Journey to Lake Turkana

We’re flying low at almost 200km/h over Lake Logipi in Turkanaland and I’m leaning out of the helicopter to get a better view of the desert landscape.

The windgust is hot, like a pizza oven, and it’s blasting my eyeballs. I’m doing my best to capture the scenes with my camera but there is too much to look at, let alone photograph.

The land seems too big, the sky too large for human vision. It’s as if my brain’s CPU can’t process what I’m seeeing quickly enough. (I’ve often thought my mind needs a RAM upgrade anyway though.)

So I set the camera’s aperture to F8, ISO to 800 and, in the searing sunlight of the Kenyan desert, the shutter speed sorts itself out at about 2 000th of a second. I hold down the button on my Canon in high speed multi-shot and autofocus modes. The shutter clicks away, taking ten images a second. Thank goodness for clever Japanese camera engineers.

The landscape below us looks apocalyptic in its sheer emptiness and harshness. It has a strange, almost malevolent indifference about it.  The renowned writer AA Gill once wrote of the Kalahari: “The great thing about the Kalahari is that it hates you. It wants you dead”.

I get what Gill was trying to say, but I reckon Turkanaland simply couldn’t be bothered about humans. It’s too busy dealing with more important things.

Here on the Great Rift Valley, Africa is being ripped apart by tectonic forces beyond human comprehension. The Nubian and Somali tectonic plates are moving inexorably away from each other. In a few hundred million years, East Africa will drift off into what we call the Indian Ocean. And Turkana land is ground central for these violent geological forces. Against this timespan, the human species seems laughably insignificant.

But I’m not finding any of this funny. By now it’s over 40 degrees Celsius and the heat of the desert air is intense. I’m feeling nauseous. The pirouetting movements of the chopper and the burning winds don’t make me feel any better.

I soon forget about it all. Suddenly there are flamingos flying all around our chopper. Thousands of them. They are soaring over Lake Logipi, one of many shallow, caustic lakes in this netherworld of Kenya’s northern desert. The birds turn this way and that, swooshing currents of pink and white. We fly low over the lake and thousands more flamingos rise into the sky, wave after wave of them.

By now my nausea seems to have morphed into some sort of natural high and it all starts to feel a bit trippy, like some bizarre dream that leaves one baffled and bewildered.

For most foreigners (including me, until recently), Kenya seems to be a land of lush savannas and huge herds of wild animals. Go to the Maasai Mara in July and August for the wildebeest migration, and you’ll see one of the world’s most impressive natural events. But that’s only telling half the story of this diverse country. In fact it’s barely a quarter of the story.

Most of Kenya – more than half – endures semi-arid or desert conditions, and receives between just 200 and 400 mm of rainfall annually. If you look at a precipitation map, the whole of the northern half of Kenya is semi-arid or desert. To the northwest is Sudan, to the north is Ethiopia and to the north-east is Somalia.

It’s understandable why most tourists on a first-time visit prefer going to the well-watered southwest of the Maasai Mara, where the climate is more gentle and the wildlife plentiful during the famous migration. That’s where most safari companies operate, and that’s the stuff that gets promoted endlessly in the tourist brochures. But it’s also what millions of people have already seen, and it’s a cliched – albeit important – story that’s been told countless times by wildlife TV film crews.

If you want to gain a more holistic appreciation for Kenya, then you should head north into Turkana land. This is the wild and unpredictable side of the country’s personality. If you do, then it soon becomes clear why most tourists steer clear of this region. It is simply too challenging for most humans to live in, or even visit for extended periods. Turkana land is the yin to the Mara’s yang. Take a look at the photos below, and you’ll understand why.

The Turkana, Rendille and Samburu people claim this turf as their territory, but the majority of the place is uninhabited. The climate and landscape are too ferocious, even for these famously resilient people.

Intrigued? Then you can visit this netherworld of Kenya the hard way – or the easy way.

The hard way is possible, of course, but it will take you several weeks of driving terrible roads in a convoy of 4×4 Land Cruisers, an inordinate sense of humour (or maybe none at all would be better), plenty of water and supplies (which means there’s less space for cold beers), lots of good luck and a willingness (or naivety) to endure the usual unpleasant surprises of travel in rough and sometimes lawless areas of Africa.

Or, you can do it the easy way. Flying in a helicopter, it will take just a day to travel almost 1 000kms over some of the most astounding landscapes in Africa. You’ll also be landing in places where almost no modern humans have been, simply because the mountains, the gorges, the craters, the volcanoes and the soda lakes are impossible to access by vehicle or even on foot (unless you’re a wandering Turkana warrior with seriously big balls, which I’m guessing most of you are not).

Mikey and Tanya Carr-Hartley from The Safari Collection offer various helicopter tours around East Africa, but the day trip into northern Kenya is one of Mikey’s favourites, because it is so different to anything most guests have experienced elsewhere in Africa. If you’re looking for a day to remember, this is it.

As a photographer I’ve been lucky to see some very special sights on the continent. I’d say that this helicopter trip into northern Kenya was the most intensely visual day I’ve had for a while.

There were so many moments during the day when I felt like I was in another realm, a place that didn’t feel familiar at all. Maybe it was the heat, maybe a bit of dehydration from the hot winds, or maybe it was the sheer scale of the place.

It was also one of the most physically demanding days I’ve had. I know that sounds weird, because we were sitting in a chopper most of the day, but because pilot Andy Belcher had taken the doors off (for photography and filming), we were exposed to the intense heat and pounding winds for 10 hours. At the end of the flight, when we landed at Lake Naivasha, I felt like my brain had been barbequed. But I’d do it again tomorrow, if I could.