This week’s dream: the world’s biggest desert lake
“Baking hot, shadeless and harsh, the haunt of gigantic crocodiles, scorpions, red spitting cobras, abundant carpet vipers, hyenas, lions and tough nomads…” – thus reads the “ominous” description of Lake Turkana in Kenya:
A Natural History. Few travellers make the journey to this vast desert lake – the world’s largest – in the country’s northern reaches. But lately the roads have improved, says Horatio Clare in the FT, and with the help of an expert tour operator, a guided camping trip there is an “incomparable adventure” for adults and children alike.
The lake lies a day-and-a-half’s drive from Nairobi, and stretches for 150 miles to the Ethiopian border. The birdlife is spectacular: flamingoes, stints, stilts, godwits and plovers stalk the shores, and lanner falcons pursue “dizzy gusts” of queleas through the pristine air. Crocodiles make swimming in its “silky” waters dangerous in all but one bay, where local fishermen wade in from their boats, hauling nets full of tilapia, tigerfish and huge, “monstrous faced” Nile perch. The sheer scale and silence of the arid, mountainous landscape “baffles language”, and in Sibiloi National Park – where a sign welcomes you to the “Cradle of Mankind” – time itself seems to shrink. The remains of five human species and those of earlier extinct hominids have been found here, including the skeleton of a boy who lived 1.6 million years ago. There are fossils of sabre-toothed cats too, and beside the “shaley hulk” of Sibiloi Mountain, a forest of petrified tree trunks, seven million years old.
Taking a different route back to Nairobi, you cross the Chalbi desert, with its “searing” white salt pans. At Marsabit, there’s an extinct volcano “draped in cloud forest”, and you might stop, too, in Laikipia, a “jigsaw” of ranches offering excellent walking safaris and expeditions to the high peaks. Natural High Safaris (naturalhighsafaris.com) has an 11-night tailor-made trip from £5,390pp, excluding international flights.