1887. A long line of men and animals, devoured by thirst, crawl through a nightmarish landscape.
Huge red lava walls where only the shadow of some isolated acacia seems to sympathize with their fate. The yelping of the hyenas every night take one of the donkeys that carry the reduced loads and those too weak to go mingle with the howling of the wind on the lava flows that surround, in a hostile land everywhere you look, yet extremely fascinating.
That year, only months before, Austrian aristocrat Teleki Samuel, embarked, accompanied by the professional soldier Ludwig von Hohnel, in the search for a course lake, connected to the Nile, yet to be discovered in the unknown land border between the British colonies in East Africa and the Ethiopian Empire Menelik.
Little did this somewhat snobbish browser task that lay ahead. After 5 months of hunger, thirst, struggles with hostile tribes (course hostile to the invasion of their land and their way of life that foreshadowed the caravan that crossed their land) and many adventures, lost all hope and now preparing to return, occurs one of the highlights, in the opinion of this humble author, travel literature of classical.
Going up a wall of lava is opening before them a surreal scene. A huge expanse of water, verde jade, hit by a steady wind and surrounded by small volcanoes. Teleki and Von Hohnel completed well, for European cartographers, the map of the African Great Lakes with the farthest, inaccessible and mysterious of all, from Lake Turkana ...
The traveler who makes Kenyans back roads north can not help but notice the drastic change, landscape and temperature, that occurs just leave town of Nanyuki
The image we all have in Kenya is the archetypal world of safari. Vast plains, herds of lions and vehicles ..... 4 x 4 surrounding herds. A country hit by the long arm transplanted to colonial English Ecuador many of their customs and way of life. But all is not well.
The traveler who makes Kenyans back roads north can not help but notice the drastic change, landscape and temperature, that occurs just leave town of Nanyuki, at the foot of Mount Kenya. We went from a green land, fresh, with good roads, Swiss ubérrimos fields with cows and fences to the European, to a dry, brown, where the ordinates give way to small villages of mud buildings, the asphalt is disappearing and the looks that are watching from the edges of the track sometimes straight out of a classic book of travel.
It was on this earth, more than a century after Teleki, together with 3 Samburu guides and two camels, trying to repeat the itinerary to Lake Turkana Teleki. From the town of Maralal and after falling at the foot of the Great Rift Valley, after more than 300 km the Travesía, fortunately far less epic than the explorers of yesteryear, we planted in front of the Turkana possibly at the same point where it looked Teleki first, in one of the most spectacular on Earth you can imagine.
Descend into the green waters, between small volcanic cones and a crazy wind, way through this world unreal
We left the Lake Logipi, in the bottom of the Great Rift, where we measure temperatures 50 ° C to 9 am, and the green hills Loroghi, Ground Samburu, where a herd of more than 30 elephants stopped us more than a day in a game of hide frankly interesting ......
And we descend into the green waters, between small volcanic cones and a crazy wind, way through this world unreal, way to Loyangalani, the only town of any size on the southern shore of Lake, as in a dream.
A dream that is Africa, an Africa that all we ever wanted and dreamed in the pages of the classics of travel and adventure, still exists, Jade surrounding Lake. An Africa where it is not easy but we will get scarred forever ....
