CHAPTER ONE
Journey to Lake Rudolf
FOR TWO MONTHS IN 1959 I had been travelling with mule
transport from Addis Ababa to the Kenya frontier. I was
disappointed by the lack of game animals seen on the way to
Mega, a small township some forty miles from the Kenya
frontier, since wild animals had been abundant there in the
accounts which I had read about this country as a boy. By now
they had been virtually exterminated. I travelled through
country conquered by Menelik at the end of the nineteenth
century and added to the Ethiopian empire. It bore no
resemblance to the five historic provinces of the north -
Tigre, Begemder, Gojjam, Wollo, Amhara - with which I was
familiar.
By the time I reached Mega, a journey of some four hundred
miles, my shoes were worn out but the Vice-Consul in Mega,
Ian Reeman, advised me to go to Moyale where he thought I
would be able to get others. I did not have a permit to cross
the frontier from Ethiopia into Kenya, but at Moyale the DC,
George Webb, made me welcome. I told him that I must get
another pair of shoes, and that evening George Webb sent for
a cobbler, told him to measure my feet and to have a pair of
strong chapli sandals ready by breakfast time. I found
George Webb a quite exceptionally able linguist, a man
dedicated to the work he was doing and fascinating to talk
to. Ever since I was a boy I had been interested in the
Northern Frontier District of Kenya (the NFD as it was more
generally known).
While I was a child in Add is Ababa British officials
serving on the frontiers of the Sudan, Kenya and British
Somaliland came up on various occasions to see my father to
discuss tribal raids and other problems they were having with
the Ethiopians. While staying with us, such men as Arnold
Hodson, Consul in southern Ethiopia, had told me stories of
tribal raids and lion hunts and I had felt that this would be
the life for me. As a boy in Ethiopia and later at school I
had dreamt of exploration and of hunting big game. In the
Sudan, five years before the Second World War, I took every
opportunity to hunt and I shot elephant, buffalo and many
lion. Now, however, I only wished to shoot an occasional
animal for food. Over the years I had read a number of books
about the NFD and: the tribes that lived there - for
instance, The Ivory Raiders by Major H. Rayne which my
mother had given me for my fourteenth birthday. Now, talking
to George Webb in the evenings, I heard a lot at first hand
about tribes such as the Boran, Turkana and Rendille who
lived there.He told me that a special permit was needed
before anyone who was not a government official was allowed
into that area, and this of course added to my determination
to go there.
From Moyale I trekked back to Addis Ababa along the east
side of the Rift Valley and its lakes. The next year, 1960, I
made an arduous journey lasting several months from Addis
Ababa, following the east side of the Blue Nile to Lake Tana;
from there, I travelled through the Simien Mountains and then
back to Addis Ababa by way of Lalibela and Magdala. Later the
same year Frank Steele and I had planned to travel southwards
from Addis Ababa to Lake Rudolf in the NFD.
I had met Frank Steele in 1951 in Iraq where he was the
Vice-Consul in Basra, while I was living in the Marshes. I
went into Basra occasionally to stay with him and his wife
Angela to get a hot bath and a civilized meal in their house.
Frank visited me in the Marshes and spent several days with
me travelling about in my canoe. After the War, he had served
for two years in northern Uganda where he had hunted,
particularly elephant, and done some game. control and
conservation work. Like me, Frank enjoyed travelling simply
in remote places. I had always preferred to travel on my own,
but I felt that here was somebody I could happily travel
with. We soon became close friends.
We had planned later that year for Frank to join me in
Addis Ababa from Beirut, where he was stationed, and then to
travel southwards to Lake Rudolf. However, the Ethiopians
refused to give us permits on the grounds that the country
was too disturbed. We therefore decided to travel to the lake
through the Northern Frontier District of Kenya.
On 7 November 1960 I flew to Nairobi to meet Frank who was
due to arrive a few days later There in the setting of the
New Stanley Hotel I felt utterly lost I knew nobody in
Nairobi and had no idea how to set about getting the
necessary permit to enable Frank and myself to enter the NFD
I had however been given the name of someone in the
administration and I went and saw him the morning after my
arrival. I explained what I wanted to do and he advised me to
get in touch with George Webb. I said, 'I can't go all the
way up to Moyale just to see George Webb,' to which he
replied, 'You needn't, he's here. He is the Number Two in
Security and Defence.' I rang George immediately. He sounded
surprised but pleased to hear me. 'I'll pick you up at one
o'clock at the New Stanley. I've got a great barn of a house
near the game park. Why not come and stay?' I was delighted
and reassured to see him again. The next day he introduced me
to the Governor, Sir Patrick Renison, who gave me a special
permit which authorized Frank and me to go wherever we wished
in the NFD.
The NFD, bordering Uganda, Sudan, southern Ethiopia and
Somalia, covered northern Kenya. The greater part was desert,
inhabited by camel-owning nomad tribes. The exception was a
northward extension of the plateau of the White Highlands
occupied by the pastoral cattle-owning Samburu; to the west
the Samburu plateau, 7000-8000 feet high, fell abruptly into
the Rift Valley, and to the north and east less abruptly to
the low, hot country beneath it.
After Frank and I had arrived in Nairobi we went to see
Ian Grimwood the Chief Game Warden, and he agreed to give us
a game licence to shoot animals for food while we were on
this safari. He suggested one animal, non-specified, a week.
I said, 'Make it two just in case in one week we need two
animals; but don t worry, we shall only shoot an occasional
animal for meat.'
From Nairobi, Frank and I went to Isiolo, the provincial
headquarters of the NFD. In those days the government houses
had attractive, well-tended gardens which have since
disappeared. Today most of their owners grow maize in them. I
never cared for Isiolo with its predominantly Somali
inhabitants. Just beyond the town, a barrier across the road
marked the entrance to the NFD. We called on Peter Walters,
the Provincial Commissioner, at his house. He was in his
garden, where an elephant had destroyed some of the flowers
the night before. He took us into his office and we showed
him our permit. I got the impression that Walters was
slightly indignant that he had not been consulted before it
was given to us. I told him that we planned to travel north
to Lake Rudolf then round the north side of Mount Kulal and
across to Marsabit where Frank, his leave being up, would
have to return to London. From Marsabit I planned to travel
south-west to Ilaut and Baragoi on my way to Lodwar. From
there I would go on to Lake Baringo and then to Maralal,
where I would end my journey. Frank and I were both looking
forward enormously to this trip through areas visited only
occasionally by an official on duty.
While we were in Isiolo, we called on George Adamson, the
Game Warden, who gave us some useful advice about our
journey. He and his wife Joy, and Elsa the lioness they had
reared, were already well known in Kenya and after Joy had
written Born Free were to become world famous.
We started our journey from Kula Mawe, east of Isiolo,
where we hired six camels and five men, two of whom were
Somali camelmen. Kula Mawe acquired its strange name ('eat a
stone') when some years previously a policeman and his young
son were travelling to Garba Tula. Too late to get there that
day, the policeman decided they should spend the night under
a tree. They had no food with them and his son asked him what
they were going to eat. The impatient father turned on him
and said 'Kula mawe!' ('Eat a stone!'), a name remembered
when, soon afterwards, a village was built there.
From Kula Mawe we took four days to reach Archer's Post,
where a bridge crosses the Uaso Nyiro River, travelling
through rolling country sometimes covered with scrub and
sometimes open and grassy. We saw a lot of game: a cheetah
and many oryx, eland, Grant's gazelle; impala and zebra. The
zebra were very tame. Archer's Post had been established by
Geoffrey Archer in 1909 as a forward post for the
administration. Now it was a small village. As a boy, I had
known Sir Geoffrey Archer when he was the Commissioner in
British Somaliland and he had come to Addis Ababa
forZauditu's coronation as Empress in 1917. Later we had
stayed with him in Berbera on our way to India, the first
British children ever to have been in British Somaliland. A
great giant of a man, he had been especially kind to my
brother Brian and me, taking us on expeditions along the
coast where we shot birds with the .410 which he lent us.
I left Frank at Archer's Post to get the camels injected
against tsetse fly while I went on ahead by lorry to Wamba.
At Wamba, a pleasing duster of houses at the southern end of
the Mathews Range, I stayed with the District Officer, David
Bennett, who had been an instructor in an Outward Bound
school in Cumberland. Together we climbed through thick
forest to the top of Warges, the 9000-foot mountain
Immediately behind Wamba which dominated the town, and from
there we had a magnificent view. In the forest were some
enormous podocarpus, a tree I remembered from Ethiopia, large
juniper trees, crotons, wild olives and others which I did
not recognize. The podocarpus trees were covered with lichen
and we saw a lot of colobus monkeys and the tracks and
droppings of what we thought was a giant forest hog. We also
found tracks of several herds of buffalo. and masses of
elephant droppings, but these were two or three days old.
Next day we climbed another, rather difficult peak, and then
did a twenty-mile walk northwards through the forest. There
were elephant all round us in the forest and the guides saw
two. We also heard a rhino. Eventually, we were picked up at
the end of the forest in Bennett's' Land Rover. We had to
search, for the Land Rover for some time before we found it
and were half-expecting to have to walk all the way back to
Wamba. I was glad to have seen this forest for I had not seen
its like before. Frank arrived the following day from
Archer's Post and the next day we set off on foot with our
camels.
As on all my journeys travelling on foot' with animals in
Kenya, we lived simply. We had no tables, chairs or lamps; we
had a tent but seldom used it. We slept in the open in a
group with our men and the camels. On one occasion, when it
rained heavily, we covered our food, kit and ourselves with
the cow hides from the camel harnesses. We carried water
between water holes which were never more than four days from
one to the next, unlike in Arabia where wells could be as
much as fourteen days apart. Sometimes we drank from running
streams but at other times water that was so polluted and
foul as to be barely drinkable.
As our men loaded the camels at dawn we drank some coffee
but ate nothing, and then moved off. At the midday halt, we
drank a lot of tea but generally our only meal was in the
evening and consisted of rice and stew. On one occasion when
I had cooked sandgrouse, Frank maintained it was the best
meal he had ever eaten; he remembers the meal to this day.
Most of the time. we were in no particular hurry; and
seldom did more than about seven hours a day, with a midday
halt, but sometimes we kept going without a break, and
occasionally we travelled at night to avoid the heat. We
camped on water whenever possible; if we stopped at midday,
we chose a spot where there was shade, and grazing for the
camels. When we had camped, Frank and I might wander up a
nearby hill for the view or go to look for elephant or try
and shoot something for the pot.
All the tribes in northern Kenya, other than the cattle
owning Samburu living in the Highlands, owned large herds of
camels. None of these tribes ever rode on camels; they used
some of them for carrying their possessions, and sometimes
women and children while they were on the move. The exception
to this were the Turkana who never loaded their camels, even
to fetch water. It has always seemed strange to me that the
Somalis have never ridden camels, in view of their
association with the Arabs in southern Arabia. We walked
beside our loaded camels. Nowadays tourists visiting this
area can ride camels on specially organized camel safaris.
On our way to the Mathews Range, we went
through hilly, stony country; some of it thickly covered with
bush, and then continued northwards with the Range on our
right, the mountains sometimes appearing high above us.
Rather unexpectedly, we passed a big bull elephant, the first
I had seen in Kenya, only fifty yards off the path. We camped
for Christmas in a picturesque valley called the Ngaro Narok
where there were big trees, acacias and tamarinds, and green,
grassy glades, and here I saw two more elephant. That night,
we heard elephant and rhino and, of course, hyenas. One rhino
coming down to water almost walked into our camp in the dark
and made off with a loud snort. Looking for elephant the next
morning, I got within thirty yards of a black rhinoceros, the
first I had ever seen, although I had previously seen a white
rhino in the southern Sudan. He looked formidable as he went
past, peering suspiciously in every direction.
At one camp near a luggah, some wild dogs ran along the
other side and, after watching us. and our camels for a
while, trotted on quietly. The country appeared to be stiff
with rhino. Either Frank or I went ahead to prevent our
camels, tied head to tail, blundering into one of them.
We went on until we came to the Milgis, a very wide, dry
watercourse which separates the Mathews Range from the Ndoto
Mountains. We then made our way up a track which took us
along the top of the Ndotos. After working our way along the
mountain for three days we descended by Ndigiri Alauri, the
'Pass of the Camels' to the hot, scrub-covered country below.
Looking northwards from the pass, I had realized that
there was nothing ahead of. us but desert country to the
Ethiopian frontier and far beyond. This gave me the
satisfaction of knowing that all the farms, ranches and towns
were far behind and that ahead of us were. only. scattered
wells, the encampments of nomads, and wild animals. Above
all, it was the wild animals which made travelling in this
country so much more interesting than in southern Ethiopia,
which it otherwise resembled. Here, at any time, you
half-expected to walk into an elephant or a rhino. At the
foot of the Pass, within a yard of where I slept, there had
been. a great pile of elephant droppings. The mountains
covered with forest .and giant euphorbia gave a background to
the scene, but I craved to get back to this desert country. I
could picture it to the north with its space, solitude and
silence.
We seemed to have collected a good lot of men the two
Somali camelmen an elderly Galla from the Boran tribe and two
Turkana boys one of whom a powerfully built lad called Ekwar,
did the cooking. He remained with me for several years. We
had been feeding well with one good meal a day and when we
were near their encampments the Samburu usually gave us a
goat.
I had been trying to learn Swahili so that I could manage
when Frank had to leave me at Marsabit I am not a natural
linguist, although after eleven years living on my own with
Arabs in southern Arabia and the Marshes of Iraq I had become
fluent in that language. Struggling to learn Latin at Eton
destroyed for ever any enthusiasm I might have had for
conscientiously learning languages.
In the far distance to the west were the mountains on
either side of South Horr for which we were heading. When we
got there, South Horr was particularly attractive. It lay in
the valley between Nyiru, nearly 10,000 foot high, to the
west and the jagged peaks of Ol Doinyo Mara, 7000 foot high,
to the east. We camped in a beautiful grove of tall, slender
acacias with a clear stream of running water nearby. Today
there is a large village there with some shops and
cultivation; then there was nothing other than a small Somali
duka tucked away; there we replenished our posho and
sugar. Frank climbed Ol Doinyo Mara, but I did not accompany
him because I had strained an Achilles tendon. He came back
tired and thirsty, saying that the mountain seemed to consist
entirely of rocks and thorn bushes and that the going had
been hard and hot. But from the top, he had had a magnificent
view of the desert country to.the north and north-east,
shimmering in the heat, and his description of this whetted
my appetite for the days to come. While Frank had been away,
in the nearby forest two hundred yards from our camp, I came
across a bull elephant with tusks which must have weighed 100
lb each. I got up to within twenty yards of him while he was
dozing and had a good look at him, then withdrew.
After South Horr, we travelled for three hours up the
valley until we came to Kurungu, a dry watercourse with a
pool of water. Here we encountered four young Turkana who
came into our camp, and I was surprised to see how graceful
and handsome these young men were. I had not expected to find
such classical features among the Turkana and, indeed, I
learned later that few Turkana were as good-looking. I looked
forward to seeing more of the Turkana on my return journey
from Marsabit. We had been travelling through Samburu country
so far; the Samburu were a tall, strikingly handsome people,
I hoped that I had got some good photographs of them.
Beyond South Horr, we had a long, tiring trek. Luckily, my
foot stood up well to this. Frank had made enquiries about
tracks and distances to the lake and had got a frustrating
variety of answers In fact it took us three more days On the
last two, it was hard going for the surrounding country was
one vast lava field of boulders red or black in colour and we
had to push on for there was no water anywhere except for
what we carried. Conscious that we were approaching the lake,
we expected to see it as we topped each new rise but never
seemed to do so.
Suddenly it was there below us Few other sights have made
a greater impact on me I saw the lake spread out beneath me
stretching towards the Ethiopian frontier where it ended 150
miles away We had come a long way from Kula Mawe on foot and
now felt a sense of achievement I found it easy to imagine
what this sight must have meant to Teleki and Von Höhnel in
1888 as they stood surrounded by their valiant but exhausted
porters, having at last reached this hitherto unknown lake
after their long and perilous journey from the coast. The
next day we had a hard seven hour march in intense heat which
eventually got us to Loiengalani Here was an oasis with trees
and some doum palms along a stream the only fresh water I
believed to be found on the shore of Lake Rudolf. Loiengalani
was a surprisingly beautiful place very peaceful, and with
shimmering lights over the lake and South Island in the
middle In those days there was nothing else there except a
police post and small huts used by the District Commissioner
at Marsabit and other officials on their rare visits to the
lake. Now Loiengalani has developed into a town with a
mission station a church and a lodge with extensive
accommodation for tourists; shops, houses and a
conglomeration of tribal huts with an airstrip nearby.
Remembering Loiengalani as I first saw it I always resent
this imposition on the lake's previously unblemished
surroundings.
Peter Browning, the DC from Marsabit, happened to be there
for a couple of days, which was useful as I was able to
arrange with him to get me new camels at Marsabit to take me
on the second half of the journey. George Adamson, the Game
Warden, had arrived the previous day. He was looking for
somewhere new to turn Elsa loose. Until then the Adamsons had
planned to release Elsa on the edge of Meru National Park.
However, the Meru had threatened to kill her if they did so.
Now the Adamsons planned to turn Elsa loose up here. I liked
and respected Adamson very much, and regretted that I saw so
little of him, but I found his wife impossible when I met her
in Isiolo. She had burst into the room while we were talking
to Adamson, shouting, 'George, George! Vy have you not done
vat I told you? Go down to the town and get the things I told
you to get!' He tried to calm her by saying, 'Can't you. see
that I've got guests?' But she continued. to shout, 'I don't
care about your guests. Get in the car!' Thinking it over
afterwards, I wondered why he had not taken her out into the
bush and shot her.
Our destination after Loiengalani was Marsabit, the
isolated mountain about ninety miles east of Loiengalani
across the Chalbi Desert. But lying in between was Mount
Kulal, an extraordinary volcanic mountain which runs
north-south, parallel to and about fifteen miles east of the
lake. When we said good bye to George Adamson at Loiengalani,
he had described the country to the north of Kulal with
typical understatement as 'quite stony'. Our first camp after
Loiengalani was a beautiful little valley with springs, doum
palms and acacia trees called Lare Debach - an astonishing
sight in that lava desert and looking much as Von Höhnel
described it when he and Teleki camped there some seventy
years earlier. We then circled the northern end of Kulal for
two hard days across a desert of lava boulders. We had the
greatest difficulty in getting the camels through these,
often coming to a standstill while we searched for a way
forward. It was intensely hot, with a tearing wind which
dried us out instead of cooling us. The views were
magnificent. We had a final glimpse of the lake which, Frank
observed, seemed as reluctant to disappear as it had been to
reveal itself As we wanted to have a closer look at Kulal we
travelled south down its east side A civet cat jumped out
from a bush close to the path it was the first I had ever
seen and I watched with interest as it ran off up a hill. We
camped in a steep-sided gorge running into Kulal with clean,
fresh water holes under big spreading trees, and fresh rhino
middens nearby. To rest the camels, we camped here for two
nights, building big fires to keep away any rhino. Donaldson
Smith, the American who led an expedition to Lake Rudolf in
1894-95, described the northern circuit of Kulal as four days
of torment, marching through a fiery furnace with the sun's
rays beating down with relentless fury. Even the redoubtable
Lord Delamere on his expedition to the lake in 1896-98 was so
disheartened and tired by the experience that instead of
continuing north up the lake to Lake Stefanie, as he had
intended, turned back south.
Still moving south down the side of Kulal, we camped near
the entrance to El Kajarta, the great gorge that appears to
split Kulal in two. Frank and I walked for about three hours
into the gorge which must be one of the most extraordinary
physical features in Kenya, and one of the least visited
because of its remoteness. The vertical walls rose up for a
thousand feet or so, sometimes overhanging and reducing the
gap between them at the top to less than forty yards. We
stopped at a point where the gorge narrowed sharply and here
boulders made the going unpleasantly difficult. There was a
pool of good water so we made some tea and then returned down
the gorge to our camp. From there we had another interesting
six days, travelling fairly leisurely the eighty miles or so
to Marsabit, across the Chalbi Desert where we saw many
Grant's gazelle and some oryx. We were now among the
Rendille, a nomadic camel-owning people, and we encountered
numbers of them with their animals at various water holes.
Throughout the last day we saw Marsabit ahead of us, a
cloud-capped mountain, 5600 feet high, rising from the empty
desert. This whole country was suffering from a severe
drought and everywhere the grazing was almost non-existent.
But the mountain itself was covered with forests, and I
remembered that my father had gone there in 1913 on his trek
to Nairobi from Addis Ababa. I still have a letter he had
written to me in pencil from Laisamis, with his drawings of
elephant and buffalo.
