September 2011 - Kenya - Northish

After we rested our bodies from the climb up Mount Kenya we continued our exploration towards the North of Kenya.
It is shocking what sort of difference one encounters within literally 80 kilometres of distance. The central area of Kenya is as green as it could get, with hills full of crops and grazing cows, this is where the agricultural economy of Kenya takes place. There are huge fields of coffee and tea Kenya’s main exports, even bigger areas are covered in green-houses that produce tones of flowers each day.
The flowers are cut early in the morning and few hours later arrive at the flower markets in Europe. Apart from that there are thousands of private little farms and gardens, the food of the Kenyans themselves (at least one portion of them).
80 kilometres further North green turns into a dream and dust takes over. It gets boiling hot and camels walk along the road!? Here it has not been raining in ages and this is the area into which the foreign aid is shipped at the moment because people do not have enough food to survive. It is a paradox; a simple, unknowing mind asks itself if with a tiny bit better resource management this situation could be improved because the resources seem to be there as well as the potential for even more farming! How can such huge areas of fertile land be covered in flower plantations (owned by private Asian investors) instead of using this land to feed the people?
Anyhow, some food for thought to feed the eternal African debate...
We visited the Samburu people, better to say some ladies of the Samburu tribe who have established a little community by themselves after escaping from their nasty husbands and try to make their living in female community only. It was a nice experience, we did not know that ARTE (yes, the German French TV channel) has been there some time before to make a documentary about them and giving them a sort of star-status, but nevertheless it was unique. After we were shown their homes and daily life, there were very impressed by our own home and we ended up having two Samburu girls chilling in our roof tent. The Samburu are very proud people who do not seem to have great interest of adopting a Western style of living, hopefully this will last for some time longer.
Our goal was to drive further North-West where we wanted to do some camel-trekking in the desert and interact with some tribes but Mohamed, one of the Samburu people we met, along with others told us that we should not attempt this on our own. The tribes up there are fighting in-between each other over the cattle which is driven more and more towards the West because of the drought in the East. So they strongly recommended that we change our route or that we take a soldier with us who speaks the language, so that when and/or if we get stopped by bandits with guns he can do the talking for us... Since we are both chickens and not into gun-situations whatsoever the decision, although a bit disappointing, was easy to take, we change the route and head back to safe grounds.
The safe grounds turned out to be the Lakes Bogoria and Baringo in the Rift Valley. In Lake Bogoria we camped in the wild with eyes staring at us in the dark, animals instead of bandits with guns, we tried to convince ourselves that this was safer... The lake is populated by about 2 million flamingos, extremely few tourists and hot springs and geysers all over the place. Lake Baringo was more of a social experience. We met Attila, a Hungarian born in England raised in Canada living in Austria with whom we spend hours and at least two full days chatting about his millions of experiences around the world in the local “bar” of the village meeting some more of the locals.
We feel that we have seen enough of Kenya and so we plan to head towards Uganda now! We will let you know soon how it is!