Naivasha, Longonot, and Hell’s Gate
I made a presentation to my parents in February, standing in front of the big upstairs monitor. Open on the screen: image search, rome2rio transport planner, Google Earth satellite view. My leading image was a zoom in from satellite: Mount Longonot's perfect crater. A circular rigeline catwalk trail above the green, folded slopes.
I had just read Lonely Planet East Africa straight through. My book was marked with underlines and pencilled-in stars. Starred places got saved on a shared Google map, annotated with key features, cross-referenced to the corresponding page in the book.
Three countries, three months. That's what the T12 Visa gets you, so I want to see it all.
There is plenty, I demonstrated, to see in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya. We should start in Rwanda, where Dana can show us around, then work our way east to the coast. We can go by way of this park, over that mountain, borrow canoes at the lake here.
But if we only wanted to compress it into a few days, an early sampler perhaps, this cluster of three activities is the place. Camp at Lake Naivasha, climb the Longonot Crater, bicycle safari through Hell's Gate.
Only an hour and a half from Nairobi (where airfare is cheapest), we can hear hippos, see flamingos and monkeys, be on a volcano, check out zebras and giraffes in a national park.
We didn't get to Naivasha until the third month, by which time Rick had gone home and we'd already seen hippos and climbed mountains. But other than that, it worked out just like I imagined– which is rare.
We stayed lakeside and saw hippos at night. We left our packs at Fisherman's camp and daytripped to the mountain, and it was beautiful!
"Not much of a story," I complained to Eileen, "when everything goes smoothly."
But storytelling depends on the teller.
There's a theory in psychology called narrative identity: the idea that the way you choose to tell a story defines much of who you are. I could tell you how it rained on my perfect mountain and ruined the day, or I could tell you how we made it down the mountain in the throes of a rainstorm to a warm and safe cafe. Did it go smoothly, or poorly, or did we overcome to make it go well?
Stories change as you live them, too. A matatu ride two months ago was a grand adventure, but by the time we reached Kenya, it was transit. A crammed-full matatu from the camp to Naivasha town, the bustle of hawkers as we changed towards Longonot, are nothing new to you, reader. Motorcycle taxis (motos in Rwanda, boda-bodas in Uganda, pikipikis now that we've reached Kenya) took us cross-country to the entrance of Longonot park.
It started pouring when we were a third of the way around the Longonot Crater. We had already climbed past the peak, so we pulled out rain gear and carried on the long way around. Dry runnels in the sandy soil moistened slowly with rivulets bulging from surface tension, then grew into streams as we hiked upslope. They carried dirt and small rocks down the eroded trail.
We pressed on, warm despite the rain, and were dry by the time we made it down.
In the evening, a young woman with a huge backpack showed up at Fisherman's Camp after dark.
We were instantly reminded of ourselves two nights before: picking down the driveway in the night. Eileen befriended her: Paula, from Germany, who had just spent six months on a farm project near Kitale. She asked if she could come along with us to Hell's Gate the next day.
The three of us rented mountain bikes in the morning, rode them into the park. You can rock climb there! I've been missing climbing since I left California last year, asking all trip: is there anywhere you can climb in Rwanda? Uganda? I eagerly climbed a route, finding my muscles underused but my technique intact. Paula climbed her first route ever.
There are animals in Hell's Gate– no lions or other dangerous animals, which is why you can go unvehicled. For us, the mountain bikes felt more novel now than the warthogs, baboons, impalas, zebras. But we occasionally remembered to stop: oh, a giraffe in the bush! A hyrax hiding by the obsidian cave!
We rode a long loop, and it only poured once, briefly. A reprieve, in rainy season.
The rain came the next day, all day, but we'd left it as a day to rest. It's good to read books and stay in one place sometimes; we've been traveling a long time. But by day's end, we're restless. That was the intent too. Onward and east in the morning to the big city of Nairobi.
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