Hlane

Caught up with Kenya.... and last weekend I went back to Swaziland, this time to Hlane reserve - where there's no electricity except a modicum for the restaurant provided by solar powered batteries - the restaurant closes promptly at eight o'clock and everyone goes to bed. The thatch-roofed cottages are lit with paraffin lamps and there's nowhere to recharge a phone or camera batteries - life before electricity must've been tough. You can hear lions roaring not that far away but they're behind a fence, in theory (although a waiter told me the fence had come down in a storm a few nights earlier - so how good a fence can it be?). You're woken in the morning by impala coughing gently as they graze the grass outside your front door.

Guides take you on bush walks (armed with a knobkerry, which is another version of a short stick). I'm starting to vastly prefer walking to driving in a land rover, because you see more detail and you never know what you're going to stumble across - in Hlane we stumbled at one point upon a rhino, a mere six metres or so away with nothing between us except some scrubby bushes and thin trees. The guide held up his hand, which is the signal to stop, and we stood watching the rhino for five very long minutes - and the rhino stood watching us, turning its head from side to side to get a better view. Then the guide eventually beckoned us away. This was exhilirating. I suppose the guides know their animals and don't take undue risks with their customers, but it certainly felt very different from looking at a rhino in a zoo. I didn't take any photos because I found that I wanted quite strongly to stay focused on what the rhino was doing and be completely ready to run if necessary; recording the experience became very much a secondary consideration.

Above: impala, insects, plants, hippo skull, two hippo skulls.

Witchcraft - performance assessment

According to an article in the Nairobi Standard, witchdoctors are sometimes held accountable for their work - in West Pokot district a few days ago a witchdoctor ended up in hospital after being beaten up for failing to perform as promised. Two boys from his village had paid him to help them pass their school leaving exams, forking over thirty thousand Kenyan shillings - about 280 euros - for his services. The witchdoctor gave them some herbs "and other black substances" to eat before each paper. The boys had full confidence in this procedure, apparently without reference to what they actually wrote down in the exams - they told their friends and parents that they'd performed brilliantly. Their actual results, however, were dire. When they learned how badly they'd done one fainted while the other one "screamed for help" - a mob gathered and duly went off to punish the witchdoctor - not for being a bogus old fraud who preyed on the gullibility of young men but because his charms had failed to deliver the goods. No criticism of the young men themselves is stated or implied - one of them is quoted as saying "We could not compare our lives to the money he wanted. Good academic performance would shape our lives forever." But surely... if the witchcraft had worked... it would have been cheating?

Above: random photos from Kenya.

Lake Elementaita

Lake Naivasha is a fresh water lake. Flamingos prefer salt water, apparently, so I drove for another hour or so to Lake Elementaita which is somehow salty although nowhere near the sea (but then why are seas salty anyway? This has always been a mystery to me. Rain is never salty, and you'd think that a few billion years of rainfall would have resulted in fresh water everywhere. But then what do I know?). When we got to Lake Elementaita the guide said that it wasn't a good day for seeing flamingos - the water level was low and there weren't very many of them. But there were several thousand, which by my standards is a lot of flamingos. The lake is very shallow and they were standing way out in the middle of the lake; so I've had a better view of flamingos in Joburg zoo - but then again it was impressive to see so many of them, in an environment that they'd chosen - up to their skinny little knees in muddy, salty, smelly water.

Crescent Island

On one side of Naivasha Lake there's a wildlife sanctuary called Crescent Island, which isn't an island any more - the water level has fallen over the years and now it's a wide land bridge with parts of the lake on either side. A guide will take you on a long walk which is quite magical - there are lots of ruminants and they're pretty used to human pedestrians, so you can be surrounded by zebra, giraffes, galloping wildebeest (who seem to spend a lot of time running around to no particular purpose), gazelles, waterbucks, umpteen bird species etc.

There are also pythons - I didn't see a full grown one, which can grow to several metres, but the guide showed me a nest of newly-hatched babies - a mere foot or so long. The English woman who lives on the island in a beautiful cottage and collects the visitors' fees (she's been in Kenya since 1970 and has "seen a few changes") said that her daughter's dog had been eaten by a python- they don't hunt, exactly, but they lurk in the undergrowth and whack any passing small mammal with their powerful tails, stunning or injuring it, then they twine around and crush the victim, breaking all the bones - then they cleverly dislocate their jaws so they can swallow it whole; then they'll lay dormant for a couple of months, digesting. I asked the guide if the mother of the baby pythons would still be around. Yes, he said, she'd be nearby somewhere. Was he sure, I asked, that they never attacked humans? Not usually, he said, but if I tripped and, say, broke my ankle, a large python might become interested and make a stab at swallowing me, after salivating copiously all over me to make me slip down more easily. I really must stop asking guides questions.

Above: Maribu storks; baby python; demonstration of the circumference of an adult python using a shed skin; live trees; a dead tree riddled with woodpecker holes; wildebeest playing their favourite game of running in a circle for no particular reason.

Lake Naivasha

At Sopa lodge at Lake Naivasha, about a hundred kilometres north-west of Nairobi, you can ask a guard to accompany you down to the edge of the lake (the guard is needed to keep you away from buffalo and hippos, rather than vice-versa: buffalo and hippos can pretty much go where they want) and you can watch flocks of pelicans heading home, or somewhere, at sunset. Hippos semi-submerged in the shallows seem to share a joke now and then, making a deep "nyah nyah nyah" trumpet-like noise which they apparently produce through their nostrils. Animals of all sorts wander around the unfenced lodge, including monkeys, giraffes, various types of antelope, and - at night - hippos as well, who come out of the water to graze in the dark.

The guards - who accompany you to and from your room - are equipped to protect you with: a short stick - this is Kenya, after all, so there's none of the nonsense you get in the Kruger with large-bore rifles at the ready. I asked one of the guards about how effective a short stick would be against a charging hippo. "If you start running," I said, "Should I follow you?" "No," he said, "I'll be trying to distract the animal. You run in the opposite direction." Then he laughed. I still don't know if he meant it.

Above: the lake; yellow fever trees - a type of acacia (the bark really is yellow and somewhat furry - if you rub it the fur comes off and it's a beautiful lime green underneath; years ago people thought it caused yellow fever, but this is only because it tends to grow in swampy areas where mosquitoes breed; but the name stuck. Give a tree a bad name...); giraffes on the path; Colobus monkeys - which hang around outside windows, hoping for free food; pelicans on the lake.

Hell's Gate

I popped over to Kenya for the weekend. Not really - it's a four hour plane trip so hardly a hop - but I needed to go for work so went a couple of days early and explored the country north of Nairobi. I expected it to be very hot, being on the equator - but the weather was perfect, warm but with a breeze and a refreshing temperature drop in the evening - Nairobi is at 1,800 metres so even higher up than Joburg. March to May is a rainy season and the countryside was very green - and the drop into the Rift Valley as you travel north-west out of Nairobi is spectacular.

First stop was Hell's Gate national park, an area containing two extinct volcanoes and some impressive evidence of volcanic activity - there are chunks of obsidian littered all over the place and some thick seams in the rock formations. A guide takes you along Hell's Gate itself, a gorge - full length 17 kilometres. There are signs warning you to "watch out for flash floods" - according to the guide you have about an hour to get out of the way before the water starts roaring through - plenty of time, unless of course it rains somewhere upstream and you don't notice in time. The gorge is still very much being formed - at one point you can see graffiti scratched into the rock several metres above you which includes the date 1989, which is not so long ago. The gorge walk is great fun - amazing scenery and lots of detail to check out, such as steaming hot springs supporting neon green algae and the occasional leech easing through the muddy shallows.

Above: the rift valley; the gorge.