The Jade Sea: A Journey to Lake Turkana
You do not stumble upon Lake Turkana. You commit to it. The journey north from Nairobi takes two hard days of driving across some of the most punishing and least-visited terrain in Kenya, and by the time the lake finally appears - an impossible band of jade-green water stretched across a black volcanic desert - you have earned the sight of it in a way that no airstrip arrival could ever match.
Lake Turkana is the largest desert lake in the world and the largest alkaline lake on earth. It sits in the far north of Kenya, running up to the Ethiopian border, surrounded by lava fields, wind, and almost nothing else. Its water carries a mineral tint that shifts through the day from grey to blue to the extraordinary luminous green that earned it the name the Jade Sea.
This is the cradle of mankind, and I do not use the phrase loosely. The eastern shore of Turkana is where Richard and Meave Leakey's teams unearthed some of the most important hominin fossils ever found. The Koobi Fora region has yielded fossils spanning millions of years of human evolution, and UNESCO lists Lake Turkana's national parks as a World Heritage Site partly for this reason. Standing on that shore, you are standing in the landscape where our species, in some deep sense, began.
The drive itself is the adventure. We travelled through the lands of the Samburu, then the Rendille, then finally the Turkana people themselves - pastoralist cultures living much as they have for centuries, herding camels and goats across a landscape that looks actively hostile to life. In the small settlement of Loiyangalani on the lake's southeastern shore, I watched Turkana women in elaborate stacked bead collars draw water, and El Molo fishermen - one of the smallest ethnic groups in Kenya, numbering only a few hundred - set out onto the lake in the early light.
The wind at Turkana is a constant, physical presence. It blows almost without pause, driving waves across the lake that make it feel far more like a sea than a lake, and stripping the volcanic shore of anything loose. Central Island, a volcanic cone rising from the middle of the lake, hosts one of the largest Nile crocodile populations in Africa, breeding on beaches that almost no human ever disturbs.
There is a temptation to describe Turkana as bleak, and in a conventional sense it is. But the longer I stayed, the more that word felt wrong. It is not bleak. It is elemental - a place stripped down to water, rock, wind, and the oldest human story there is. National Geographic has run expeditions here for decades precisely because it remains one of the last genuinely remote places on the continent.
One evening I sat on the black lava shore as the sun dropped and the jade water turned briefly to hammered copper. A Turkana elder sat nearby, saying nothing, watching the same water his ancestors had watched for longer than any of us can properly comprehend. I have thought about that silence more than almost anything else from my years in Kenya.
Turkana is not a destination. It is a pilgrimage. Go only if you are willing to be uncomfortable, to drive for days, to arrive somewhere that owes you nothing. What it gives back, if you let it, is a sense of scale - in time and in space - that nowhere else in Kenya can match.
