Championing Lake Natron and surrounds as the perfect mid-journey dose of culture and landscape, exploration specialists, Mij and Squack Evans, take Dave Waddell on a tour of an area long dear to their hearts; a place where nothing is laid on the proverbial plate, and where everything, therefore, requires that the visitor actively engages in the experience. The rewards for doing so are something else.
Lake Natron and surrounds – when and why did you first go to the area?
Squack: When we talk about Lake Natron, we often describe it as a cross-border experience, so both Kenya and Tanzania. Our first experience of the area would most certainly have been Kenya’s Lake Magadi, which lies to the north of Lake Natron, and is a 2.5-hour drive out of Nairobi, meaning it’s close enough to visit in a day.
Mij: We always went there on school trips. It’s one of those funny places that has remained really quite untouched in many ways. As a child, I went there because it was close and accessible. There’s not that much that has changed over the years.
Squack: That’s the interesting paradox about the place. Lake Magadi is also home – and has been for as long as I remember – to a massive soda factory, which converts the lake’s trona [a sodium carbonate compound] into soda ash. Soda ash is used in a ton of things, including glass manufacturing, detergents, cosmetics, metallurgy, you name it. Despite this, and a railway and tarmac road, hardly anyone goes down there.
I think I visited – the area, not the factory – as a kid. I remember it being extraordinarily beautiful.
Squack: Once you get away from that core area around the factory, it’s always been an incredibly wild and remote and tucked away place. Then, with the advent of places like Shompole Lodge, it was also suddenly much more on the radar for people to go and visit, but always in small numbers: the lodge was very high-end, very luxurious, a very fancy place. It’s always been more about the place, the landscape, the views, and the local Maasai, of course, than it is about the wildlife.
Mij: The Maasai culture here has not been exposed to mass tourism, which means any visitors that do make it down here have a very genuine cultural experience. It’s low-key, not at all put on or rehearsed. If you happen to visit, you are invited into lives just as they are lived. We are guests, the Maasai our hosts, and despite all the cultural differences, there is so much overlap, something the kids discover quite naturally, and often way ahead of us adults.
Squack: In conjunction with that, you get these otherworldly landscapes with these soda lakes, and the huge Rift Valley walls. This is physical geography 101, the stuff you learn at school, but hardly ever get the opportunity to experience. These amazing formations are right there in front of you, and you can almost imagine the Rift Valley peeling apart, the lake appearing, and its water slowly evaporating away.
This is not the Mara or the Okavango Delta, but the wildlife remains a key attraction.
Mij: It’s definitely not the Maasai Mara. There are not masses of visible wildlife. However, there are elephant and buffalo, lion and leopard and everything else. The wildlife does not attract people ad nauseam, but taken as a whole, the Natron area is this incredible place, and the beauty of it is that hardly anybody else goes there.
Squack: And when you go across the border onto the Tanzanian side, it’s even more remote and even fewer people, largely because a lot of the areas around Lake Natron are actually hunting blocks, meaning they’ve been traditionally set aside for hunting, which is why you’ll hardly ever see another visitor there. There’s Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active volcano, the only natrocarbonatite volcano on Earth, its magma and lava flows the coldest in the world – about half the temperature of igneous rock volcanoes.
Mij: You could hike up Ol Doinyo Lengai, or just go walking in one of the dry sand riverbeds. There is a hill with ancient burial sites on top, and from up there you get a great view of Mount Kilimanjaro on a clear day. And then there’s Lake Natron’s itself, which is the world’s most single most important breeding area for Lesser flamingos, and largely because it so remote and so inhospitable – the alkalinity of the lake has a PH scale that can reach as high as 10.5 to 12, its temperature anything up to 60°C, and so very little flora and fauna thrive here, the Lesser flamingos a notable exception. This is most definitely not a swimming lake.
You’ve both spoken previously about the area’s Kenya-based accommodation and activities. What about what’s on offer around Lake Natron in Tanzania?
Squack: There are a couple of very high-end properties around the lake, not so much on a Great Plains level of wonderful fanciness, but high-end in respect that you’re paying for their sheer authenticity (there’s no better word for it) and for the exclusivity they offer. If you’re somewhere like Orekeju Camp, you’ve got the camp to yourself and more than likely the entire concession, and you have the freedom to walk where you like and fly camp wherever and whenever you want. This is an amazing landscape. There’s this amazing sense of wilderness when in it. There’s really no one else there.
Mij: Except, of course, you’re sharing the space with a community of Maasai. It is an opportunity to share the experience with people who live more or less as they have for the past 100 to 200 years. Obviously, there is change and modernity has made its way here too, but everything about being here gives you a sense that you are in a place operating much as it might have done a century or more ago.
How does the destination fit into the wider (itinerary) scheme of things?
Squack: Generally speaking, I often combine this particular area with more typically classic destinations. In Kenya, that might mean combining it with Maasai Mara and Laikipia; in Tanzania, with Tarangire and the Serengeti. Usually, it works well in the middle of the trip, after a big dose of wildlife, before decompressing on the coast. It gives you a big dose of culture and an equally big dose of landscape. Plus, you go wherever you like, however you like, which you can’t do in a national park, particularly in Tanzania, where you are quite constrained as to what you can and can’t do.
Mij: Lake Natron is where you get out of the car, walk, go off-road, and give the children a lot more freedom. In my experience of taking our two boys, both reasonably young, the opportunity to engage in different forms of bushcraft is just the ticket. One of the things they both fondly remember was learning how to use fire to straighten and make walking sticks at Orekeju. This is the active part of going on safari, which is not to say that being in a vehicle isn’t fun, but rather that being able to do everything, to view animals on wildlife drives and to make your own walking sticks, is what rounds out the experience, especially for kids.
Squack: And then the other thing I would strongly recommend, and which you can combine on both sides of the border, is using this part of any itinerary to take a helicopter trip. Seeing everything we’ve been talking about from the air is a very, very different experience. The lake and surrounding landscapes are so uniquely beautiful. On the Tanzanian side, you can use the helicopter to get up onto the top of Ol Doinyo itself, and you can potentially even do stuff on the edge of the Ngorongoro Highlands as well. On the Kenyan side, there’s the northern tip of Lake Natron, but also, as mentioned, Lake Magadi too. Taking a heli means you get to see the flamingos, though always from a height that doesn’t disturb or disrupt their breeding – they don’t breed every year, which makes the whole breeding enterprise quite a fragile thing.
Mij: We ought to mention the three presently open properties on the Kenyan side. There’s Ndoto House and its sister camp, Lentorre Lodge, which is on the conservancy next door, and then there’s Shompole Wilderness Camp. Ndoto we’ve already spoken about at length, so I won’t say too much about that. Lentorre is also very comfortable and probably a better fit for young children. Shompole Wilderness, meanwhile, is a simpler (though still lovely) tented camp. Then there are plans for reopening Shompole Lodge as part of Great Plains’s Kenya portfolio.
Squack: All three of the open camps have excellent wildlife hides overlooking permanent water holes. The drier it gets, the more incredible the viewing experience, with the likes of striped hyena (which people hardly ever see), porcupine, caracal, serval, lion, leopard, elephant, giraffe, and lots of zebra and wildebeest. The animals get used to the lights at night, which makes for the most extraordinary night photography, the light bouncing off the surface of the black water, making for these beautiful, crisp images. It’s another side to wildlife viewing, where you may have spent the day walking around the north-western tip of the lake, and then overnight in a hide, which has beds, and where guests are periodically woken up when things get active.
If your interest is piqued by Mij and Squack please do get in touch so we can arrange a call for you to talk with them about signing a safari that brings in these lesser known gems