Africa Part 3/7: Lake Naivasha, Mt. Longonot, Hell's Gate, Kenya

The next stop in our safari itinerary was Naivasha in Kenya.  Naivasha is a decent-sized city that caters to tourists (both domestic in Kenya as well as international) with a large lake and mountains nearby.  To get there from Amboseli, we had to backtrack past Nairobi and then drive over some mountains.  We pulled over at a viewpoint to look over the East African Rift (a large tectonic plate boundary stretching from Mozambique in the south to the Red Sea in the north) and the mountains lining it.

 

 

When we were booking the trip, the resort we were originally going to stay at wound up canceling on us and our safari company booked us in an alternate hotel that they assured us would be nice.  It turns out the days we stayed there overlapped with an international rally car race they were going to hold there called Safari Rally, and the resort decided to cancel on everyone who already booked and rent itself out to the race teams.

We chalked the cancellation up to a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things and didn't really think anything more about the rally car race until we pulled into town.  We had planned on going on a hike through a gorge called Hell's Gate, but since the Hell's Gate National Park was one of the primary sites for the Safari Rally, the traffic to get into it was horrendous.  We considered just hanging around to watch some of the race, but after being stuck in traffic that was not moving for an hour as we tried to make our way to the parking lot, we gave up hope and turned around.  It was cool to see some of the rally cars around town and on the streets after the race.

Here's a highlight video from the Safari Rally - basically street cars driving around rough roads as fast as they can while trying to not break down.

So instead of hiking in Hell's Gate that day, we went to Lake Naivasha for a boat ride to look at hippos and other wildlife (something we were planning on doing the next day).  Here's Lydia in front of some cows that were grazing along the lake.  All the trees in the picture died in a flood in 2020 when the lake rose far beyond its current banks.

It was very peaceful and relaxing to be out on the water.

Here's a hippo we found munching on the grasses near the bank of the lake.

Yellow-billed stork.

Our boat captain/tour guide for this boat trip pointed out this African fish eagle at the top of the tree.  There were a handful of fishermen nearby sitting in innertubes fishing for tilapia and whatever else they could catch.  Our guide negotiated with one of them and bought a small tilapia off him, then waved it over his head to get the eagle's attention and tossed it into the water.  The eagle swooped down from its perch, snagged the fish with its talons, and flew off to eat its dinner.  It was cool to watch.

We found a herd of waterbucks along the edge of the lake.

After the boat ride, we went back to our hotel and rested up for the morning when we planned to go on two hikes.  Our first hike was up to the crater of Mount Longonot, a volcano that is believed to have last erupted in the 1860s.  Though the hike to the top where you can see into the crater is only 3.1 km (little less than 2 miles), it is a steep climb gaining a little more than 400 meters (1300 feet) to where we stopped at the crater.  This combined with the fact that the elevation there at the start is 2150 meters (more than 7000 feet) meant sea-level citizens like us had a hard time making the climb in the thin air.

Derek got his souvenir from a road-side rest stop/curio shop after missing out by not getting something like his sisters when they got their necklaces in Nairobi.  He was very interested in having a weapon, but after losing his yogurt to airport security, he and we were concerned that swords, spears, knives, and other weapons might raise too many alarms whether they were kid-sized or not.  The prized possession he chose as a souvenir was a well-constructed slingshot with rubber wrapped around the stick for strength and to seal it.  Random men we encountered when Derek pulled it out or when we bought it all commented that they had one like it when they were younger.  I speculated some of them could have hunted with a slingshot like that, but we never found anyone who admitted shooting anything more than inanimate targets.  But when we bought it, one of the store employees offered to demonstrate it and he shot a rock into a tree trunk from 10 feet away hard enough to break through the bark, so this little slingshot packed a punch.

Derek brought his slingshot along on the hike and as long as he followed the three rules we agreed to when we bought it, he was allowed to keep it.  The rules are

1. Always be aware of what is in front of you when you are shooting
2. Don't shoot toward anything living or breakable
3. No complaining or asking for another souvenir this trip

He did a good job with the rules.

  

We stopped for a rest and to catch our breath at a shelter about halfway up the mountain.

 

We finally made it to the top and could enjoy the views looking down into the crater from the rim of the volcano.

 

Our guide pointed out that even though the volcano hasn't erupted in more than a century, there is still steam that escapes through vents at times and we saw some of it.  The ground can apparently be warmer in sections if people hike into the crater.

 

People can hike around the circumference of the crater (7.2 km), but as tired as we were from "just" climbing to the top, we were satisfied with looking down into the crater and only walking a little ways around the rim in search of interesting places to take a photo.

 

Proof that we made it to the rim of the crater and that we ascended to 2560 meters (8400 feet), probably the highest elevation that our kids have ever hiked.

Going down was a lot faster than going up.

We met our hiking guide Steven at the base where he and other locals show up each morning waiting for someone to hire them to show them how to hike up the mountain.  Joseph, our driver and safari guide, met him there and negotiated for him to take us up the mountain.  The pandemic has been very hard for this part of Kenya (and other places in the world dependent on tourism) since there were fractions of the usual numbers of visitors which meant far less money.  Day labor hustling has got to be a depressing and difficult way to make a living, but we were very happy with Steven.  He was particularly great with Derek going up and down the mountain, and Derek was perfectly comfortable holding Steven's hand.

 

Steven and his wife hoped to get into the business of motorcycle repair which would be less dependent on tourism since so many locals use motorcycles for their own transportation or as taxis.  First, he needed to earn enough from being a hiking guide and whatever other odd jobs he could find to pay for tools and whatever other supplies he would need.  We gave him a generous tip to help him along the way to becoming a mechanic and hope he can achieve that goal.

After the Mount Longonot hike, we went back to the hotel to rest for a bit and swim in the pool.  We found a foosball table in the hotel's game room and our soccer-playing kids loved playing it even though the ball was a little pitted and some of the players were missing.

Then we went back to Hell's Gate National Park (where we would have hiked the previous day had it not been for the Safari Rally) to do our second hike of the day.  We met up with our hiking guide Steven again, and headed down into the gorge in the national park.  There we found hot spring water cascading down a cliff; it was very interesting to touch the water and feel how warm it was. 

 

Inside the gorge, we walked at the base of a slot canyon.  Apparently a few years ago, there was a flash flood that killed some hikers in the canyon, so the authorities don't allow hikers there, but Steven paid a special fee (bribe?) of about $8 to the park ranger and we went down.

This canyon was amazingly cool.  We found a long rope that some hikers use to climb up the cliffs.  Karina gave it a shot and managed to climb pretty high before her hands hurt from the rough rope. 

The canyon gets very narrow in many sections.

Steven helping Derek climb up a section.

Lydia is a great climber.  This is at the end of the hike before we turned around to go back - this part is called the Devil's Bedroom.

Karina climbing the rope again.

There were lots of ridges, caves, crevices, and other features as the canyon wound back and forth through the rocks with tall cliffs on each side.

And of course, the cliffs were great for climbing fun.

While the Mount Longonot hike was cool once we got to the top, it was a lot of work to get there.  The Hell's Gate hike was fantastic from start to finish because of views like this.

 

 

This was probably the narrowest the canyon got.  Lydia and I were both able to stretch across the width of the canyon a few feet from the ground.

 

 

 

 

At the ranger station, they had skulls of many different animals, and of course, our kids were fascinated with them.  Here's Derek holding a skull of some kind of antelope - maybe a giant eland.

 

Here are exterior pictures of our hotel/resort we stayed at, the Naivasha Sawela Lodge.  It was essentially a series of two-story buildings around a large courtyard with about eight hotel rooms in each building.  You could sit on our top floor balcony, crane your head, and see Lake Naivasha where we went on our hippo boat ride in the distance.  We woke up in the morning to velvet monkeys climbing around in the trees just off our balcony.

 

From the back.  Our balconies were the two sliding glass doors on the top floor, in the middle.