Lake Naivasha and Hell’s Gate NP: Trip 4 out of Kisumu

I thought Lake Naivasha was half-way between Kisumu and Nairobi—like a three hour bus ride. It’s sort of a suburb of Nairobi and takes 6-7 hours to get to from Kisumu by big fancy bus. By crappy matatu it takes 6-7 hours but it feels so much longer as every three minutes you see your life flash before your eyes.

Lake Naivasha is the ancestral home of the Masai tribe—one of the few tribes in East Africa which has attempted to hold on to its culture in the face of globalization and nation building. Sadly, they lost most of the ground around Lake Naivasha to flower plantations. Lonely P told me that a flower could be harvested in Lake Naivasha in the morning and in your European lovely’s bouquet in the evening. Pretty impressive and gives you a thought for the scope of these operations. There are literally hundreds of very large greenhouses surrounding this fresh water lake in the heart of Kenya. And scattered in-between all these giant farms / communities are little campgrounds.

Entrance to Hell's Gate NP

I went with Steph (another Hubert Fellow) and Aaron, and we chose from the LP to stay at Connelley’s Camp. Expecting Irish, after some ridiculous back and forth with the moto-taxi drivers, we realize the camp is actually called Carnelley’s Camp and costs twice as much as LP claimed. Still, it is a stunning campsite with hippos in the lake—right there.  Actually, the hippos could be a little too close at times and at night, the lovely Carnelley family places an electric fence to dissuade the hippos from entering the camp grounds and eating the campers. I never got around to touching the fence, but I was curious as to how powerful an electric shock needed to be to stop a hippo.

The next morning, wake-up early and head for breakfast (four maandazi—fried dough, and three cups of tea, shared among three people—what the hell were we thinking for a full day of bike safari?). As we sit enjoying our meal, the gentleman who is serving us (and we’ve gotten to know pretty well from multiple meals) goes and finds an entrepreneurial soul who is willing to rent us mountain bikes for 500KES, 400KES, 300KES per bike—it was impressive how quickly the price went down and I credit this with the incredulous look on my face because LP had said the cost should be 50KES at the park to rent a bike—I think someone never quite made it to Lake Naivasha and chose to phone in this chapter. The correct price is actually 500KES at the gate to the national park, so we got a deal except for the fact most of our brakes worked marginally (“it’s very flat in the park”—except for the giant mountain if you go left) and the seats sucked.

Quality of bike aside, you enter the park and are greeted by rugged, dry, beauty. It was simply stunning. You bike for a bit and there are some gazelle, a little further and a warthog family, to the left a giraffe and to the right a zebra and damn, I almost hit an ostrich. A few times during the day we pulled off the road, stashed the bikes and walked into the park and the fields of giraffe and zebra. The only animal that could be a little dangerous was the warthog, and we gave full clearance to him and his kind but all the others are relatively passive and somewhat skittish. That was the day, biking and walking safari.