Crater Lake Travel Guide

The Crater Lake reserve extends beyond the immediate crater and reaches down to the shores of Lake Naivasha beyond. Naivasha is a comparatively deep freshwater lake and is a very different ecosystem to the shallow soda lake in the crater itself, so it's nice to have two such contrasting environments so close to one another.

If you're feeling energetic, it's well worth asking your guide to incorporate a wander down to the Lake Naivasha shore into your morning game walk. We were able to get within about 10m of a pod of hippos who were squabbling loudly - there was much indignant grunting and displaying of large peglike teeth in cavernous mouths, so I'm guessing that it had something to do with establishing dominance within the group.

However much you might want the ultimate close up hippo shot, it's best to keep a sensible distance - hippos may look fairly docile, but they kill more people in Africa each year than any other animal (with the obvious exception of malarial mosquitoes)!

Flamingoes are migratory birds, and tend to move between the chain of lakes in the Rift Valley region.

In contrast to the millions (and I mean that quite literally) of flamingoes that we saw at Lake Bogoria, there were only a few at Crater Lake when we stayed there. However, they were particularly interesting, as they are relatively habituated to humans, and so will allow you to get relatively close (whereas the Bogoria birds get very unsettled once you start to approach).

The picture shows a greater flamingo (walking in front) and a lesser flamingo. As you'd expect, the greater flamingo is larger, and has paler pink plumage with a neutral coloured eye. By contrast, the less flamingo is smaller and more intensely pink, with an unnerving red eye that looks more than a little satanic.

They happily hang around in the shallow water fringing the soda lake that has established in the crater, trawling for small crustaceans with their outlandish beaks. You can't help but fall in love with their endearing mix of elegance and gawkiness, and, for me at least, are the iconic animal of the Rift Valley.

I may have left my geological roots way behind me, but I confess to having a long standing fascination with obsidian.

Well, to start with, 'obsidian' is just such a splendid word! I had always thought that it would make an ideal name for a heavy metal band, and indeed, a quick Google confirmed that a death metal outfit from Holland has been thinking along similar lines!

So, what is obsidian? Well, in simple terms, it's a volcanic glass that is associated with silica-rich magmas - these give rise to volcanoes that tend to blow their tops catastrophically rather than oozing lava placidly to surface. Obsidian is formed when the magma is rapidly forced to surface and cools so quickly that there is no time for crystals to grow, thus creating an amorphous (ie, non-crystalline) solid. Usually obsidian is dark, with its exact colour being dictated by the chemical impurities in the silica: in the Rift Valley, it is so dark a green as to be almost black.

Because obsidian lacks an internal crystalline structure, it is possible to flake it to create edges of extreme thinness. This property was used by Stone Age man to fashion tools such as cutting implements and arrow heads, and I was amazed to discover the obsidian is still used today for surgical scalpels. As you walk around Crater Lake, you can find partially completed arrow heads, which provides a spine tingling link back to the times of our earliest ancestors who originated in the Rift Valley.

Wherever you go at Crater Lake, you'll stumble across obsidian, from tiny sparkly black specks in the sand to enormous great boulders, such as the one shown in the bottom left corner of the photo: the larger pieces are distinctive because of their strange, almost 'plasticky' surface and conchoidal (curved) fracture. In this case, the obsidian appears to have been a volcanic 'bomb' ejected from the volcano, which became buried in layers of ash - this lump is about the size of a football and indicates the force with which it would have been hurled out over the landscape!

My only regret about obsidian in the Rift Valley is that I didn't see a single curio made of this splendid stuff. With its unique colour, texture and feel and local provenance, it is just crying out to be crafted into jewellery, or indeed, anything that would usually be made out of glass. Yet curio sellers persist in hawking the usual same-ish range of frankly dull crafts (and, in my opinion, most Kenyan crafts are very underwhelming compared to those on offer elsewhere in Africa): surely this is a obvious gap in the market for some entrepreneur to exploit???

To experience the Crater Lake reserve at it's absolute best, you really have to get out and walk - indeed, the opportunity to do so was what attracted us here in the first place. A game ranger is assigned to you for the duration of your stay, and will be happy to guide you around the reserve on foot, and although he will select the walk depending on the athleticism of the group, you really need to be of moderate fitness to make the most of this. For example, probably because we were particularly keen, the morning walk that we did lasted four hours, during which time we probably covered 10-12km

The terrain is pretty rugged, especially if you are going to hike up onto the crater rim (and you'd be mad if you didn't) and some scrambling is required on certain sections. I would therefore recommend that you bring some sturdy footwear with you - hiking boots are ideal, but training shoes would be fine as well - don't even attempt it in flipflops!

For fear of stating the obvious, the usual hiking rules apply. Kenya straddles the equator, and even down in the Rift Valley, you may be at higher altitude than you're used to, so take it easy to avoid exhaustion, cover up with a hat and long sleeves and use sunscreen on exposed skin to avoid sunburn and bring lots of water to drink.

One of the many wonderful aspects of clambering along the crater rim is the unexpected bird's eye perspective that it affords you of the wildlife below!

This photo was taken in the early morning as a family of giraffe were drinking at a small waterhole. Although we've been lucky enough to see a lot of giraffe in our time in a lot of places, we have almost always been 'looking up' to them, so it was quite a novelty to look down on them for a change (in my case, as I'm a short person, looking down on anything is a particular buzz, especially if it's as tall as a giraffe!).

Also once you're on the crater rim, the animals are unaware of your presence as your scent and any noise that you make (within reason) travels upwards rather than downwards. This allows you to observe their interaction under undisturbed conditions, and we were quite enchanted to spend a few minutes watching the way that the dynamics within this particular family group played out.

If you're someone who's previously done safaris elsewhere in Africa, one of the differences that you'll immediately notice in Kenya is that humans and their livestock are allowed to enter national parks and reserve areas. This is in stark contrast to Southern Africa, where such designated areas are reserved for wildlife and human access (other for tourism and wildlife management purposes) is prohibited.

Kenya's approach to encourage the coexistence of traditional landowners and wildlife is based on the recognition that the Maasai people are a pastoral society and need access to the land for subsistence purposes. However, this raises a range of challenges for park management, of which the most obvious is competition for scarce resources, particularly in times of drought. At the time of writing for instance (2011), there is apparently fierce competition for grazing between wildlife and domestic livestock in Masai Mara after several years of below average rain. The control of disease (such as bovine TB, which can be transmitted between domestic cattle and certain wild herbivores) is also an issue where the two groups of animals are able to mix freely.

However, perhaps the most thorny issue to manage when people are allowed free access to wildlife reserves is the control of poaching, which remains an enormous challenge to Kenya Wildlife Services.

Whatever your moral or conservation stance on this issue, it is quite an eyeopener to see people wandering through reserves, especially when you yourself have been warned to stay in the vehicle for fear of predators!