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The only problem using public transport to reach the East side of the \'Jade Sea\', Lake Turkana, is that there isn\'t any. It takes more than that to put the Travelmag off a journey. Jack Barker gets there anyway. |
\'Come on. We\'ll miss the film.\' My companions were impatient. \'It\'s Demetrius the Greek.\' By way of encouragement they recited whole scenes from memory, filled me in on the plot. They pulled me away from the sunset. \'How tall are you?\'
The Catholic mission has the TV. Every Sunday they fire up the generator, plug in the video, and point the screen out through a doorway. A sea of 150 little faces, cross-legged, gazed up into the cathode glare: adolescents, ranked by height, had a more distant view. Gasps followed every blow, giggles every kiss. Then the video broke down. The audience, chattering excitedly, rushed out of the mission compound and raced to their huts.
Outside the circle of dancers the chat, too, was about cattle, and the rising cost of women. Driven to the lakeshore by years of drought, the Turkana economy here depends on fish, but to get married takes cattle. Parents will require 10 cows, 40 goats, a few camels and maybe a donkey before they release a daughter for marriage. To a young tribesman eating fish on the barren shores of Lake Turkana raising a herd this size is an impossible dream. The old men marry all the young women: young men just dance.
Few Westerners get to Lake Turkana: fewer still by public transport. It had taken me seven days to reach the lake and I\'d been lucky. I still wasn\'t sure if they\'d been the best or the worst days of my life.
In retrospect, the first half of the journey had been easy. I\'d defeated the early-rising bag-snatchers of Nairobi and squeezed into one of Kenya\'s overloaded minibuses. The first broke its suspension and limped over the equator at 12 mph, the second suffered a series of flat tyres and bumped to a final halt in buffalo country. There are better places to spend the night, as buffalo are famed for their dislike of Nissan Urvans and are apt to attack if they find one wounded. The driver built a bonfire for safety but then a truck came lumbering out of the darkness and offered us a lift - for a fee - into Maralal. By car the trip would have taken five hours. It took me fifteen.
Maralal\'s darkened high street wasn\'t so much lined by trees as interrupted by them. Tin-roofed wooden houses glowed with cracks of light and three small boys yapped around my ankles, offering advice, asking for pens.
What makes getting to Lake Turkana by public transport a particular problem is that beyond Maralal there isn\'t any. Travellers and locals alike rely on whatever vehicle passes: generally local trucks.
The word on the wide verandas of Maralal was that two Turkana women had gone to Nairobi and were due - overdue - back with a hired, loaded truck. The streets buzzed with brightly-dressed Samburu women, hooped with countless bead necklaces, and men with braided hair and painted faces, discouraging casual photography with seven-foot spears, but pausing quite close to Westerners with cameras in case they might pay for photos. There are worse places to wait for a lift.
There are worse places to spot game: the town is in the middle of a game reserve, and by night marooned by dangerous elephant. In the evening I visited Maralal\'s Safari Lodge. Antelope, warthog, baboons and zebra had come either to watch me drinking beer on my own or to use the salt lick, made from mud brought down from Lake Turkana. I was told the buffalo had left for pastures new, and so walked back to town passing a sign saying "do not take this path: danger of buffalo" and blew out any lingering cholesterol when a zebra reared up out of the bush ten feet away.
First stop the next morning was the petrol station. I was quickly directed to an old Isuzu truck piled high with provisions. It was going to Lake Turkana, I was told. The overdue women had finally arrived.
Shreds of tread clung to the wire-mesh surface of some tyres, while others lay in the sand, surrounded by Kenyans with levers. In the back sacks of sugar, boxes of milk, tea and tobacco were piled high leaving a minimal cockpit on top, ringed by anxious faces peering down. Using a ladder welded to the side I joined them. The two Turkana women who\'d masterminded the expedition smiled, mouths full of cheap, stalky Quat, along with about ten other passengers, including a small Italian nun in her fifties. It wasn\'t the last word in comfort, but so what? After all, I thought, it wasn\'t far to Lake Turkana. 150 miles? It couldn\'t take longer than ten hours, surely.
How wrong I was.
The ancient truck wheezed and hissed its way out of Maralal, came to the first hill, ground to a halt, and stopped. All the passengers climbed off and pushed, as the driver dragged us up the slope by revving the engine and dropping the clutch, gaining two feet each time. Smoke filled the cab and we stopped to unload. The nun, Sister Gwendolina, had been 18 years in the area, and pointed out that this wasn\'t the only hill - or the worst. This truck, she said, wouldn\'t make it.
For her, it didn\'t have to. A car, packed with strays from the roadside, squealed to a halt at the sight of a habit. Sister Gwendolina picked up her cardboard box and squeezed in.
