Hell's Gate
The most amazing thing about being in East Africa is the thought of this area being the birthplace of human kind. The Great Rift Valley runs like an inverse scar from Africa's coast, near the Saudi peninsula's attachment to the continent, down through Kenya and Tanzania, dotted with ancient volcanoes like Mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro, plus dozens of other equally beautiful volcanic mountains rising from the plain floors. The first time I see Mt. Longonot on the road from Nairobi to Kisumu, I want to climb it. The Masai name “oloonong'ot” means “mountain of many spurs,” and those jutting spurs along the crater rim, crown-like, create its royal beauty. We can see Longonot while in a boat on Lake Naivasha, but I don't climb it... (this trip!). You see, Longonot is not an extinct volcanoe, for puffs of steam still rise from its crater's interior, giving it the classification of “senile.”
Geothermal “pools” run underground throughout this area and are harnessed in Hell's Gate National Park, next to the Lake. At the park's lower gorge, a power station has been constructed with minimal impact to the area, boasting pipes of all sizes zig-zagging in earnest. Experts predict the station will eventually supply half of Kenya's electricity. The super-heated underground water can reach 304 degrees Centigrade, one of the hottest sources in the world. On our hike through the gorge, our Masai guide, Jackson, shows us the hot water running down the walls and over rocks, steam rising. Shells lay on the ground where someone has taken the challenge to boil an egg. The water is so hot it appears to bubble in a small, bowl-like rock.
Hell's Gate is one of only two parks in Kenya where people can walk and see animals. Everywhere else, you must be in a vehicle, but here we rent bikes just outside the park's entrance and cycle through, rolling past zebra, warthogs, baboons and wildebeest, cape buffalo and gazelle's. Well, at one point we actually stopped when cycling past buffalo, for fear they might attack us. Stopping is precisely what you don't want to do because these young (huge!) buffalo are just as curious about us as we are about them. So when they start staring and turning toward us, taking an occasional step out of curiosity, we turn back. Quickly. A British couple comes along in their red 4X4 and drive ahead, to scope out the herd, returning to tell us we can safely cycle by if we just keep on cycling. So we do, with a bit of trepidation, and as we pass the massive animals they run away from us!
Once in the park, it is 7 km to the gorge. Several cars pass us, kicking up dust, but we keep moving on the dirt road, spying a Zebra carcass and Speke's weavers. John Speke is the English explorer credited with discovering Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile. Speke and Captain Sir Richard Burton traveled into Africa's interior in the mid-1800s, searching for the source. Richard Burton is my hero, so it's thrilling for me to live on Lake Victoria and to travel through areas he explored nearly 150 years ago. I suspect not much in the way of customs and housing for many tribes has changed since Burton came through. But for the gripping story of their explorations, watch the movie “Mountains of the Moon.” It's an adventure, a love story and an action film!! Burton was something of an ethnographer before anthropology became a discipline. He traveled throughout Asia, Africa and even the U.S., learning more than 30 languages and documenting the customs of societies he visited. He even sketched the people and their abodes. Burton was quite a remarkable person and deserves his own post on this blog, which I will happily provide in the near future!
Patrick, who lives in Durban, South Africa and is in Kenya working with the Mamias Sugar company, gives us a ride to the park, about 10 kms from Lake Naivasha Lodge. As we cruise along the lake's rim in Patrick's company car, he says in his British accent, “You are about to see some of the worst roads in Africa.” And he's right. Soon the road becomes a checkerboard of pocks, large and small and deep, so that many vehicles leave the road entirely and ride along the side (if there is a shoulder to ride on). We bounce and jar, ever cognizant of other cars, who are also bouncing and jarring and often in our path. This goes on for 4 or 5 kms and is all the more remarkable because along the road are nurseries, where flowers are raised and exported to Europe. Homegrown, one of the largest growers, exports more than 50 million flower stems to the UK each year.
This area hosts multi-million dollar horticultural industries. Why do they not repair the roads to transport their goods more easily? Someone said a flower can be cut in the morning and will arrive in Holland that afternoon. Hard to believe with these roads. Because of the number of horticultural farms and their contamination of the lake with pesticides, environmentalists managed to get the lake listed as a Ramsar Site, a wetland of internationally recognized ecological importance. Just within the last few years, the growers have shown an awareness of the dangers of the pesticides for the lake as well as their workers. Measures are being taken, such as not cultivating within one km of the lake (to prevent runoff) and health checks for workers. But the danger of chemical use is the pervasive way it settles in soil and water and living tissue. In her 1962 book “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson describes the impact of pesticides in the United States after two decades of use:
“Synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of bird; and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother's milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.” (p. 15-16)
Carson's book alerted the government to the dangers of pesticides, which led to environmental legislation and some reform, and her title reflects the silence that follows the death of birds, insects and other animals. Even with awareness concerning pesticides, the future of Lake Naivasha is uncertain. The Rough Guide to Kenya says, “Some of the areas 350 types of bird, hippopotamus and other wildlife are still threatened with extinction, and already the lily-trotter, the great crested grebe and the create helmet shrike have all but disappeared.” (p. 237)
As we skim the lake in a fiberglass boat, I peer at the hippos and flamingos through binoculars, knowing the nearby horticultural houses go on for miles and miles. But in my view, the landscape rolls away in layers, with wall of hill followed by wall of mountain ringing the valley. Looking at the shoreline and beyond through the binoculars is like watching a National Geographic special. So much beauty in the grass at the water's edge, in the furred and un-furred animals, in the feathered creatures only yards away. I feel my heart expand into my throat as the Waterbucks graze and the Pelicans preen. The beauty fills me.
The delicate, delicate beauty fills me.
Geothermal “pools” run underground throughout this area and are harnessed in Hell's Gate National Park, next to the Lake. At the park's lower gorge, a power station has been constructed with minimal impact to the area, boasting pipes of all sizes zig-zagging in earnest. Experts predict the station will eventually supply half of Kenya's electricity. The super-heated underground water can reach 304 degrees Centigrade, one of the hottest sources in the world. On our hike through the gorge, our Masai guide, Jackson, shows us the hot water running down the walls and over rocks, steam rising. Shells lay on the ground where someone has taken the challenge to boil an egg. The water is so hot it appears to bubble in a small, bowl-like rock.
Hell's Gate is one of only two parks in Kenya where people can walk and see animals. Everywhere else, you must be in a vehicle, but here we rent bikes just outside the park's entrance and cycle through, rolling past zebra, warthogs, baboons and wildebeest, cape buffalo and gazelle's. Well, at one point we actually stopped when cycling past buffalo, for fear they might attack us. Stopping is precisely what you don't want to do because these young (huge!) buffalo are just as curious about us as we are about them. So when they start staring and turning toward us, taking an occasional step out of curiosity, we turn back. Quickly. A British couple comes along in their red 4X4 and drive ahead, to scope out the herd, returning to tell us we can safely cycle by if we just keep on cycling. So we do, with a bit of trepidation, and as we pass the massive animals they run away from us!
Once in the park, it is 7 km to the gorge. Several cars pass us, kicking up dust, but we keep moving on the dirt road, spying a Zebra carcass and Speke's weavers. John Speke is the English explorer credited with discovering Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile. Speke and Captain Sir Richard Burton traveled into Africa's interior in the mid-1800s, searching for the source. Richard Burton is my hero, so it's thrilling for me to live on Lake Victoria and to travel through areas he explored nearly 150 years ago. I suspect not much in the way of customs and housing for many tribes has changed since Burton came through. But for the gripping story of their explorations, watch the movie “Mountains of the Moon.” It's an adventure, a love story and an action film!! Burton was something of an ethnographer before anthropology became a discipline. He traveled throughout Asia, Africa and even the U.S., learning more than 30 languages and documenting the customs of societies he visited. He even sketched the people and their abodes. Burton was quite a remarkable person and deserves his own post on this blog, which I will happily provide in the near future!
Patrick, who lives in Durban, South Africa and is in Kenya working with the Mamias Sugar company, gives us a ride to the park, about 10 kms from Lake Naivasha Lodge. As we cruise along the lake's rim in Patrick's company car, he says in his British accent, “You are about to see some of the worst roads in Africa.” And he's right. Soon the road becomes a checkerboard of pocks, large and small and deep, so that many vehicles leave the road entirely and ride along the side (if there is a shoulder to ride on). We bounce and jar, ever cognizant of other cars, who are also bouncing and jarring and often in our path. This goes on for 4 or 5 kms and is all the more remarkable because along the road are nurseries, where flowers are raised and exported to Europe. Homegrown, one of the largest growers, exports more than 50 million flower stems to the UK each year.
This area hosts multi-million dollar horticultural industries. Why do they not repair the roads to transport their goods more easily? Someone said a flower can be cut in the morning and will arrive in Holland that afternoon. Hard to believe with these roads. Because of the number of horticultural farms and their contamination of the lake with pesticides, environmentalists managed to get the lake listed as a Ramsar Site, a wetland of internationally recognized ecological importance. Just within the last few years, the growers have shown an awareness of the dangers of the pesticides for the lake as well as their workers. Measures are being taken, such as not cultivating within one km of the lake (to prevent runoff) and health checks for workers. But the danger of chemical use is the pervasive way it settles in soil and water and living tissue. In her 1962 book “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson describes the impact of pesticides in the United States after two decades of use:
“Synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of bird; and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother's milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.” (p. 15-16)
Carson's book alerted the government to the dangers of pesticides, which led to environmental legislation and some reform, and her title reflects the silence that follows the death of birds, insects and other animals. Even with awareness concerning pesticides, the future of Lake Naivasha is uncertain. The Rough Guide to Kenya says, “Some of the areas 350 types of bird, hippopotamus and other wildlife are still threatened with extinction, and already the lily-trotter, the great crested grebe and the create helmet shrike have all but disappeared.” (p. 237)
As we skim the lake in a fiberglass boat, I peer at the hippos and flamingos through binoculars, knowing the nearby horticultural houses go on for miles and miles. But in my view, the landscape rolls away in layers, with wall of hill followed by wall of mountain ringing the valley. Looking at the shoreline and beyond through the binoculars is like watching a National Geographic special. So much beauty in the grass at the water's edge, in the furred and un-furred animals, in the feathered creatures only yards away. I feel my heart expand into my throat as the Waterbucks graze and the Pelicans preen. The beauty fills me.
The delicate, delicate beauty fills me.
posted by Cindi at 9:35 AM
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