Magadi

"I had a farm in Africa. It was in the Ngong Hills".

Drought in the Ngong Hills

Karen Blixen was not well known in the UK until the Meryl Streep film "Out of Africa" was made, but there was already a suburb of Nairobi called Karen when we were there. Now the house is a museum, open to the public.

After seeing everyone else off on planes from Nairobi, Hanna and I had one more day in Kenya and we decided to take a mini-safari of our own. We thought we had hired a car for the day, but I guess they double booked us so I trolled around the streets looking for a car to rent. It turned out cheaper to book a car and driver for the day, so that's what we did.

I had read that the flamingos we saw at Nakuru nested in soda lakes in the Rift Valley on either side of the border with Tanzania and that it was an easy day trip from Nairobi. I hoped it was because we were due to fly out that night!

Our journey took us south through Karen and the Ngong Hills then through drought ridden valleys to a lake of salt. It was even more harsh than I expected, yet a man was doing raking salt in a tractor that should have been boiling over. All he had was a sheet of corrugated iron over his head. The air almost cracked with the heat.

Baboons

We decided to take in the view from the west side of the lake so the sun was behind us, but the only shade there was beneath a burned off Acacia. As we approached we realised that our space was already taken by a family of baboons. Normally I would have recognised their rights; they were there first; but this time I knew we wouldn't last long in the open or in the car. The baboons gave in very easily, which was a relief because they can be very bold.

We settled in with some soft drinks and a telescope and watched the flamingos for a while. As at Nakuru, I found it hard to watch the pink mass of birds for long. My eye would wander to anything different and so I looked for waders and found avocets, stilts and plovers. One flamingo stood out because it had a broken leg but it didn't suffer for long; a tawny eagle had seen it before we did and simply parachuted from the blistering chrome sky, vertically down onto it. Birds scattered in all directions and we watched the eagle dine on its flamingo right there.

Lake Magadi

Time and temperature drove us away, but we felt it had been worth the trip. I would have loved to see the larger Lake Natron but that was impossible.

Our driver pointed out a possible pit-stop for us on the way back and we just could not refuse. Olorgesailie is a really important archaeological site because this where some of the earliest (900,000 year old) human bones and implements were found by the Leakeys and their team. It was like visiting a fresh excavation despite the site being active for 50 years or so by then.

Sadly, that was the end of our safari and we went straight to the airport.

In those days the Kenyan government kept a tight reign on currency. We had almost been refused entry because we didn't bring in enough foreign currency for our trip and we were required to keep a log of all our transactions. I was worried that we would have problems at the airport because we had spent a lot more than we came in with. A large, armed officer was manning a small fold-up table that served as the emigration desk on the grass outside the terminal. He barked questions at the tourists who handed their suitcases to his two assistants. It was intimidating to say the least.

A Kenyan Asian family was ahead of us and they were given a very hard time. The contents of their bags was scattered all over the place. We were next and I handed over the cases as a drunken Welshman pushed by me and asked if he could come back out of the terminal because there was no bar inside. The officer's head looked about to burst open as he ordered the man to wait his turn. Then he politely asked me to identify my cases which I did. He scrawled on them with chalk and waved us through. That was it!

Salt pans

We landed in Madrid and had to go through immigration there. While we waited a voice called "Jim; Jim Stevenson?"  It was a familiar Welsh voice belonging to a college friend of my brother; the same Welshman that saved my bacon the night before. I thanked him for his help aand asked him what he was doing in Kenya. He explained that he was on a "freebie" with his wife who was a travel agent. He had been hoping for a week on the beach but they had broken down on the way. He hadn't had a good time. I asked him where he had broken down and he said "Amboseli National Park".  I would have loved to get stuck there.

On this trip I had borrowed some Nikon lenses and shot 26 rolls of expensive Kodachrome 64 film. Nearly 1000 frames. Those are the pictures that accompany this text, but a Spaniard with a machine gun wanted to zap them with X-rays. I wasn't up for that but let them hand-check my lead-lined bag.

Those pictures give me hours of pleasure today.