Cycling Through Hell's Gate
The name Hell's Gate sounds like something a slightly overdramatic map-maker came up with after a bad day, but once you are standing inside the gorge - red cliff faces rising sixty metres on either side, the smell of sulphur rising from geothermal vents in the rock floor - it all starts to make a kind of geological sense. This is a place where the earth is still working out what it wants to do.
Hell's Gate National Park sits about ninety kilometres northwest of Nairobi in the Rift Valley near Lake Naivasha. It is one of the only parks in Kenya where you are allowed to get out of your vehicle and move through the landscape on foot or bicycle. The option of cycling through a national park in East Africa, surrounded by actual wildlife, struck me as so genuinely unusual that I felt obligated to try it.
By seven in the morning I had rented a bicycle from the gate - a solid, basic mountain bike that had seen better decades - and set off down the main track. Within ten minutes, I was sharing the track with zebra. Not in the way you share a track with zebra when you are in a vehicle, at a distance, observed - but genuinely sharing it, the way you share a road with other commuters. A small herd of maybe fifteen zebra were using the same path I was, and for a few minutes I cycled alongside them, keeping pace, close enough to see the texture of their stripes.
I saw a large herd of buffalo at a waterhole and stopped about thirty metres away to watch them. On a bicycle, thirty metres from a buffalo is a live calculation. Cape buffalo are considered one of the most dangerous animals in Africa - not because they are aggressive by nature, but because they are unpredictable when startled. I gave them a respectful berth.
The gorge walk requires leaving the bicycle behind. I locked mine to a fence post and walked down into the gorge on foot, following my guide Kipchoge, who knew every narrowing and pool and hot spring by name. The walk takes you through a progressively narrowing canyon, the walls closing to in places barely a body-width wide, the rock worn smooth and sculpted by water into organic, almost hypnotic curves.
At the bottom of the gorge, natural hot springs bubble up from the rock. Kenya sits atop one of the most geothermally active zones on earth - the Olkaria geothermal plant adjacent to the park generates a significant portion of Kenya's electricity from the same underground heat that makes the gorge floor warm underfoot.
Kipchoge showed me where klipspringers - small, impossibly neat antelope designed specifically for vertical terrain - watched us from a ledge twenty metres above. Klipspringers have rubberised hooves that allow them to stand on rock faces the width of a coin. I spent ten minutes watching them and trying to understand the physics of it. I still cannot.
Hell's Gate is not the drama of the Mara or the scale of Tsavo. It is something more personal and more active - a park where you are required to use your body, to move through the landscape rather than view it from inside a sealed environment. Hire the bicycle. Walk the gorge. Trust the klipspringers.
