Everything has an end

Our final look at Lake Paradise. Photos by Chris Fletcher.

When I got up, Eddie and Kurani were already breaking camp. It was very sad to sit around the smoldering campfire knowing this was our last morning at Lake Paradise.

While Julius was making a final breakfast, cooking up the last of the sausages and bacon, we all packed. Even while I was stuffing clothes in my duffel bag on my cot, Kurani was pulling up the tent stakes. By the time I was done, the tent, which had felt like home, was sagging around my head.

The plan was for Calvin to drive us into Marsabit where a small plane from Tropic Air would, we hope, be waiting for us, and then the four of us—Hardy, Fletch, Pedro and myself—would fly to Samburu where Pete and I would get off and spend some time at the Elephant Watch Camp and Hardy and Fletch would continue on to Nairobi. Calvin and his crew would then drive the two vehicles down to Elephant Watch Camp and join us for an evening before continuing on.

We headed out of camp with the dew still bright on the grasses and the sun having just risen over the rim of the crater. The woods were alive with baboons and birds and all the little dudus that hum and whir in the first heat of day. Clouds of waterfowl were coming in from their evening roosts in the trees and guinea fowl ran across the road in front of us, cackling in their indignity of our disturbing their pecking of insects in the short grass over the road.

Me in front of our plane at the Marsabit airport.

It was just a gorgeous morning;  so gorgeous my heart felt heavy and I could hardly breath. Once we were off the mountain, Calvin was in a hurry to get us to the Marsabit airstrip. He’d coordinated the time of our arrival with Tropic Air and his thought was that he wanted to be pulling up with us two or three minutes after the plane had landed. He didn’t like the idea of us or the pilot having to wait around. As I’ve said before, this is a very troubled area what with the shiftas and all and there’s no need to invite trouble. When we got to the airstrip the little 6-passenger Cessna was waiting for us. The wind was blowing sharply and it was cold enough that all of us were wearing jackets. We quickly loaded our gear and took off, waving at Calvin.

I was in the co-pilot seat and Pedro was in the back where he could lower one of the rear windows and stick his head out to do some aerial photography. He asked the pilot to fly north over Lake Paradise. The wind was blowing so hard that the pilot was nervous about slowing the plane too much, afraid it might stall, but he dipped his wing and we came in low over the extinct crater, low enough so that we could see the elephants drinking from the shallow pools one last time. We circled all the way round the caldera, slowly, slowly, with Pete hanging out the window and the rest of us with our faces pressed against the glass trying to get one last view. And then the pilot straightened out the plane and turned it south, towards Samburu and Lake Paradise was behind us.

In December of 1926, Osa and Martin Johnson closed down their camp at Lake Paradise and began the long journey home over the Kaisut Desert. They went first to Nairobi and Mombasa before sailing to London and New York where they began working on their film together and arranging a world lecture tour. But they never forgot about Lake Paradise.

Martin Johnson wrote, “I have been home just four months, and as soon as I can, I am going back. I know exactly the spot I will make for. It lies away out in the blue, a good thousand-mile trek from Nairobi, in British East Africa. It is Paradise, literally as well as figuratively, and if it were charted it would appear on the maps as Lake Paradise. And I know of no place in the world that better deserves the name.”

The Maasai have a saying: Epwo m-baa poking in-gitin’got, which means basically “Everything has an end.” Martin Johnson never made it back to Lake Paradise. He died in a plane crash on January 12, 1937.