Elite Traveler March-April 2016

INSPIRE KENYA

The arid scrubland of remote north-western Kenya is not an obvious destination for any tourist, let alone those for whom price is no object. It is bordered by Ethiopia and war-torn South Sudan. There are few roads and even fewer hotels. The sun and heat are scorching. But it boasts two attractions found nowhere else in the world. The first is Unesco World Heritage Site Lake Turkana, a sublime expanse of turquoise green water, known as the Jade Sea, that forms the world’s largest desert lake. The second is the fossil beds of the lake’s 7,000 square mile basin – layers of ancient sediment forced to the surface by the tectonic movements of the Great Rift Valley. They are so rich in evidence of human evolution that the basin has been dubbed “the cradle of humanity”. One of the world’s top paleontologists, Dr Louise Leakey, is hosting visits to this treasure trove. She readily admits she is doing this for the money, but the proceeds will go to the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) which her celebrated father, Dr Richard Leakey, established a decade ago to support scientists searching the basin for answers to the most fundamental questions – “who are we, where did we come from and how did that happen?” To join Dr Leakey’s journey back to prehistory, however, it is first necessary to reach one of the TBI’s two field centers – Turkwel, near the lake’s western shore, or Ileret on the other side. This journey is the pampered, luxurious part of the trip. A chartered helicopter will fly parties of four from Nairobi up over the highland moors and forests of the Aberdare National Park, down into the Great Rift Valley and past old volcanic craters to the luxurious Solio Lodge for an evening game drive around the private conservancy of the same name. In three memorable hours we saw more rhinos than we could count, a pride of lions, giraffes, zebras and much else besides before returning for drinks, dinner and then the blazing log fires at our own exceedingly comfortable cottages. The next day we enjoyed an even more spectacular flight over some of the earth’s most diverse and breathtaking scenery. Game scattered as we skimmed over the Laikipia Plateau, the snowcapped peak of Mount Kenya protruding from a veil of clouds far off to the east. We landed on the rim of a perfectly conical caldera where the pilot laid out coffee on a table and three girls from the Pokot tribe appeared from nowhere – their necks laden with colored bead necklaces, their skin notched with decorative scars, their hair dyed ochre with mud and all three giggling delightedly at their reflections in the chopper’s shiny flank. We banked to the left and right as we negotiated the twists and turns of a deep river gorge and admired the magnificently colored escarpments of a ravine known as the Painted Valley. We stopped and enjoyed the perfect stillness of a pristine sea of undulating yellow sand dunes ringed by outcrops of black volcanic rock. We flew low, with the helicopter’s doors wide open, over endless miles of lifeless lava fields, then an expanse of marshy lakes where panicked crocodiles slithered into the water. Tens of thousands of pink flamingos took wing as we approached Lake Logipi. Beyond that, over a final ridge of volcanic mountains draped with rivers of petrified lava, the shimmering waters of Lake Turkana stretched away to the horizon like a mirage in this parched and unforgiving land. Dr Leakey is the third generation of the first family of paleontology . In 1959 her grandparents, Louis and Mary, unearthed the skull of a 1.8 million year-old hominin in a Tanzanian gorge that they named Zinjanthropus boisei, so giving rise to the idea that man originated in Africa. Two years later their eldest son, Jonathan, found the partial remains of a species they called Homo habilis, or "Handy Man", which gave rise to the equally revolutionary idea that several species of hominins - the distant, upright walking ancestors of Homo sapiens – coexisted. In 1967 their younger son Richard discovered the Turkana basin’s fossil beds by accident after his plane was diverted by a thunderstorm while he was flying to Ethiopia. One sensational find followed another – the skull of the oldest known

“Girls from the Pokot tribe

appeared from nowhere – their necks laden with colored bead necklaces, their skin notched with decorative scars, their hair dyed ochre with mud”