Kenya en Route

Monday 14th May

We are relaxing here at Lake Naivasha today – the bird life is wonderful so that keeps us entertained, and of course there is always laundry and car maintenance to be done. We went for a walk in the afternoon, otherwise just had a really lazy day.

Tuesday 15th May

We left at 8.30am and stopped in at a weavers shop where Dave bought a shirt & belt and I bought a kanga. Then we headed N on another appalling road – Kenya has them too! In fact, Kenya is the “pot-hole king” and now we were on a detour, it was dusty and pot holed so going was slow especially as the road was so busy. We saw Lake Elementeita an our left hand side and stopped to go and investigate as we could see the pink shimmer of a million flamingo on the water. Lake Elementeita is a soda lake only 1 ½ meters deep at its deepest. Thousands upon thousands of flamingo live in Lake Elementeita, Lake Nakuru and Lake Bogoria – all lakes in the Great Rift Valley. When a female flamingo is 18 months old, she goes to Lake Natron to lay a single egg which she leaves in the sand for the sun to incubate – 28 days later the chick hatches and feeds on the egg yolk for 7 days before going into Lake Natron to feed on algae for 3 months before migrating to either Elementeita, Nakuru or Bogoria to start the whole cycle again. Marabou storks and African fish eagles can and do feed on flamingoes. The sight of thousands upon thousands of flamingo was a breath taking sight.
We then got back on the road to travel towards Nakuru where we stopped at lunch time for shopping, petrol, internet café etc before heading NW for Kagamega Forest National Park – one of the few remaining rain forests in Kenya. Slow going roads with loads of traffic resulted in us having to look for a bush camp as we realized we were not going to make Kakamega, however, Kenya is very populated, so despite taking a side road, we had to ask locals if we could camp in their land. Well, it was the equivalent of 4 UFO’s landing in someones back garden- the “Baba” could not speak English but through one of his 5 sons as an interpreter, he gave us permission, and in fact invited us to sleep in their home! His grand children had never seen white people and this was definitely the event of the decade. Fortunately, for us, it started to pour with rain after we had set up camp, otherwise I don’t think they would have gone to sleep that night!

Wednesday 16th May

Bright & early at 6.30am we were up making coffee and so were our hosts on hand to observe these “aliens”. I took a family portrait of them all and Dave printed it out for them which led to great excitement, while Brian & Maureen gave the kids marbles and colouring-in books. The hospitality shown to us by this family was incredible and we were really grateful. Anyway, we set off again at about 8.30am and reached Kakamega Forest at about 10.30am. We did a drive around and saw 100’s of exquisite butterflies and then set up camp as we saw the red tailed monkeys, black and white colobus and plenty of birds right there in the camp.



Thursday 17th May

We woke up fairly early in pouring rain but it soon subsided and we set off on a guided walk – man was this guide knowledgeable! He could identify the birds from their calls alone, and he could imitate their calls as well, so it helped us see and hear things that we were not even aware were there. We had a late, big breakfast and then set off back to Kakamega town to do shopping and tyre puncture repairs! We made a short detour out of town to see the Weeping stone of Shinyalu which is a 20m high granite stone with a boulder on top. Water continually weeps from this boulder on top down the length of the granite stone. Of course there are several local legends surrounding this stone.
So it was after 1 o’clock once we finally got on the road NW to the Ugandan border. The Ugandan border was a pleasure and we were through by 4pm and heading towards Jinja on a wonderful tarred road. Our delight was short lived however as after 50kms the road deteriorated badly and the last 70kms were harrowing – busy, pot-holed and dusty with far too little road for the amount of traffic – often you were quite literally squeezed off the road by bigger vehicles with “more claim” to the patch of tar! We only reached the Explorers Campsite on the banks of the Victoria Nile River after 7pm.