I was watching a CNN special on Putin when the power suddenly went off.  I’ve waited awhile but other than a few flashes, the power has stayed off.  Maybe related to the dark storm clouds that seem to be rolling in?  Guess I won’t get to see all the scary details and facts that have been gathered to prove that Putin is a dangerous man in a dangerous world.  So instead of watching depressing TV shows, I decided to use what power I still have on my computer to continue the last ‘chapter’ of my latest epic journey which I had left hanging in my last post.

I left you with my arrival in Nairobi from Ngurunit.  On the way down, Leslie and Goodie invited me to join them on a work trip to see Kenana Weavers in Njoro, about 3 hours drive Northwest of Nairobi (near Nakuru) not so far out of my way back North to Maralal.  I gladly grabbed this opportunity as I had met the founders of this business many years ago while selling my baskets at a parking lot craft fair at the US Embassy in Nairobi.  Their business of promoting knitted products, including stuffed animals and tree ornaments, thereby giving many women employment, intrigued me.  We have several of their animal head Christmas stocking that get hung up for Santa to fill every year!  Finally, I would get the chance of seeing their work on the ground and seeing what lessons I could learn to apply to the Ngurunit Basket Weavers business.  Before heading there Tuesday morning, Monday in Nairobi was a very busy day with some fun thrown in.  I had brought the finished basket order for Swahili Imports down with me from Ngurunit so a good part of the day was used collecting packing materials, printing out lists and labels and stuffing all the baskets into boxes.  I had the advantage of my friend Candace’s big front entry to spread out and pack up.  I also got a break for a walk with Candace and Mouse around her neighborhood.  Then back to work and by 8:00 pm I got the job done, with a little help from Candace, just in time for her friend and dinner guest Susie, a colleague from work, to show up for a lovely dinner and wine on Candace’s back garden veranda.  It is beautiful there in a different way than Ngurunit.  Green and full of flowers and definitely cooler!!  We had a lovely evening.

Then early Tuesday morning I was up and out the door for my adventure to Njoro and Kenana Weavers.  Of course, I rushed out the door to get an early start and then spent 1 hour stuck in stop and go traffic on my way to pick up Leslie and Goodie.  Typical of Nairobi.  We finally got on the open road by 9:00 am.  The drive itself is beautiful.  The Nairobi – Nakuru road goes up over the top of the Rift Valley escarpment at 8000 feet and looks out over Mt Longonot and Lake Naivasha.  Then one weaves down to the floor of the Rift Valley and heads north towards Nakuru with beautiful views of Lake Elementita and Lake Nakuru along the way.  We arrived in Njoro at the farm where Kenana Weavers is located just in time for lunch.  The biggest excitement there was getting little dog Mouse introduced calmly to the 2 huge St Bernard mixed breed dogs and the Great Dane that live there.  Their heads are bigger than she is in her entirety!  She got along fine with the big boys but found a 4^th dog, a little local breed female, the most annoying. Being very pushy about being her friend.  But they eventually sorted things out. 

After lunch, I had an amazing time meeting the knitters, the managers and the founders of the business.  I learned so much about inventory, supplies, orders, pricing, payments and a ton of other things that go into a community business.  Some things I know well, but some ways of organizing it all very new.  I am still assimilating all the information and working out how to apply to the baskets for scaling up and improving the weavers’ income through more sales and marketing.  In addition to the knitting operation, I was given the chance to tour the whole farm, which as a livestock scientist, that is my first and foremost love in my life.  So much was going on.  It is one of the biggest dairy operations in Kenya, which, I learned, is actually not an advantage.  They are planning to close down the dairy side of the farm within the next 3 or 4 years. The milk processing plants pay too little for milk to take into account all the equipment needs on a big dairy.  The price works for the small-scale Kenyan farms with a few hand milked cows and that is what operations the dairy plants aim at.  So, all the big operations in the county are gone already or are going out of business.  I found this interesting as it had been just the opposite in my homeland of Wisconsin.  There, all the small dairy operations were hard pressed to stay in business as the dairy industry went more and more mechanized and only bigger and bigger farms with thousands of cows (especially like those in California) were able to stay in the black.  Different part of the world, different dynamics.

Anyway, I’ve digressed.  Back to the farm.  The best part of the whole trip for me was the thoroughbred horse breeding operation for racing and steeplechase eventing mounts.  I was taken to a field of 8-month-old recently weaned colts.  Lovely.  The horses were very friendly and I spent quite a while giving them love.  So different from the camels of my desert home.  Horses are the love of my youth and I will always adore them.  Just the smell of a horse and the feel of their soft nose brings me peace.  After that, the evening was spent in a wild spot of the farm watching hundreds of white throated bee eater birds coming in to roost for the night.  Their nest holes were dug into a layer of volcanic ash in stacks of little caves that looked like miniature replicas of the cave pueblos found in Southeast USA.  Amazing.  Leslie and Goodies joined me with their hosts for watching this natural wonder.  As it got darker, other flocks of different birds also came to roost in the area.  So beautiful. 

The last wonderful thing about the trip was the night spent in the Kemu cottages, another business located on the farm.   It has camping grounds, tented areas and different cottages for visitors and tourists.  There was a group of Waldorf school kids camping also that night. They were having so much fun! We were put in Beryl cottage which had been the actual cottage, with a little remodeling, of the Kenyan historical female pilot Beryl Markham.  Her book, West with the Night, was one of the first books about the colorful Kenyan settler personalities that I read when I first came to Kenya in 1994/5.  It was so cool to stay in the cottage that she lived in as a young lady.  It had been located on a nearby farm and instead of risking it being destroyed, this bit of history was saved and moved board by board to Kemu cottages.  After a lovely comfortable night and a delicious breakfast accompanied by orphaned roe bucks that were being raised in the courtyard, Mouse and I jumped into our car and headed back to Maralal.  We arrived back late afternoon on 22^nd March 2017 after an amazing journey with good friends having traveled far and wide, meeting many more new friends also, both furry and human.  Now I am still in Maralal catching up on all the paperwork, yard work and house organization that has been piling up as I travel up and down the length and breadth of Kenya these last months.  Still no electricity, but it is raining now, finally, so that is a blessing.  Let pour, let it pour!!!  Till next time….       

In Maralal again!

Wow!  It has been another epic journey.  Filled with so much more excitement and adventure than originally planned. No big car problems this time, other than the annoying beeping of my back door warning light for hundreds of kilometers.  I finally got that fixed in Nairobi on Monday so it was blessedly silent on my return to Maralal yesterday (Wednesday).  What made the trip epic was all the things done, places gone and people met.  So Wonderful!!!  I and basket group manager Kalindi managed to pick up Leslie, Goodie and Camilla in Korr last Friday with no issue other than being very hot.  We returned to my home in Ngurunit for lunch, making our game plan and getting everyone settled into their rooms.  Then to the Ngurunit Basket Weaver’s community design house to meet with the 11 master weavers and 2 managers Friday afternoon as a sort of pre-meeting before getting together with all the members on Saturday.  As usual, plans changed.  One manager, Lilian, had a sick child and had to rush her to Marsabit town, 156 km away north, to go to the big hospital.  The Ngurunit clinic just couldn’t handle it.  So that left us with Kalindi, which was also fine.  Then, only 5 of the 11 master weavers showed up eventually due to the advent of a food relief truck on Friday afternoon which took everyone’s attention away from the long-term livelihood activities.  When one’s family is hungry, it is hard to look far ahead and the immediate hand to mouth solution takes priority.  With the drought going on, many development activities are going by the wayside for the moment, even in the big government programs.  Now that drought disaster has been declared, most resources go now to the immediate relief activities and good long term plans are left hanging.   This has a huge negative effect on development programs everywhere.  I feel there needs to be a duel focus.  Yes, immediate relief is important, but it should go hand in hand with long term goals of making sustainable solutions to deal with the next emergency within the framework of the development activities focusing around economic and food security initiatives.  Anyway, even with half the expectant participants, we made a really good start on the goals of the visit which were focused around looking at how to improve design, increase marketing and production options and look at how to sell more baskets so keep the weavers busy all the time.  In other words, increase their economic opportunities which does lead to food security and improved livelihoods even at times such as now in a bad drought. 

Having made the plans for Saturday’s meeting and being assured of a large turnout despite the drought issues, we drove over to the Salato Camp to have a beer and relax a bit before going home.  As we were sitting there enjoying the peace, a Land Cruiser of Spanish tour guides on vacation drove in out of the blue.  The driver John, a Kenyan tour operator, had seen the camp before and decided to come there to support community instead of going to the privately owned camp across the way.  It was a brilliant piece of networking in process.  My dog Mouse greeting these new visitors enthusiastically as we welcomed them to the camp.  Marandi, the camp manager, is still learning the ropes and this was his first big foreign group.  I saw he had a bit of a ‘deer in the headlights’ look as he showed the visitors to their rooms so I offered to send over my maid and friend Nankaya to help as she had done a lot of work at the camp in the past.  My visitors and I, having invited the Spanish group to come see our basket weaving work in the morning, headed home to rest and make dinner.  As Nankaya had gone to help at the camp, we all pitched in to cook and then enjoyed it outside under the stars.  Ngurunit, no matter how dry, is always beautiful. 

The next day, Saturday, was a joy to me.  Despite their difficulties of finding water and food at the moment, so many ladies came to meet Leslie, Camilla and Goodie.  It was a wonderful meeting with lots of ideas shared and discussed.  Orders made and plans developed.  The Spanish group came over and everyone sang and danced together for a while before tea and snacks.  I made some good connections that day for connecting to the Spanish tourism market for future visits to Ngurunit and Salato Camp.  Ngurunit Basket Weaver’s group also has some new inspiration, goals and understanding as to how to increase their market too.  I learned so much for the three powerhouse business women that were working with us.  So Amazing!!  Reuben showed up from Maralal on Saturday evening just a bit after we were back from the day of working with the weavers.  So another lovely evening of dinner and wine under the stars, also with our new Spanish friends who came over from the camp for a visit.  Then Sunday my visitors, mouse and I jumped into the car and headed for Nairobi.  In Nanyuki 4 hours later we stopped for lunch with a friend in the craft marketing business, Sarah.  It was so good to reconnect with her again.  Networking is life here in Kenya.  We headed to Nairobi about 3 in the afternoon expecting to arrive around 6.  Actually we did arrive at that time just approaching Nairobi when we were caught up in a huge traffic jam caused by an accident.  Two hours to creep along for 5 km.  I finally got everyone dropped off and to where I was staying at my friend Candace’s house at 8:30.  12 hours travel door to door – Ngurunit to Nairobi.  But if one takes off the 3 hour lunch and 2 hours traffic jam, then it only took 7 hours driving time.  Amazing.  I was now in Nairobi and the epic journey not over.  The next half, with more wonderful places and people will have to wait for the next post…….to be continued....

Here is an entry I wrote while in Ngurunit last week.  Will post it now and put today's current thoughts on a following post.  Enjoy....

16 March 2017

I am sitting here in Ngurunit watching the sun drop behind the mountains I can gaze at from my front patio.  It is incredibly hot and incredibly dry here.  Mouse (my little dog) and I arrived yesterday and while I love being here, we have been melting into puddles of inactivity barely able to move around until after 4 pm when it starts to cool off a bit.  There is a brisk breeze going at the moment, which helps amazingly.   I have come this trip for basket business.  This morning I packed up the latest basket order to be ready to take it to Nairobi for shipment.  Tomorrow, Leslie, Camilla and Goodie are to arrive in Korr by airplane to meet the weavers for the first time.  Excitement.  Goodie is one of the shop owners in Nairobi for which I supply baskets to sell locally.  Having her come with Leslie and Camilla is an extra bonus.  So cool all three of them can make it.  I was just at network tree, a place about 6 km from my house here, to make phone calls and assure everyone I had made it safely to Ngurunit.  No car problems so far (knock on wood).  And to confirm the plan still on for Korr tomorrow!  It is!  Wonderful!

I thought this would be a good time to describe my world in terms of places, distances, roads and means of travel.  I throw out a lot of place names but unless one has either been to Kenya, or read some of my earlier blogs, maybe one would be confused as to what all the fuss is about in terms of traveling so far and having so many car issues.  I have two main places in Samburu County, which is located in Northern Kenya, a semi-arid place.  Ngurunit is my village home.  The place where husband Reuben grew up, most of my in-laws live, we have our livestock and our family home.  I also do most of my ‘work’ in this area and it is the home and base of the Ngurunit Basket Group weavers.  It is located on the very north edge of Samburu County, in Samburu North sub-county, bordering Marsabit County.  It is around 600 km away from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, a long way directly South from here.  From Ngurunit one can get to Nairobi two main ways.  One way is through Maralal, which is my other ‘home’ in Samburu.  Maralal is 200 km southeast from Ngurunit.  I came from Maralal yesterday, which is where we live mainly for work.  It has all the modern conveniences of electricity and network.  Ngurunit has solar only. And the network tree.  Maralal is the County Headquarters of Samburu and is where Reuben’s and my main offices are located.  That is from where I usually travel back and forth to Nairobi from – about 370 km away from Maralal, depending on exactly which road I take.  Nanyuki, Nyahururu, Gilgil, Naivasha and Nakuru are all towns I pass through from time to time on my way back and forth.  These are the main places that feature in a lot of my writing.  The roads around Samburu County and going south from Maralal are very very rough.  Bumpy, full of corrugation, lots of gullies.  Dry and dusty or full of mud, depending on the season.  They are almost entirely dirt roads, marram roads, as they are called here.  Just one trip between Maralal and Ngurunit, on which I pass through Baragoi (half way point) can cause loads of car problems from things shaking off or getting lose.  Just this trip, my nice Pajero now has a back door that doesn’t shut tight enough to keep the warning light and beeper off.  I had just fixed that same problem in January.  Now, one 200 km journey over the corrugation and the beeping is back on.  So annoying.  Will have to fix it again when I go to Nairobi with the visitors this coming week. 

There are a few other towns around the North that I have been traveling to.  Korr, to which I am going tomorrow, is a bleak place in the Kaisuk desert of Marsabit County.  It is 43 Km from here, Ngurunit.  There is a good airstrip so that is where the ‘big’ planes from MAF (Medical Aviation Fellowship) can land.  Then there is South Horr, a town directly West from Ngurunit about 80 km away.  That is the base for accessing the towns and groups with which I have worked in the past around Mt Nyiro, the holy mountain of the Samburu.  I haven’t been there for a while, but Reuben still goes there a lot for his work. 

On Sunday, I am going to take the visitors to Nairobi by the good road, the other way I can get from Ngurunit to Nairobi these days.  It has only 20 km of rocks, bumps and corrugation from Ngurunit to Namare (also go through here on way to Korr) where one picks up the wind power road.  It is also marram, but made very well due to the need of the Lake Turkana Wind Power project to get parts and pieces of over 350 huge wind turbines up to Northern Kenya.  We will take this road East for another 50 km, instead of West and North like I did to Loiyangilani in February, and it comes out to tarmac (paved) road in Laisamis.  From there it is tarmac all the way to Nairobi passing via Nanyuki and Mt Kenya straight south for around 500 km.  This way one can do Ngurunit to Nairobi in one day, which is amazing to me.  It used to be a 2 or 3 day journey on horrible bumpy roads.  In the rainy season most of them were impassable.  This way I do not go through Maralal so eventually from Nairobi will head back via a straighter road to Maralal through Nyahururu.  Basically making a huge circle around Kenya.  I will have traveled around 1200 km in one week by the time I get back to Maralal next week. Come to think of it, that’s like driving from Wisconsin to Colorado as I used to do so long ago – wow.  I used to think that was so far!  Now it is a normal regular trip in the course of my days.  Hopefully with this description of my world one can have a bit of an idea where I actually am in all my travels in terms of the relationship of one place to another and the types of roads I travel.  Basically I am driving around in circles, up and down the country.  Like a yo-yo or a top.  Spinning endlessly as I go about life and work in Northern Kenya. 

Play is over and back to work.  But what I find I love so much about Kenya is that my work is so much like play!  Just got back from a combination social and networking dinner with friends Leslie and Camilla.  Leslie I have known since 2005 having connected through my basket marketing activities for the Ngurunit Basket Weavers.  She has Swahili-Imports located in Eugene, Oregon.  This is a wholesale business aiming mainly at USA retailers for many African products and Leslie travels around to many African countries, including Kenya, sourcing products and promoting artisans.  For over 10 years we have been meeting and working together to market the Ngurunit baskets and improve the income opportunities of the weavers.  She has been incredible in so many ways.  Supportive and keen on helping the basket weavers but also very keen on all the business aspects involved in marketing in this global world.  Camilla is another basket marketing connection, though somewhat more recent.  She and partner Holly, based in London, have a start-up business called The Basket Room.  I have been working with her for about 2 years developing designs that they can wholesale in Britain and Europe.  It is very stimulating to meet with them and discuss all the ins and outs of the craft marketing business.  I do my best with marketing baskets and other pastoralist products but having a formal background only in livestock science, I sometimes feel utterly inadequate in the business side of life.  This evening was fascinating listening to the two business women talk about their challenges and successes.  We also planned the great next epic journey in my calendar, to have the two of them fly up to meet me in Ngurunit and meet the basket weavers for the first time.  Looking forward to that.  The visit will not be just about meeting the women, but also about looking at new designs and possibilities for the future marketing and orders.  The group has just finished the most recent order for Swahili-Imports so we will pack up the car and drive back to Nairobi together.  Fun fun fun – and this is work.  I love it!

I am still in Nairobi after coming back here from the Ark on Saturday with Naiboku.  We enjoyed a swim in the hotel pool Saturday afternoon and a movie in a nearby mall (Westgate) in the evening.  Sunday a lazy morning, then shopping for Naiboku before taking her back to school Sunday afternoon.  It was a short, but very interesting and fun midterm break.  One more month and she will be out for holiday at the end of first term from April 6^th.  The Kenyan school year runs from January to November with approximately 3 months at school and 1 month break alternatively for a total of 3 terms every year.  It is nice to have it broken up like that rather than 9 months of school and 3 months of break as it is in USA.  Though the logistics of traveling up and down for the breaks and such can be challenging.  I was supposed to have headed North on Monday but once again, car issues appeared out of the blue.  I managed to get the car into a garage thinking that a new clutch was in order.  Fortunately, turned out to only need some adjustment so got the car back today.  Now planning to leave tomorrow but after two extra unplanned nights in Nairobi.  Used them well for socializing and networking.  Not only did I have ‘work’ fun tonight, but yesterday I went out to a Lebanese restaurant with Candace, my USAID friend and Hiroko, a Japanese consultant who I’ve worked with a bit in the past.  She is also a Rotarian so we have that in common too.  It is always interesting and enlightening to get together with others who work in the development field.  We can compare notes and network.  Many good things come out of these gatherings.  I have learned to go with the flow here in Kenya.  As I’ve said before, the only firm plan I make, is that my plan will change!  All other plans are tentative.  No need to get upset when things don’t work out as I had hoped.  I just look for the good I can get out of the different circumstances that present themselves.  The art of the moment.  My favorite way of life.    

It is sunrise.  I’m overlooking a waterhole at the Ark Conservancy in the Aberdares.  A Cape Buffalo is drinking water as a half dozen little birds hang from him picking off ticks and other parasites from head and back.  Three crowned cranes majestically strut around greeting the morning.  Mt Kenya again greets me, this time from further away, rising out of pink clouds.  Wow, the sun is coming up a fushia ball emerging from clouds.  Amazing sight.  Egyptian ducks float on the water with families of duckling paddling behind.  Some more buffalo are coming to the salt lick along the edge of the waterhole as the first group wander off to start grazing.  Yesterday, Naiboku and I arrived in the afternoon to this idyllic place.  We spent the afternoon watching herds of elephant and buffalo move in and out of the waterhole area.  At points around the lodge we saw many birds, genet cats, bush baby and mongoose.  Bush buck and the Giant Forest Hog were also frequent visitors.  Even a large number of hyena made appearances now and then, passing by with an ominous presence.  A couple of times I saw either a buffalo or an elephant stand off with a lone hyena trying to pass too close and be sent running the other way.  Once a big male buffalo followed a hyena all the way to the other side of the waterhole and watched it as it disappeared into the trees.  Like a bouncer kicking an unwanted person out of a party. 

This is the second morning of our wildlife adventure.  Yesterday morning we woke up in Elsamere, a conservancy center on the shores of Lake Naivasha.  After breakfast we got into a boat and went cruising among the hippos and birds.  Very fun.  It is amazing to think how many hippos are just hanging out under the water unseen from above.  We were going along enjoying the water beauty and our boat man pointed out a bird that he said was standing on top of hippos.  All we could see was a lot of water hyacinth.  He banged the bottom of the boat and bit and suddenly a bunch of heads emerged out of the weeds!  Huge heads!  There were at least 7 or 8 hippos just lounging about in the water.  Hard to know exact number as they would take turns taking a look at us and then submerge again.  Naiboku had never really seen hippos in the wild, especially up so close.  We found several groups as we moved along the bank of the lakes.  Also the fish eagles are cool.  They would swoop down near the boat to pick up treats thrown out for them. 

Sun well up now.  Time for breakfast and heading onto our next destination. 

Up very early after a night of fighting mosquitos.  Uggh. Anyway, a new day and a new adventure awaits Naiboku and I this weekend.  Thus I want to share the last writing I did in Ngurunit last week. Then will be back to real time writing for a while.  Probably.  So enjoy Ngurunit again for a bit as I get moving and go pick up my daughter.  Plan to go to Artcafe for a nice breakfast.  Or maybe Java House...hard to choose.  Then on to our adventure.  That you will hear about in the coming week....for now, here is the windings down of my February epic journey!

24^th February 2017 - Friday

My time in Ngurunit this last week has been a wonderful mix of joyous fun with friends followed by peaceful contemplation and rest with a bit of interesting work thrown in here and there.  The best kind of life.  Saturday and Sunday nights were spent having lovely meals, chatting, playing guitar and singing with my friends under the beautiful stars.  Oh the stars!  No light pollution in Ngurunit so the stars are many and so vivid it is as if you could just reach up and touch them.  We watched Orion march across the sky after Taurus the Bull as now and then one of us would gasp and shout “shooting star” and the rest would miss it and then watch more closely for the next one.  Monday morning saw the packing up of the Land Rover as Sue, Colin and Candace prepared to head back towards Nairobi.  Candace and I took one more early morning walk to my favorite magic spot behind ‘my’ mountain which looks north across a sea of trees with fantastic hills dotted here and there across the flat plain.  Amazing view!  The dogs, Mouse and Bruin, ran circles around us trying to catch squirrels and lizards as we made our way back for a breakfast of sour dough bread that Sue had taught me to make.  Delicious and lovely under the shade of an Acacia tree with amazing views of the sun rising on the Ndotos and Mt Poi.  Such peace and joy amongst friends. 

Marandi and I went along in my car as far as Laisamis on the main highway to make sure the Land Rover made it to the nearest fuel station.  Hugs all around and we parted ways with my friends as they headed South and we, after a bit of shopping, headed back to Ngurunit.  The next couple of days had me catching up on reading and creative projects.  It is so hot in Ngurunit in February that in the afternoons with the sun beating down mercilessly, the best thing to do is stay in the shade and be quiet.  Yesterday, I found some motivation to walk over to the camp with the dogs to continue with Marandi on our roofing project.  It was fun figuring out how best to put the makuti roof mats we had acquired in Loiyangilani onto the dining shade roof.  First, working out how to get the carpenter up on the roof with no ladder.  I always prefer using table and chair stacks.  One gets good at improvising when one lives 200 km from the nearest convenient hardware store.  Then sweeping all the debris and tree branches off the plastic under layer.  After that, the application and layering of mats one row at a time.  It is so cool to see the work progress and make such a beautiful change to the character of the building.  Moving from looking tatty and badly kept to rustic and lovely in the matter of just a few hours.  While roofing, we also managed to have the water pipe system looked at and fixed.  The water guys found some blockages and after clearing it all and reconnecting, the shower tank was filled up and made ready for visitors.  It is so satisfying to see Salato camp looking so nice again.  One step at a time it is getting better and better.  Next job is a coat of fresh paint inside all the rooms.  I’m waiting for Reuben to come from Maralal sometime this evening with some fresh supplies, a container of paint being one.  Spending this one more weekend in Ngurunit, then the coming Monday back to Maralal and ‘civilization’.  Will miss the peace of this beautiful place. 

A new journey has begun even before I get all the entries up from my last one.  I travelled down to Nairobi today.  Tomorrow I get my daughter, Naiboku, out for her mid-term.  As her mid-term is only 3 nights out, there is not really enough time to go all the way back to Maralal and then return again by Sunday.  The only time out of school would be spent in a car.  So I have an adventure planned for the weekend.  More on that after it happens.  For now I want to share another post from my Ngurunit time last week.  Almost caught up...after this, one more and then we will have reached the present.  Continuing epic journey of February...here it is:

18 February 2017

There and back again.  That was the nature of my most recent adventure.  Yesterday, Friday, I packed up the car with two dogs, camp manager Marandi, lots of water, a box of snacks and myself.  Destination and mission; pick up Candace at the Korr airstrip and head to Loiyangilani by Lake Turkana to pick up roofing mats (makuti) for sprucing up the Salato Camp dining hall with a new roof cover.  Part of the fun was that Candace had no idea of the Loiyangilani ‘side trip’ as she thought we were going to pick her up and bring her straight back to Ngurunit, only 43 km from Korr.  Getting a flight from Nairobi was one way Candace could take advantage of a long weekend to join Sue, Colin and myself in Ngurunit.  Then she would be able to go back by road in the Land Rover, providing it continued moving with its rather dodgy fuel tank issues.  Due to that, my other friends opted to stay in Ngurunit instead of risking the long trip to Lake Turkana and back in their dubious vehicle.  They would hold down the fort while I went and finished the original mission of securing roofing mats, taking Candace along on a surprise detour.  The trip to Korr was fast and problem free as the road was surprisingly good.  Despite being quite close to Ngurunit, I hadn’t been to that town in over 8 years.  Arriving, I realized I hadn’t been missing anything.  Korr is located in a rocky and desolate, mostly flat place on the edge of the Kaisuk desert.  The wind is relentless and very hot.  Fortunately, there were a few sturdy Acacia trees to give shade at the edge of the airstrip.  We had to wait over an hour for the plane’s arrival as it hadn’t been able to land in Marsabit due to cloud cover.  This forced the plane, with Candace in it, to wait in Logologo, another hot, windy and desolate town along the Eastern highway, for the Marsabit to Nairobi passenger to be brought down by road.  The 6-seater plane finally landed in the heat of the midday sun and Candace emerged having enjoyed her flight up from Nairobi.  She reported it was absolutely beautiful and that even the hour waiting on the Logologo airstrip was interesting.  The pilot, Melvin, actually lives in Logologo at the old AIM (African Inland Mission) station that had a hanger for his plane.  He has rather recently come to Kenya (from Canada, I think) and is still getting organized on what service he can do for the North.  He flies for MAF (Medical Aviation Fellowship) and it was very interesting talking to him about the possibilities of getting lower cost flights all the way into Ngurunit.  I am hoping we will be able to connect a lot more in the future.  We chatted until his Korr to Nairobi passengers showed up, some of which I knew.  It was fun catching up a bit with people I hadn’t seen for a long time.  It is funny how in this age of global connections, I often have more contact with people living on the other side of the world than I do with my relative neighbors only a few kilometers away. 

I loaded Candace into the car, informed her of our spontaneous adventure plans and we took off for Loiyangilani, an estimated 200 km and 4 or 5 hours away.   I took a different road out of town thinking to take the short cut through Illaut.  Having not taken that road for at least 14 years, I took a wrong fork and soon saw I was headed slightly off from where I thought I wanted to be.  I am never lost, just a bit off the intended route.  I always know where I am, just maybe not exactly on the specific path I had thought to be on.  It is on detours like these that I find cool things and places I would not have found otherwise.  So instead of getting concerned, we just carried on in the general right direction towards the Ndoto mountains where I knew we would eventually find the wind power road to Loiyangilani that we were looking for.  One little tricky rocky uphill and we found ourselves passing through Farokoren, rather than Illaut.  I was able to point out to Candace a primary school that we had been involved in building many years ago.  After that we found the road we were looking for at the Arsim river crossing about 10 km closer to our destination than originally planned.  It was a beautiful way to go.  Good to know for the future.

A few hours later, traveling on the incredibly smooth, somewhat boring, wind power project road which cuts a swath through the flat desert plains straight North, we stopped at Loibor Sedar to see an old camp that I had worked on improving with the Lonjorin community way back in 2010.  It had never really taken off for tourists, but now with the new County Government, the Samburu Conservancy rangers often used it for their base camp.  It was good to see it being used also as a community livestock camp with water being piped in from the hills.  It opens up more grazing land which is essential during this difficult dry season.  The main attraction was a hill of white sand created by the strong wind picking up sand from the dry river bed and depositing it on the hill.  Amazing natural feature.  In the past I have climbed it with the kids.  The sand is so deep and the hill so steep that it is a challenge to move upward.  Coming down is a blast as you take huge steps and slide down as you go.  A bit like skiing, though a lot hotter!!!  We then carried on North towards the lake and soon came to the wind turbine project.  One comes over the top of a hill and suddenly spread out before you are hundreds of space age huge wind mills dotting the ancient barren hills covered with volcanic rock.  So futuristic looking.  An surreal sight!

An hour later another amazing sight, this one all natural, comes into view.   We come around a corner and there is the jade sea, Lake Turkana, spread out before us.  I’ve always said that the landscape there is the closest I’ll ever get to visiting the moon without getting into a rocket.  The volcanic rock covers the ground in fantastic formations all the way to the shores of a sheet of water that looks like rock itself when it is a calm day.  Only a few trees struggle here and there among the rocks.  This goes on and on for over 20 km as we bounce along the shore towards Loiyangilani.  Then over another hill and the oasis covered with palm trees and houses scattered about comes into view.  Barren and full of life at the same time, Loiyangilani is a slightly forsaken looking place.  Uncomfortably hot with a constant wind that blows with a draining power.  I find the town very interesting but not so welcoming.  It is a must see place, which is why I took Candace with me, but not a place one wants to stay long.  We arrived at Palm Shade hotel and met up with my husband’s cousin, Jane.  Palm Shade is a lovely haven in a harsh place.  Jane had arranged how we could get the needed roof mats and a lovely evening meal which included delicious fish from the lake.  We stayed in the traditional mudded houses with plenty of windows to let the wind in, the only way to survive the heat.  We picked up the mats in the evening at the village.  It was fun meeting all the women who wove the mats.  The normal chaotic organizing, counting, recording and packing of mats on the car roof for transport.  Paying and leaving among a chorus of thanks and good wishes for safe travel and ‘hope you come again soon’ sentiments.  Candace was fascinated.

The evening was spent relaxing and meeting other Palm Shade guests.  One tourist couple, who were not enchanted with the North.  And their disgruntled tour guides who love the North.  I have made a new connection that I hope will bring more tourists, this time happy ones, to stay at Salato Camp in Ngurunit.  Networking is my strength and my joy.  Northern Kenya does enchant me and I want to share it with as many people as I can.  We woke early this Saturday morning and headed back to Ngurunit.  Stopping for lunch under a tree, I found some of my group members from one of my past camel projects.  They were grazing their livestock on the Acacia pods (sagaram).  We shared our water and our lunch.  I never stop marveling at how I can be seemingly in the middle of nowhere and suddenly, there is someone I know.  Those connections keep coming back, often at times of need.  We continued on and got back a few hours ago to Sue and Colin enjoying the beauty of Ngurunit.  Now it is evening and I am watching the sun go down on my beloved Ndoto Mountains.  I am happy to have had the Loiyangilani adventure there at the lake, but definitely happier to be back again in my lovely, comfortable place.