photo (we forgot to take them on the way north) and then we stopped for lunch… under a tree! The view was one of fields… civilisation and cultivation. Quite a change from the solitude of the desert and the starkness of the lake.
I finally managed to remember to get a photo of one of Kimani’s kitchen knives… this is the small one. Kimani uses a pair of pangas as kitchen knives, he sharpens them every day and can peel carrots with them beautifully. It was quite something to watch! After a photo of the guys with the vehicle we drove on to Nairobi. The end of that trip, the start of another load of laundry, another pile of photos to download, back onto tarred roads… electricity… white people… two storey buildings… matatus…
Back into the “real” world, a world that it is a lot more superficial than one where goats die because there isn’t enough to eat, where the people die because the goats die, where a digital camera is a novelty, where the light at night is the moon and the stars, where there’s space to let your thoughts roam, where the sky is bigger than you can ever imagine and the world seems to go on desolately forever.
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| Friday, 16-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Day 7 - Lake Turkana to Maralal
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Sunrise from Lake Turkana
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Our hut was the first on the left
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Thatched walls, a thatched roof, and tiny windows
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The day we learnt how strong the wind is and the dustiest day of my life…
We were up in time to catch photos of the sunrise at Lake Turkana and a few shots of the camp in the early morning light. The we started packing the vehicle… Baraza had parked back on to the wind so when the door was opened (the door on the side I was sitting on) it slammed all the way round, chipped off a huge piece of paint and bent the hinge. So now it wouldn’t shut… (and the other back door wouldn’t open… we’d had problems with the doors the whole trip!).
We ended up tying the door shut with a pair of shoelaces that Kimani had in his bag. Because the door wouldn’t close properly though there was a crack that let in dust all day… I was absolutely covered from head to toe, my clothes were brown, my hair turned to mud when I got in the shower later that day.
The drive started along the shore of the lake and I managed to finally get my camera on the right settings to capture the green (photo . When we left the lake, we’d dropped so far south we were out of the desert and back into semi-arid vegetation. There was still plenty of sand and rocks though!
On the drive we noticed plants with bright pink flowers and at one point there was one growing close to the road. Stopping to take photos at this point was a real effort as for in order for Teke and I to get out of the vehicle we had to climb through the windows as we couldn’t open either of the doors! Kimani informed us that the plant is a desert rose, it’s certainly really striking.
Our route took us along the edge of the Rift Valley and we occasionally got glimpses down the escarpment which was quite spectacular. When we arrived in Maralal we went straight to a garage to try and get the door fixed. We bumbled around the markets and had drinks for an hour while they bashed the hinge back into shape and fixed the catch so it worked again.
When we got to the campsite we pitched the tent and jumped in the shower… I had a mud bath before I managed to get the showergel to my skin but I felt amazing afterwards! We had a quiet evening and another good dinner then slept like logs because it was so much cooler… I had jeans and a sweatshirt on in the evening!
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| Thursday, 15-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Loyangalani faces
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Whilst we were in Asmal’s village we got the opportunity to take photos of people. I’m not a fan of posed shots but this was a chance to take photos of children which was fun because they were going mad. Posing for the photo was an adventure but as I’ve got a digital with a screen, looking at the photo afterwards was even better! I had a few seconds to snap photos and then it was a case of trying to make sure that everyone could see without touching! I then cropped the photos down to get “candid” portrait shots. Here’s a selection of some of my favourites.
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| Wednesday, 14-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Day 6 - Lake Turkana & Loyangalani
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The view from my bed ;)
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The fridge (and the cat!)
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A boy and his dog fishing in the lake
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The day we learnt what wind is… We first woke up just before sunrise, when the moon was setting. It was an enormous orange ball in the sky because of the dust. It looked really amazing but neither photo I took came out – there’s an orange squiqqle in both of them as I couldn’t hold the camera still for long enough! The second time I woke up was after sunrise and I was greeted by the view in photo 1. Lovely.
Not so lovely when we walked outside… or rather tried to walk outside… The wind was incredible! So strong that I had to lean into it in order to be able to walk anywhere. Walking uphill into the wind was virtually impossible.  We were supposed to go on a boat trip in the morning but it was cancelled because of the wind so we spent our time chilling out, having a shower, watching the world go by and snoozing. I finally got around to reading the manual for my camera… it can do so much more than I realised!
We were joined in our laziness by the camp cat who just slept in the shade for most of the day. She spent a large part of her time under the fridge (photo 2). If you make a double-lined bag with foam inbetween the two layers of Hessian, put your drinks in, soak the bag in water and hang it in front of a window to catch the breeze… you end up with cold drinks! A rather efficient fridge, you just have to remember to keep it wet.
The wind kept up pretty much all day. In the afternoon we went into Loyangalani. Asmal, one of the Gametrackers staff, had been catching a lift up to Lake Turkana with us as he’d been south on leave. He lives in Loyangalani and invited us to visit his village and meet his wife and sisters. We spent a couple of hours in his village, having a tour of Loyangalani and the hot spring and then we went for a beer before heading back to camp whilst watching a really cool sunset.
Kimani excelled himself at dinner that night. We’d been treated to an amazing variety of soups, fish and chips, macaroni cheese with a crispy top ( ), irio, lentil sauces, veggie curry and on and on and on. But for pudding on our second night at Lake Turkana, Kimani made us plum crumble and custard. And he made it on a fire. Wow! It was amazing! We ate far too much and sat and watched the stars before heading to bed, to sleep off the food… again!
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| Tuesday, 13-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Day 5 - Kalacha to Lake Turkana
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We woke up to a lovely temperature in Kalacha, it was cool! We had breakfast and then headed out into the desert again (past the oasis with the drinking camels ). It was more salt pan all the way to North Horr, with a few glimpses of ostriches running across the desert.
We had a tour of North Horr town whilst looking for the “hotel” (what they call essentially restaurants). Eventually we found the place we were looking for and stopped for drinks (“soda baridi” that was actually cold!). All the animals in the town were looking ok but as soon as you got out of town everything, even the camels was really skinny. Up there the goats are scared of vehicles and run away, we saw a couple that just fell over when they tried to turn and run. Things are really not so great.
After North Horr we were told we were heading into the worst bit of the road, where people often get stuck… true enough… we got stuck… unfortunately the driver can’t blame the sand… he “didn’t see” the road (I did…) and tried to take a short cut that hadn’t been driven enough times and promptly sunk. His next action (which sunk him even deeper in my estimation) was to put his vehicle into 1st and spin his wheels – how to dig a hole in sand really fast!   So we were well and truly stuck, too deep to use the sand skids…
However, there was a bright side to the story! The family from the AIC Church Mission in Kalacha had decided to drive through with us and luckily, when they saw us getting stuck they went a different route through the river bed and didn’t get stuck. They tried to tow us out… we didn’t have a tow rope and theirs wasn’t long enough for them to stay on the stable sand to pull… so they got stuck as well! Then they winched themselves out using a tree, turned around and winched us out! What a palaver!
We continued on our way through the desert, over sand flats and through more lava flows. We were driving quite fast so taking pictures through the window was a bit of a challenge. (Our driver never seemed to realise that we wanted to take photos of more than just animals!) Later on in the day he managed to get us stuck again… this time on a rock that was “bigger than he realised”. The vehicle didn’t have a tall jack so there was an “Africa Fix” with a short jack and some rocks and we were away again.
Teke and I ended up walking to the viewpoint for our first view of Lake Turkana as there was a ‘Working for Food’ gang rebuilding the road and we stopped to give them water. While Baraza and Kimani did the water thing we walked down to take photos of the lake. From a distance it just looked like a big lake, when we got closer I realised that it was really green.
Yes I know it’s called the Jade Sea but I’d just figured it would be green-ish, or green in the right light… not quite. The Jade Sea really is GREEN. We stopped for water in Loyangalani and then went straight down to the camp where we nearly fell asleep in the hour before lunch. We spent the afternoon chilling (I think! I can’t quite remember!) and then took photos of the sunset before dinner and bed.
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| Monday, 12-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Day 4 - Marsabit to Kalacha
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What a way to wake up... there was water dripping on the tent, the air was full of cloud and it was cold enough for jeans and a jersey! The first picture really shows it all… We had breakfast and then were off again, first into Marsabit for bread as the shop was closed the evening before. We managed to nearly get lost in town – when you’re in the middle of the road you can’t see the shops and therefore have no idea where you are, the mist is just so thick.
Apparently the mist in town lasts till 10 o’clock, 15 minutes drive out of town there is no mist, 30 minutes drive out of town you’re back into the real desert. We spent hours driving through lava flows and across sand flats. Then there were more lava flows with the occasional oasis and even a pair of zebras, that was a real shock!
Near lunchtime we passed through a Gabbra settlement and into Maikona, on the edge of the Chalbi Desert. We stopped to ask there when the last rain was, our plan was to drive across the desert to Kalacha but if there’s been rain the desert turns into a shallow lake and is impassable. We were in the clear so we went across… The Chalbi Desert is essentially an enormous salt pan, surrounded by lava flows and oases.
We managed to miss the turn-off to Kalacha (“at the oasis with water and the camels drinking, turn right”) so we ended up eating lunch under a random acacia tree in the middle of the desert. The wind was incredibly strong and covered everything in a fine black dust so Kimani skipped the usual salad and we had carrot sticks, cheese and bread.
Just as we were finishing lunch an army vehicle crammed with people came past and confirmed that we had missed the turning in return for a bottle of water. We turned around and went back to Kalacha, our destination for the night the AIC campsite. Wow… nice campsites, beautiful showers… and… a swimming pool!!!!!!!
I chilled under the tree chatting with Kimani and drinking tea until the sun had dropped enough to avoid sunburn then swam and showered and lost a few kilos of dust! In the evening one of the guys from the mission came to say hello, then it was dinner and bed. A tent this time, without the fly though… there was no chance of rain and we needed every breath of wind we could get. It was a very hot night.
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