The weekend before I left to come back to the US for six weeks to wrap up my old job, I wanted one last good African adventure to tide me over through some boring DC weeks (just kidding. kind of.) I went with two friends, one who really wanted to go hiking. While trying to find something off the beaten path, we stumbled on the yet-unadvertised Sampu Lodge along the Nguruman Escarpment in southern Kenya near the Tanzania border, in the Shompole Nature Reserve. The lodge is run by Masaai and all revenue goes into the community, one of a number of attempts in Kenya to compensate the Masaai for turning their cattle grazing land into protected wildlife reserves and integrating them into this new economy and the tourist dollars to be had (though Masaai prize cattle beyond essentially all else, and I've never particularly gotten the feeling the tourist dollar will ever trump that). It's a complex relationship, of course, but that's the gist of it.
One of the attractions of the lodge was that to get to it you drive past (and actually across) Lake Magadi, which we curious to see. It's a saline, alkaline lake, fed by saline hot springs. The water is a dense sodium carbonate brine which precipitates into a mineral called trona that forms a crust on top of the lake. In places, the layer is 40 m thick.
On the eastern shore of the lake, there's the Magadi Soda Factory, which produces soda ash from the trona. Soda ash is apparently a high-demand industrial commodity used for everything from glass production to reducing acidity of chlorine in municipal pools to making German pretzels to taxidermy. The factory is in the middle of nowhere and a rather bizarre and bleak company town has sprung up around it.
After that, it's a beautiful drive, if a little rough sometimes (and mostly definitely almost double the hour or so they had told us it would be).
The lodge itself is basic, safari tents and self-catering. The people who run the camp are still in the early phases of learning how to manage the camp and maybe aren't getting as much support as they need. They're friendly and trying hard, though, and the setting is unbeatable, with views over the plains and directly overlooking a watering hole. We heard lions roaring in the bushes around the camp all night.
We went for two hikes up the escarpment, one in the evening and a longer one early the next morning.
One of the attractions of the lodge was that to get to it you drive past (and actually across) Lake Magadi, which we curious to see. It's a saline, alkaline lake, fed by saline hot springs. The water is a dense sodium carbonate brine which precipitates into a mineral called trona that forms a crust on top of the lake. In places, the layer is 40 m thick.
On the eastern shore of the lake, there's the Magadi Soda Factory, which produces soda ash from the trona. Soda ash is apparently a high-demand industrial commodity used for everything from glass production to reducing acidity of chlorine in municipal pools to making German pretzels to taxidermy. The factory is in the middle of nowhere and a rather bizarre and bleak company town has sprung up around it.
After that, it's a beautiful drive, if a little rough sometimes (and mostly definitely almost double the hour or so they had told us it would be).
The lodge itself is basic, safari tents and self-catering. The people who run the camp are still in the early phases of learning how to manage the camp and maybe aren't getting as much support as they need. They're friendly and trying hard, though, and the setting is unbeatable, with views over the plains and directly overlooking a watering hole. We heard lions roaring in the bushes around the camp all night.
We went for two hikes up the escarpment, one in the evening and a longer one early the next morning.
The only bad moment in the whole weekend was that while we were roasting marshmallows around the campfire (and listening to lions roar in the bushes nearby) I dropped a glob of fiery marshmallow onto my wrist and got a hideous burn. I like to think of the scar as a little something to remember a great trip by?
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