Sir Richard Francis Burton, the 19th Century polyglot swordsman explorer, is known for his travels to, and travails in, Mecca and East Africa. Less familiar are his writings on exploring North America's Salt Lake to the Pacific Ocean in The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California, a few pages of which describe, in 1860, Native American tents, with comparisons made with Bedouin abodes in the Arabian peninsula. The book, published in 1862, contains what is likely the only first-hand account of nomadic life - and the tents in which nomadic peoples lived - in both the Middle East and the Mid West.
The key to a total fulfilment from your Marsabit experience is to thread day with night and camp in the middle of the park. Whether it be a Bedouin goat-hair bayt al-shar, an Arapaho bison-hide tipi, or a standard store-bought variety, it makes little difference. What’s important is that you not short shrift this quintessentially Kenyan wilderness experience with an in-and-out midday drive, but plan as an absolute minimum 24 continuous hours inside the park. If you can find the ground space for a bayt al-shar, make it a week.
But it's the word safari, introduced by Burton from Swahili to the English language in the mid 1800s - taken earlier from the Arabic safar - that I am concerned with here, and its adaptation to the Marsabit experience.
Safari, simply meaning travel or journey, as a concept has transformed quite a bit since the 1800s, and today is commonly applied to multiple modalities of modern-day joy seeking. From bicycle to boat to balloon safaris, the means by which one can explore Kenya's wild spaces varies, ranging in comfort, altitude, speed, and the fees paid to participate. But there's a lesser-practiced safari, one you won't read about in travel magazines or pop-up ads, but is truly the best, and only, safari for Marsabit National Park: the lawn-chair safari, or as Burton might have called it, Bedouin-style self love, or something in that vein. In any case, I’ll explain.
A lawn-chair safari might sound like a lazy person's indifference towards adventure; that would be an egregious assumption. And if after reading this post, you're intrigued with the idea but prefer a term more outdoorsy, call it a camping safari, but with a chair. But there’s a difference here. Lawn-chair invokes a sense of day-time relaxation, outside on green grass under a warm sun, where time and obligation are suspended. Sure, a camping-chair might conjure up similar notions, but camping-chair safari lends emphasis to campfire songs and ashy marshmallows. It’s the former term, lawn-chair safari, that stresses mid-day stillness, and in this case of Marsabit National Park, performing only one activity from the comfort of that chair: watching wildlife for he entirety of a day. So yes, the lawn-chair safari is not only camping, and is most certainly the antithesis of the 4x4 game drive. If you visit Marsabit NP with the intention to drive in and drive out, then you'll find your experience lacking.
In this park, you’re not going to see a cheetah break out in a graceful 100-meter sprint to take down a Thomson's gazelle. Most of the park’s 1,500 square kilometers are covered with dense forest and bushy ground cover. From a car you’ll see a lot of tree bark, leaves, and shrubby thickets. No one traveling at distance to Marsabit should expect to see large fauna they haven't already seen somewhere else, either.
Instead, you have to think of Marsabit, and more specifically, Lake Paradise, as a 24-hour theatre with a long list of performers that include the most extraordinary animals on earth. It’s a show with no beginning and has no end, and your seat is likely to be the only one in the house. This is the essence of a lawn-chair safari.
The park has two primary watering spots, the volcanic crater lakes of Sokorta Diko, and the more lush (and non-developed) Gof Sokorte Gudha, otherwise known as Lake Paradise. The latter is where you want to be. The lake is nearly a half kilometer wide and a full kilometer long. The crater is another 2x larger.
When you return home from Marsabit, you’ll tell your neighbors about it because the chances are they’ve never been, and like most everybody else, will never go, but you’ll try to convince them anyway. Marsabit is far off the tourist circuit, and with so many other parks more readily accessible, it’s no surprise that fewer people visit. But its lack of popularity is to the benefit of those who make the journey north, and on what is possibly Kenya’s best road from Archer’s Post to Moyale. As Kenyan long-distance runner Jalis Lukong enthusiastically said during an interview, describing the moment he looked over his shoulder and realized victory was imminent in the 2013 Kass FM marathon, “no peepol, no peepol, noooo. And I happi.”
In Marsabit National Park, bliss is achieved by spending an entire day - or more - relaxing on your chair on the lake’s edge, watching animals emerge from the forest and saunter down to the crater’s watery fill. Pole pole, there is no rush. Stock cold drinks and bring a book. Gary Snyder poetry works well. To break stride, go for a walk around the lake, and if you've got the goods, take a gin and tonic along to enhance the experience. With some binoculars, you're set.
Marsabit National Park is a on mountain shrouded in montane forest that sits above a surrounding dry landscape that stretches hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Despite its isolation within an otherwise extremely arid region, the park’s altitude creates a peculiar ecological zone that is kept green by relatively high rainfall - some 90cm per annum - with its rich volcanic soils retaining an ample amount of moisture, inducing an evergreen forest and deciduous woodlands of thorn trees and perennial grasses, favored vegetation among elephants and buffaloes.
Rainfall pools in the park's two volcanic craters, with each accessible by road and foot, but Lake Paradise is ideal for camping. The other, Sokota Diko, is home to the park's only lodge, which, in October 2020, appeared to be deserted, or at least in some sort of pandemic-induced dormancy.
Abundant in the park are grevy's zebras (an uncommon forest dweller), elephants, buffaloes, bush bucks, kudus, baboons, spotted hyenas and scores of birds, both permanent residents and migratory varieties. I've read of reticulated giraffe being around, but I didn't see them. By night, there's a ton of nocturnal action going on, and on one after-hours scan of the lake's edge with all 746 lumens of my torch, I counted nearly 50 sets of glowing yellow eyes looking in my direction (after which I entered and zipped up my tent and slept). The segue into each evening begins the same way: an opening chorus of zealous crickets who relieve the day-shift ensembles of Egyptian geese, sacred ibis, and fiscals, among others... all collectively - with elephants, buffalo, and baboons - maintaining a steady 24-hour acoustic rhythm in the echoing crater. Here's an audio bit of an elephant herd's matriarch and a not-so-coy buffalo, at odds about whose turn it is to enjoy the sunny-side of the lake for a drink at day’s last hour.
Over two and half days I saw no other people at Lake Paraside - only a duo of rangers on my way into the park. Quite a contrast to an earlier Hell's Gate experience in 2013, when a bus load of people appeared at sunset and rolled out a generator and stand-up sound system. Such traumas, if you've experienced them, are remedied here, but as described above, the park is anything but quiet, and everything but dull.
One of the largest tusker elephants ever known in Kenya lived in Marsabit National Park. Ahmed’s legendary status - cemented by his huge frame and 70kg tusks - goes back to the early 1960s when word spread in Kenya of a giant elephant in the north, so long were his tusks that they would drag on the ground as he walked. In the 1970s, documentaries were made, further elevating his status to an international pop icon of sorts. His size, tusks, and fame compelled President Jomo Keyatta to provide, by presidential decree, Ahmed with his own protective detail: two armed guards on constant 24-hour watch. When Ahmed died, of natural causes at 55 years, the nation mourned, and plans were made to preserve Ahmed’s body for future Kenyans to see for themselves “The King of Masabit.”
Around 2 am on my second night in the park, in my Kelty 2-man dome tent, I awoke to the crackling sound of heavy feet punching through dry thickets of prickly shrubs. By the time a felt awake, I heard only crickets again, and rolled onto my back atop a deflated sleeping pad, propped myself up with elbows, and through a small window of the tent’s rain fly peered outside. To my right a waning moon was a few degrees above the crater's eastern rim, giving faint outline to the shrubbery surrounding me. I then looked left and there he was, the noise maker, the part of the show when a performer steps crosses over the orchestra pit and wanders into the house. His face was close enough that if I could have pushed my breath through the thin wall of the tent, the hairs on his face would quiver, a massive silhouette towering above my, its head a dark galactic void within the suffuse backdrop of the midnight sky,
Elephants' sight isn't their strongest sense, but those ears, and that trunk... I'd been found out, and wearing only my drawers, I was feeling rather vulnerable as I contemplated how I hadn't given prior and proper thought to this somewhat inevitable moment. The elephant made a slight shuffle and stepped closer, I slowly pulled my elbows wide and reclined, stiff.
The elephant took another thudding half step forward, another step and its on top of me, its silhouette ballooning in the dark. His trunk took a swat at the tent, pushing the papery-thin walls inward. I’ve seen on tv elephants that use outcroppings to scratch their backs, so I was trying to be optimistic that wasn’t going to happen here. With that concern lingering, he twirled his trunk downward to the base of the tent, near my head, sucking the air from my inner ear into a vortex of sound, a steady but rigid stethoscope-ish in-stereo reverb.
Perhaps my socks, I thought, somewhere outside the tent and between his snout and my head, would discourage further investigation. In a moment, the elephant pivoted right and three short steps later was investigating an unused cooking pot and a stove, as well as my camping (lawn) chair and a 1967 field guide to National Parks of East Africa by JG Williams. Shuffling again, he stepped on and crushed an empty can of Tusker lager, and for a moment I was distracted with an idea for an aluminium recycling campaign. But a startled elephant is an unpredictable one, so I stayed horizontally frozen, my heart thrill-pumping blood.
Either satisfied or disinterested with his findings, the elephant pivoted back towards the tent one more time. As he stepped into the moon's light his shadow filled the inside the tent with a darker shade of darkness. Whatever sound I might have been hearing at that moment, I have no memory. It took one last feel of the tent's nylon dome and then slowly slumbered on, sticks crunching under its dragging feet, and then was gone.
I saw only one solitary bull elephant while camping at Lake Paradise, pictured here. I’m certain he was my midnight visitor. Indeed, it appears from this photograph, taken the day before, that his plotting began at this moment, munching grass, waiting for the fall of darkness.
I managed a few hours of sleep. With sun up, I unzipped the tent, rolled out, and stood up as straight as my body would allow. Scanning the rim of the lake, my attention zoomed in on a lone spotted hyena some 35 meters away, seemingly standing more upright than myself, watching my pull a twig from my disheveled bed head. Dammit, I was in no condition for more social improve. But after less than a minute after our eyes locked, the hyena turned east and galloped off, slipping silently into the forest and out of sight. Not a very clear photo here; it was a struggle to reach into the tent and quickly fiddle with camera dials. I could barely get my eyes to focus, much less the camera lens.
There's one 'official' campsite at Lake Paradise, or Gof Sokorte Guda ("big sweet water crater"). It's a good spot for several tents, but if you're one or two people, there’s better. The special campsite is behind the tree line on the northwestern edge of the lake. If it’s been raining, it’s a slog to get there. On the map below, it's marked 'special', which apparently means you need a reservation, but I didn't have one, and there was no one else there anyway. The header photo on this page is taken from the park's lake viewpoint, on the road, directly above the special campsite. In the distance in that photo is an opening in the trees on the opposite side of the lake, and a solitary acacia in the middle of that opening closer to the water's edge. That's where I camped (yellow circle on the map below), and that tree will provide shade for your lawn-chair safari.
The view of the lake from that lone tree is perfect. Slightly up the slope, it affords a panoramic vantage point to see everything, much unlike the special campsite which sits, as mentioned, behind the trees and is a 25m trot on a rocky path to better the view.
My reasoning for the lone-tree spot was two-fold. One, the view's great. Two, since everything that visits the water emerges from somewhere through the tree line, I wasn't interested in sitting alone in a dark grove waiting for whatever was coming next to flop onto my lap while on its way for a drink. Tied to this, the baboons keep to the western edge of the lake and never wandered far enough over to where I was to raise concern of sticky fingers grabbing foodstuff. I considered that their relectance to make it closer to me was due to fear of predators. Perhaps. The lone-tree site provided a modicum of assurance that any surprises would perhaps be spotted before they happened, at least during daylight. On this map, the road into the crater enters through that clearing, so it's the first spot you come upon in a car.
Marsabit, or "mountain of cold", as some seem to define it, is certainly much cooler than where I was just before, Samburu National Reserve. T'was nice to wear layers in the cool morning, like a misty Oregon campout, and the third day included an early fog roll-over the lake.
If in need of provisions before going into the park, there's a market, Basmart, on the right side of the A2 as you enter Marsabit town from the south. It's adjacent to the Total petrol station. A bit further, another couple hundred meters or so (and at the next right turn going east, into town), is the main road to Ahmed Gate. There's a Shell station on that corner. If you need some of those mentioned Tuskers, you can get them by the case from the Saku Beer Agency (a beer agency!) a hundred meters past the Shell station, on the left side of the Ahmed Gate road. (The Marsabit NP map, btw, was available only at the Ahmed - and not the Karare - gate.) The road conditions in the park are good, easy in - easy out.
Of everywhere I've camped in Kenya, this place is among the best... no menacing monkeys carting off your stuff, no people doing nonsense, and enough inquisitiveness on both sides of the tent to maintain a steady cycle of wonder. Whether you go to camp there or not, don't forget to bring something to sit on. You'll be happy you spent as many hours as possible on the edge of Lake Paradise, and leave with full appreciation for the lawn-chair safari.
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