KENYA: Lake Naivasha

 A zebra crossing and a giraffe crossing later, we are once again on the road to Narok. Huge cactus trees dot the landscape. We take a detour to Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake in a string of saltwater lakes in the Great Rift Valley. It is also the highest located of the Rift Valley lakes. Floriculture thrives in the vicinity of the lake, depleting as well as polluting the lake water. Flowers exported from the farms – owned by British, Dutch, Israeli and Indian investors - reach Europe’s markets early morning by flight.

As I prepare for the photoshoot, my young models are already posing.

Stopping for the night at a resort on the edge of the lake, a Ramsar site that is the habitat of many mammals, birds and fish, we come across hippos, water bucks, the arboreal colobus monkey and many a winged visitor in the evening sky. A superb starling fearlessly walks around our table hoping to grab some crumbs. Like the Ruppel’s starling we sighted in the Mara the previous day, this little bird has the same iridescent blue coat but with an orange chest and belly. The mandatory warning to stay clear of grazing hippos at night keep us warily inside.

In the morning, there is a surprise visitor in the lawns – a wildebeest. The Hell’s Gate National Park is close by, and so is the Crater Lake Game Sanctuary – Kenya strikes you more as a continuous expanse of national parks than a country. Conservation is a mission in Kenya, and no wonder it has numerous national parks and national reserves. Vehicles halt in respect – and probably fear - as wild animals cross the road. A fatally injured animal, in the wild or in a farm, can be put to sleep only at the instance of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).

The purpose of our stopover is a boat ride to see flamingos and hippos at close quarters, but we are advised to go to the nearby Crater Lake or Lake Oloiden for a better flamingo experience. Lake Nakuru, the other Ramsar site, which is a haven for flamingos does not permit boating.

Thirty kilometres away, we stop at Lake Oloidien, an alkaline lake that has been cut off from Lake Naivasha by a small reserve forest that is home to giraffes, zebras, leopards and spotted hyenas. Lake Oloidien, which was connected to Lake Naivasha earlier, became a separate lake in 1979 when its water levels fell and it steadily went saline.

Uncle and niece at L. Oloidien

A flamboyance of lesser flamingos stand like a pink gateway to the waters. On the left is a small flock of greater flamingos, whiter in shade, and feeding on worms and other insects. The lesser flamingos feed on the blue-green algae in the greenish lake; in fact, the algae is responsible for turning the flamingoes’ coats pink. Steve, our boat driver, informs us that the birds shift to the centre of the lake at night to feed, to escape predators like the hyenas. The flock here is only the young, as the adults (over 10 years) have gone to Lake Bogoria in the northern Rift Valley to breed. The life expectancy of a flamingo is 25 years, Steve tells us.

We see a couple of hippo families frolicking in the water. The lake has about 225 hippos; there are 5-25 members in each family.

Masai giraffes on the Naivasha route.

“The gestation period of a female hippo is 8 months. If the baby is a male, the mother leaves it on land as the adult bull in the family will kill it. The mother checks on the baby and feeds it. When it attains adulthood, the young bull will return to the water to fight the reigning bull in a hippo family and take over,” Steve explains as he points to a lone bull on the land.

A pair of blacksmith plovers chirped shrilly as they flew low over the water and then settled on the shore. Sun martins and African pied wagtails flitted in and out of water searching for spiders and others insects on the water surface. Egyptian geese and red-knobbed coots swam around while white-breasted cormorants and cape teals assembled on a small sand bank below the woods. Masai giraffes and zebras graze in the thick vegetation around the lake. A zebra’s stripes are as unique as the human fingerprint, I learn.

The lesser flamingos form three groups around the lake, flying away in panic in a line to join the other group as the boat sped past.

A Masai walked his 100-strong sheep as we return to the shore an hour later. The Masai belief is that all the land in the world and all the cattle in the world is theirs. The Maasais owned a vast territory from Kilimanjaro to Baringo, before the colonial settlers came. Even the thriving capital of Nairobi, meaning “place of cool waters” in the Maasai language, was a swampy water hole that the Maasais did not attach much importance to – until the British decided to establish a depot there for the Uganda railway in the early 20^th century.

On the way back, we stop at Happy Valley in the Naivasha area, where produce from Lord Delamere’s 100,000-acre farm is available fresh and relatively cheap. The influential and eccentric British settler’s family had taken Kenyan citizenship and retained its landholding after the country’s independence in 1963. In fact, the main avenue in Nairobi was known as Delamere Avenue until it was renamed Kenyatta Avenue
after Kenya’s founding father and first President. The colonist’s heir and present owner of the farm had run into trouble with Kenyan law for shooting to death a Maasai intruder and a suspected poacher in his estate in 2005 and 2006, but escaped with a light sentence.

The dormant Mt Longonot greet us again as we cross the Rift Valley and return to Nairobi’s evening rain and traffic jams. The big money from tourism has not helped improve existing infrastructure or the living standards of ordinary Kenyans. (Tourism is one of Kenya's major foreign earners alongside tea and horticulture and raked in 98 billion shillings last year, shy of its 100 billion shilling target, and up from 74 billion shillings posted in 2010. Revenues soared 32 percent in 2011 as high-spending arrivals from the United Arab Emirates, China and India made up for a fall in visitors from its traditional European markets.

According to Sibabrata Tripathi, India's High Commissioner to Kenya, the East African country currently receives about 20,000 tourists from India.) Cost of living is high, industrial production minimal, and government spending on health care and education abysmal. Public transport is non-existent, with matatus (private vans and mini buses) charging exorbitant fares that shoot up further on a rainy day. The vestiges of the colonial rail line remain underutilised.

There is a thriving Indian/Gujarati expatriate community whose businesses aid the local economy. Not surprisingly, there is a shopping mall selling Indian goods, clothing and food, and temples for the Indian communities. The land for the Asian market selling wholesale vegetables is a gift from the Indian community for poor Kenyan entrepreneurs.


Mira with Maasai dancers at Mamba village, an amusement park.

 The poor in Kenya deserve a better deal. The stoicism with which the poor in Nairobi – many of whom have migrated from drought-prone areas in the north of the country - go about their day-to-day affairs will seem strange to someone coming from a country where doles, subsidies and welfare measures rule the roost, however skewed they are in practice. A warm and friendly people, Kenyans do not seem to have half the luck of the wildlife that they protect and love.

**The original draft of an article I wrote for publication in Frontline magazine**