vulcanicity

Looking Back Through The Old Africa Album

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The Great Rift Valley surely is a world wonder, the four-thousand-mile system of volcanic fractures and fissures that stretches from the plains of northern Syria, across Arabia and the Red Sea, then cuts down through Ethiopia, on through Uganda and Kenya (with a westerly Albertine branch around Lake Victoria), pressing on through Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and finally finishing in Mozambique. I read somewhere it is the only geological phenomenon that can clearly be seen from space.

The aging photos in this post, then, show scarcely a glimpse of Kenya’s Great Rift. Most were taken at different seasons from the 9,000 foot viewpoint on the highway north of Nairobi. The road itself, the country’s major route to Kisumu on Lake Victoria and Uganda beyond, climbs from the city, up and along one of the East Rift’s faulted terraces before descending to the valley floor at Nakuru.

The volcano you can see is Longonot, quiescent now and containing a lost wildlife world within its massive crater. You can walk around the rim, and it’s one of my regrets that we never did. But then in the ‘90s when we lived in Nairobi, security everywhere always seemed an issue.

The foreground farms lying in shadow are on a lower Rift terrace. This is Escarpment village where Graham did a lot of his fieldwork on Napier grass smut for his PhD thesis. I went along to hold the clipboard and one end of the tape measure. For that story see Past Lives – Beneath A Tropic Sun.

Next comes a rainy season view. This was probably taken during the very wet 1997/98 El Nino event:

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But then…

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…the dry season, both above (July) and below (August) on the valley floor:

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And finally…

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…here’s a late afternoon view, further south from the Ngong Hills near Nairobi.

Looking back on these photos, the biggest wonder is that I was ever there at all. Even at the time, much of what we saw was too astonishing to grasp.

Lens-Artists: Looking back at #1 Wonder This week Sofia reminds us to be amazed by life’s wonders. Please visit her beautiful photo galleries.

Longonot ~ This Volcano Has Well And Truly Blown Its Top

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This is Mount Longonot, one of several old volcanoes in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.  The caldera was formed in a series of huge explosions around 20,000 years ago. Can you imagine it? Any humans standing on the Great Rift escarpment, where I was standing to take this photo, would have had an absolutely astonishing view. And indeed, there would have been people around then – East Africa’s indigenous hunter-gatherers, small statured, fine-boned people whose presence long preceded the 16-17th century arrival of Bantu farmers and the Nilotic cattle herders.

The volcano is officially ‘extinct’ though Maasai traditions make report of fresh lava sometime around the 1860s.There are also active steam vents which Kenya is hoping to exploit to produce clean geothermal energy. You can see more about this HERE with some excellent photos of Longonot. (The smoke on my photo is most likely from stubble burning).

As I mentioned in an recent post about the Maasai Mara, until the arrival of British colonial settlers in the early 20th century, the entire Rift Valley was Maasai grazing territory and the landmarks thus have Maasai names. Longonot derives from oloonong’ot meaning ‘steep ridges’ in Ki-Maa. A fitting description.

But to my mind (and in true Conan Doyle The Lost World style) the most magical thing about Longonot is the hidden forest on the crater floor where zebra, giraffe, buffalo, hartebeest, lion and gazelle may roam. There is a path to the top, but it is quite a hike, nearly 2 miles to reach the rim and a good 4 miles around it. Back in our day you also needed to enlist the services of a Kenya Wildlife Service ranger to go with you, which didn’t always work out. It’s a big regret that we never did do this climb.

Here’s another view of it  showing the oloonong’ot .

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And the highest point of the cone seen from Lake Naivasha (2,776 metres; 9,108 ft): a seine fisherman and papyrus beds (where hippos may lurk) in the foreground.

Square Tops #6