Afroalpine wanderings

This might be a rare divergence in genre from my regular posts in being about travel. Travel of this kind is a rather rare event for me. I almost decided not to write it but then felt it might be something I might want to be able to be able recollect again in the future. The Wikimedia Foundation held Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi and I was fortunate to have been selected to attend with support. It was held in a wealthy ghetto of Nairobi isolated in a high-security hotel complex, and I suspect many of the attendees hardly saw what the rest of Kenya really is. Along with another participant, Manoj Karingamadathil, and our wonderful driver Peter, we spent about 5 days visiting Nyeri, Mt Kenya, the Aberdare National Park, and looping anticlockwise around the Aberdares through the rift valley, back via Lake Naivasha to Nairobi. One of my aims was to see the Afroalpine vegetation zone with giant lobelias and Dendrosenecio, something that more people associate with the Kilimanjaro region. 

Prior to the trip, I set myself about to learn as much Swahili as possible, and it was not really needed but certainly useful. I had decided not to go anywhere near the over-hyped and overpopulated wildlife parks. I was not even interested in the migration of wildebeest in the Masai Mara. I saw later on social media, the horrors of tourists and safari vehicles blocking animals and forcing them to leap off cliffs so that photographers could take pictures of animals splashing into the water or being taken by crocodiles just as they were shown in wildlife videos.

I also spent a good deal of time examining older travels and descriptions of the Aberdare and Mount Kenya region. In the process I went about sprucing the Wikipedia entries on Samuel Teleki and Halford Mackinder. Both their expeditions have rather shocking events, Teleki and his entourage had burn Kikuyu villages and shot many. Mackinder (later a professor) and his team had casually murdered some of their porters (the final bill to the contractor merely has "shot on orders" written against them!). And then their expeditions took back numerous plants and animals which were named after them. And there are places that still bear their name in Kenya.

Lioness gherao-ed by vehicles

Just before leaving Nairobi for Nyeri, I decided to join a bunch to a somewhat overpriced safari to the Nairobi National Park. The traffic load that the park deals with is rather shocking and the behaviour of the vehicle drivers confirmed my worst about what happens elsewhere. The word "gherao" describes how the vehicles dealt with the poor lioness. We did however see some very beautiful ostriches, a black-bellied bustard, a hunting serval, and a secretary bird among many other things and the park is truly beautiful in spite of its unusual juxtaposition of wildlife with the city skyline. I noticed groups of Fiscal Shrikes following herds of zebra and swooping down to take disturbed insects after them. I was not able to find any information on this in the literature. It is perhaps fortunate that the wildlife tourist pressure can be focussed on some unfortunate sanctuaries while letting some areas be far more wild. Like in India, it seems that the plains bear a greater pressure than the hilly regions. The lack of roads is probably the biggest saviour of the wilderness. The old colonial travelogues with their slow caravans contrast so much with our rapid ability to move around. 

We made our way to Nyeri that afternoon and reached in the evening, stopping along the route many times. I later learned that the name of the town Nyeri does not exist in pre-1912 maps of east Africa and that it was coined by the ornithologically-infamous Captain Meinertzhagen who had served in the King's Africa Rifles. An undated photograph of him in uniform was exhibited in the Nairobi National Museum. A visit to the museum earlier in the week was also quite enlightening. I had an inkling based on the amount of space spent for the bird exhibits that it had its origins in natural history and only later did I find that it was actually created by the colonial members of the East Africa Natural History Society (I had to create a Wikipedia entry for the organization!). In general the colonial impact on east Africa seemed to be so much worse than in India - with far more violence inflicted on the local people and land. The story of white wildlife preserves is also quite stark. The pricing of the larger and more popular wildlife reserves targets wealthy tourists but I heard some happy bits from a guide that the Kenyan Wildlife Service gives out special permits for Kenyan students to visit the sanctuaries at free or reasonable prices. We saw a large bunch of (mostly) happy school children and their teachers taken for a walk from the Naro Moru gate until the Met Station and back. One hopes that more local naturalists, educators and conservationists prevail.

Some months earlier I had plowed through a machine translation of a German biography of Bernhard Grzimek (and obviously, tried to improve the English Wikipedia entry) - and the overall story was rather sad. When I was a kid in the late 1970s, my father used to bring home issues of the beautifully illustrated Tier Magazin, a German predecessor of the BBC Wildlife Magazine that the Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore used to receive. It was one of the popular creations of Grzimek (sadly there seem to be no digital archives of this amazing work) and when I went to university, I found his Animal Encyclopedia a fascinating work. By some oversight I only noticed much later that the venue of Wikimania was right across the road from a school named after Michael Grzimek. One presumes that a large donation was made by BG to them. The Grzimek biography ends with the highly questionable and unusually large amount of wealth that he had accumulated through his life and the family squabbles and tragedies that had followed after his death. 

Nyeri was a welcome escape from Nairobi and a visit to the Baden Powell memorial, although not a fan of the man, revealed a somewhat unexpected surprise. I am sure it was well known but I had missed it in my research and the grave of Jim Corbett cropped up rather unexpectedly. I knew that Corbett moved to Africa after Indian Independence and had known of his exploits in the nearby Aberdare range which resulted in his last book "Treetops" and his rather famous quip on the freshly minted Queen Elizabeth. Interestingly the Bible quote used on the memorial is exactly the same one used on his mother's grave in Nainital (photo - remembering a very rainy monsoon day in Nainital) - presumably chosen by his sister Maggie.  

Nearby was another large grave - that of Gray Leakey - a cousin of Louis Leakey. The horrific story behind it was known to the local guide but was new to me - and so, naturally, I later created a Wikipedia entry at Gray Leakey. Overall, it seems that the Mau-mau uprising needs a complete retelling in a post-colonial analysis and voice. There is a rather under-appreciated museum at Nyeri that looks at local history and the independence movement. We visited the General Karibu caves area and the surrounding countryside, filled with streams fed by the glaciers on Mount Kenya - the real reason for Nyeri's agricultural wealth and much of the colonial settlement.

The Aberdare National Park is an incredibly large reserve and is undoubtedly the place for any naturalist to visit. Somehow the idea of a mountain range in Africa came as a surprise to me. Whereas roads in Indian hill regions tend to become highly twisted their the obligatory hair-pin bends, the roads in the Aberdares are surrounding regions are laid remarkably straight and as one moves from here to the rift valley, the changes in altitude are so gradual. We entered the Aberdares from the Treetops gate - named after an establishment that was patronised by Corbett. The moment one enters at dawn, one is entertained with the amazing sounds of the African forest - the almost electronic-sounding duet call of a boubou combined with numerous Apalis, Tauraco, Cisticola and other unidentified species. The tops of the Aberdares have shola-like grasslands, termed there as moorlands. Along the way one encounters thick Hagenia (a rather delicate Rosaceae with almost herbaceous looking leaflets) and Podocarpus forests, followed by tall bamboo forest. We saw an elephant on a faraway hill, a cape buffalo, and a large pig which turned out to be "Meinertzhagen's" Giant Forest Hog Hylochoerus meinertzhageni! Jackson's spurfowls were the tamest and most conspicuous roadside birds (remarkable how understudied they are in the ornithological literature). We only managed to reach as far as Chania falls before we reached the 2 pm turn-around point and the route was just stunning! I dream of a day when I will be able to make another trip with someone who knows the region, its fauna and flora, better.

Helichrysum on Aberdare's moorlands

Heath, Hagenia, Sambucus, Podocarpus etc. beside the Chania stream

 

Moss draping the Podocarpus, 
parts of the Aberdare are watered by condensation

 

Helichrysum in the foreground, a Kniphofia just visible

The most coveted visit was to the Afroalpine zone on Mount Kenya. The road from Naro Moru to the Met Station which lies on the slopes of the extinct volcano of Mount Kenya was another of those straight mountain roads - getting from 1500 m to 3050 m on a straight line (with a leopard welcoming us!).  We walked from the Naro Moru Met Station up above the tree line to see the incredible flora. Giant Lobelia and Dendrosenecio appear after a region of heath. The ground is boggy and covered in strong tussocks of grass. We were not equipped with waterproof shoes and we started a bit too late as well. The weather on the mountain is constantly changing, sun, wind, cloud, mist and all of a sudden a shower of hailstones. Lobelia gregoriana which forms beautiful rosettes holds a little bit of fluid at the centre which is apparently a frost protection adaptation. The polysaccharides produced by the plant cause ice to form at the top of the water pond which insulates the central growing tip from freeze injury. I wondered if a similar adaptation exists in the Hedyotis verticillaris of the Mukurthi region. I showed a picture of the landscape to botanist Navendu Page and he exclaimed that it was "a different planet" ... it is. We did not go into Teleki valley or see the nival zone and sadly, the glaciers on Mount Kenya appear to be doomed. The glaciers looked from the plains like flecks of white which led to the Kikuyu name of Kere-Nyaga which according to one etymology theory is related to the white feathers on an ostrich. The Kamba people called it Kima ya Kegnia, others called it Ndur (Kimaja) Kegnia and Kirenia. Somehow that gave rise to the word "Kenya."  One bleak prediction on the glaciers is that they will all be gone by 2030. With it, nobody quite knows what will happen to the streams that they fed, the lands that they watered, the people involved in farming, the vegetation and wildlife.

Heath just above the tree line

The rosette of Lobelia gregoriana with the pond

Lobelia gregoriana flowering

Dendrosenecio keniensis in flower

Dendrosenecio keniodendron in the background

Looking up the slope of the so-called "vertical bog"

A final goodbye to Mount Kenya

It is easy to see the effect the mountain had on the surround people and the ritual significance that many tribes gave to it. 

We returned to Nairobi with a stopover at a typical tourist trap - Thompsons Falls. And another stopover at Lake Naivasha. We had enchanting views of Mount Longonot from the escarpment in the evening. Obviously we had just scraped the surface.

Kenya is a beautiful country for the most part but like any place there are troubles hidden underneath. There is clearly a vast wealth gap and the city of Nairobi is a cruel one with the usual signs of urban poverty. The lack of government spending on social infrastructure like public transport is glaring. The villages and smaller towns were much more cheerful looking. The Kenyan public education system has clearly delivered in the past. There were a few unfortunate sights like police collecting bribes from vehicles passing by and there were big protests that the government had suppressed with force. Hopefully, good people will prevail and make it a better place for all, in spite of the long and deep divides of tribes, linguistics, and circumstance. 

I greatly missed my good old Lumix FZ100 which was the ideal travel camera which dealt with both macro and distant objects. Bridge cameras have unfortunately become unavailable or too expensive. I only had my mobile phone and my new Olympus OM-D EM10 but setup mostly for macro photography for which I did not have enough time. But more images can be found on iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons - all of course on free licenses - a gallery can be found here. 

Thanks to numerous people and circumstances that made this trip possible.

Wikimedia Foundation for supporting my attendance at Wikimania Nairobi. Harish Thyagarajan for assistance with Kenya logistics and most importantly reassurance. Sugandhi for putting me in touch with Harish! Peter, our enlightened driver and local assistance - we will remember the Swahili wisdom - “Kupotea njia ndio kujua njia” [= to be lost is the way to find the way]. Martina Tichácková on iNaturalist for the alpine plant identifications. The wonderful welcoming people we met along the way, KWS guide Alex, the KWS staff at various gates. The friendly host at a tiny little restaurant in Naro Moru who found Indian snacks too spicy. Manoj for the great company!