Kenya Calling

How do I capture our diverse experiences of Kenya in just so many characters?
Chaotic, charming, challenging, changing, captivating?
All of this and more.
David Stanley said when we arrived that Kenya is like a jigsaw puzzle... Only you cannot see the picture you are trying to piece together, the pieces don't fit and many are face down!

Note shanty houses left overhanging newly cut road.

Building techniques and materials.

This picture encapsulates lots - stock have right of way on roads and are everywhere. The road is a stalled upgrade to Nairobi's stretched highway system, yet still is heavily used in its undeveloped state...

Don't think from these photos that it is all bad... but certainly very different. Read on...
We have just (at the time I started this post on 1 April!) spent two days driving to and around some of the northern arid area of Kenya and the nearby high altitude, and therefore non-arid, spaces north of Nanyuki. Thirty six hours of contrast and surprises. [Check my Facebook page for more photos from this excursion!] Within that time we were near Nairobi in the rain, driving through a range of landscapes until reaching Suyian Soul - a farm and wildlife range. With the promise of elephants the safari tops were raised in the two vehices equipped with them and on we bumped, dust and hair flying! 

I felt like a child - absolutely thrilled and delighted to be here, in this landscape, doing this. The fascinating thing is that ranchers have to coexist with the wildlife of Africa - depending where your farm is that may mean a lot or a little. At Suyian Soul it is a lot! We stopped and saw a mob of cattle being fattened - 3.5 year old steers eating what looks to us like scrub and low quality grass, but which, with careful management, achieve the aim if enough rain comes in the next month as it should. I should say that rain here comes at two times of the year - the short rains from late March to early May and the long rains nearer the end of the year. Fortunately some of these old clay rich soils have an amazing ability to retain moisture for longer than ours do on the Central Plateau!

Part of the diversification of this business has been to introduce camels - they graze at a level not touched by the cattle. Camel milk is much sought after in the north of Kenya - and touted for it's health properties. The tricky thing is they have to be milked with their calves at foot - or they won't let their milk down! Having milked cows in the paddock, Kevin was determined to give camels a go. He succeeded with a little help from the camel herdsman and many of us tried the result - handing round the yellow plastic 'pot'. As someone else described later on our journey, camel milk tastes a bit like where it comes from - you can imagine it from the photo!

One way of working with the wildlife that also want to graze the ranches is to set up tourism ventures. Suyian Soul is a great example of this. Our accomodation can only be described as 'integrated' with the surroundings - you might want to look at their website http://www.suyian.com/

Late afternoon was designated for wildlife... off we went on rough tracks delighting in the 'mickey mouse eared' zebra here, elegant giraffes, blustering cape buffalo and many impala, dikdik and ilan. Thanks to tracking collars we even spent a while watching a pack of Kenya's unique wild dogs at very close quarters, indolent in the days last rays, bellies round and looking like hunting that evening was definitely off the agenda! 

Heading back in the twilight, desperate to see the promised elephants, we were instead treated to a rare sighting of a leopard - relaxing on a large rock. We made sure all could see it in the distacnce, then edged closer, stopping again for closer photos. We managed to do this about four times before it finally lost patience with us and jumped down into the scrub. Even the locals with us were excited about this sighting!

There is in fact a leopard on that rock

Early morning starts have the benefit of watching the brightening of the large sky - we were treated to a glorious sunrise that my phone, despite its pretty good abilities, could never do justice to! 

Safari top up again, at last we found our elephants... then more, and more and still more - even seeing a large mob of about a dozen roughing up the trees across a stream from us.

A picnic breakfast in the rapidly warming sun finished off this most unique part of our journey and we drove on into another entirely different landscape.

I'm picking this up nearly a week later and we are all the way down in Cape Town now.
Kenya exposed us to agriculture that has a whole different set of uncertainties than we are exposed to in NZ... land tenure came up at every stop - the population of 44 million is growing by about 1 million a year. There are schools everywhere to cater for the huge child population. The cities are sprawling, the constitution was changed in 2010 so that land owned by non-Kenyans are now legally leasehold only (not freehold) and everywhere there is evidence of peope using land whether private or communal. Most roadside verges have some sort of garden, livestock or market operation going on. 

Transport, rainfall distribution and corruption/government stability are all issues on peoples' minds here. In the north where we stayed at Suyian Soul, there is the added threat of wandering pastoralists from further north coming south with their herds in times of drought. 
Despite these difficulties people were cheerful and friendly. 

We thoroughly enjoyed our lineup of farms - cropping, floricuture, beef, dairy, horticulture (including macadamia, avocado and tea) along with the fruit juice processing plant, school, Maasai cattle sale, cheese factory (see Twitter: https://twitter.com/DairyingBOP/status/584001272216453120) and International Centre for Agroforestry. Many operations include at least some degree of processing as part of their business - a means of coping with transport and capturing value. All of my group agree it has been particularly enlightening to visit a place that is so far removed from our known contexts. Interestingly one of our hosts also said she appreciated having us here because she felt it was valuable to see what for her is normal through our eyes... inviting an outside perspective is something to remember to do ourselves when we are all back and busy coping with our own customary contexts!
 This brings me to my final topic for Kenya... a dairy farm that is very foreign to our NZ experience but which is entirely appropriate for the challenges and resources of its setting. Some of you will have seen the photos and/or video of milking cows in the paddock, with the cow being called into their mobile stalls ready for hand milking. If not check it out!
This was a streamlined, well-monitored and effective system: highly labour intensive, but independant of poorly supported infrastructure issues and with a very low capital requirement.

Cows are a cross between the local Somali originated Boran and the Holstein Friesian of Europe. The cross copes with the heat, rough forage typical of more tropical environments and the ubiquitous ticks. Production is not that much lower than ours, but stock have longer than a year between consecutive calvings. During the driest times, and when pasture is being cut for silage, cows are essentially feedlotted and supplemented with a combination of that home grown silage and imported feed including molasses and concentrates.

A truly hybrid system that simply works here. It was great exercise in paradigm prodding! 
Next installment wil be a less chaotic part of Africa... I'm looking forward to disovering what is special about South Africa.