12/12

For the second day I have walked down to the dam, in the valley behind and below Anthea's. I tried to sketch it yesterday, and the place is so peaceful, and one of those where it is easy to sit and think about things. (& lose any innate ability to draw..)


I'm sitting on a concrete structure, which appears to have been built to house a sluice, or a pump inlet pipe or something, but judging by the amount of crayfish debris, and signs of other carnage on it, must be the regular haunt of the Giant Kingfisher, which is currently sitting not far off, watching (& probably cursing) me and the water for food.


The slightly scruffy, but quite pretty collie Folly, has kind of adopted me, and come down to the dam with me, is sitting not far off keeping an eye on the flying things....insects & birds.

I haven't really written much about the scenery on my travels yet, for lack of real opportunity, but am going to try now.







The drive south from Nairobi soon brings you out of the urban mess into open scrub-land, and the sites of a number of closed factories, and other miscellany. These quickly give way to vast views, mainly to the west, but the east too at times, as you travel through some attractive if savage looking hill country.

Then there is nothing of real note....(Sadly we couldn't see Kilimanjaro for cloud cover) until the hills give way to more vast, and I mean VAST views of the bush.

The road winds through some quite spectacular mountainous areas, without itself changing levels much, if at all. (Alright, so there's quite a drop in height for the first thirty or forty miles out of Nairobi) It's only when yuo've travelled through hundreds of miles of bush, when you start approaching Mombassa that coconut palms emerge to add variety, as well as the almost ubiquitous Baobub, "The Upside Down Tree", which is at it's most impressive right on the coast.

The soil almost everywhere is some shade of red, perhaps suggesting an iron rich base..? It is apparently endowed with minerals, but relatively poor in microbial life, and vegative content/humus is again lower than could be expected. (Hm, so I'm told...)

The tea growers avoid fertilisers, and even mulch, believing that the tea thrives better in the barest soil. This makes some sense if it is mineral rich, but goes against other cultivation ideas in a pretty fundamental way. However they do seem to do quite well out of it, so must have some idea...

Returning to the drive, the road frequently offers enormous views, even to a hundred miles or more, across the simply mind staggering expanses of the southern bush, only a fraction of which is actually designated as Tsavo National Game Park. I haven't got the exact dimensions, but am told it is approximately the size of Wales, which is simply incredible.

There are similarly amazing views cross to sections of the Ridt Valley further back up the road. (Anthea drove me to have a look at the "Naivashu Ridge" or something, which coincidently Neil & Tanja had also visited as part of their safari trip.) (We argued with the vedors of all the cheapest crappiest sh*t in the galaxy, and won no arguments it has to be said, but still managed to avoid buying any of the nonsense they were tryng to force on us. They's reckoned without Anthea. A kind of victory then..)

Like I said, I don't quite savvy the lingua Cymraig, nor Kiswahili, but I understand the tragedy/comedy of some of it, I think....well, a bit, maybe...

The road to the viewpoints gives nothing away either, not until, after winding through some rocky cuttings and several ramshackle villages, you come to a very large lay-by. As soon as you come to this you realise that you've arrived at the very edge of the world. There are a number of sort-of shelves in the immeasurable legth of the escarpment, but essentially you're loooking at a drop of about a mile, to a seemingly endless plain, which although it is difficult to really make out, appears to be made up of primarily scrubland, or bush, with occasional small--holdings in and amongst. Anyway, as with so many other things on this trip, I hope the photos show it better than woreds....

We didn't stay for a very long time, just long enough to have a really good look. Anthwa decided to try the next road down the escarpment, despite it having a poor reputation for hijackings. We drove down it for a while, to another viewing point, past two AK47 wielding cops, (kid you not) and stopped again, just as briefly before heading for home.

Then, about a mile or so along the road, we were flagged down by some more (big f-ing gun toting) cops. Fortunately they hadn't reckoned on Anthea's nerves of steel, and after giving her a lot of gyp over her PSV license, or something similar, she persuaded them that they were just sooo wasting their time trying to extract money from us. They gave up, and I breathed again, and so we were allowed to go...

(Road pics next, at least I think so, all I'm doing is copying my written journal...but they'd kind of fit right now...)