A Day at Hell’s Gate

For one of my last weekends in Nairobi, I decided to visit Hell’s Gate. I booked a spot on a joint tour with a pick-up at seven in the morning, which I made with a delay of a minute or two because the guard at my compound had hidden the keys to the gate in a new spot. The drive from Nairobi to the park took about two hours. On the way, we made a quick stop at a lookout over the Great Rift Valley, which I had never seen with such good visibility: I could even recognise the ridges of Mount Longonot. We also managed to squeeze in a quick stop to place an order for our lunch and another to test out our bikes.

The gate to Hell’s Gate had just seen its first few baboons of the day, and by the time we returned from our excursion, the troop had completely overtaken the place: under the watchful gaze of the alpha male, the mothers wove their way among the parked cars carrying their children on their backs like hairy little jockeys. They reminded me of tales I had read that are told by some tribes in South Africa, which hold that witches like to ride baboons backwards.

Our driver handed us over to a guide, who led us on our cycling journey to the gorge. We stopped a few times on the way, first by Fischer’s Tower, a granite cliff that rises abruptly opposite to a larger contiguous massif. The pillar is popular with rock climbers, whose snacks have succeeded in habituating the local hyrax population to the presence of humans. As soon as we arrived, one curious hyrax came out of the bushes to take a better look at us and waited for quite a while before he concluded we had brought him no food.

We made another stop across from the face of the cliff, where our guide gave us a demonstration of its echoes. He explained that because the rock is not porous, all sound bounces straight off the flat wall. Our other stops were dedicated to animals. We saw a few zebras and gazelles as well as a herd of common eland, and a giraffe and her calf crossed our path to join the rest of their family (I am told a herd of giraffes is called a tower, but I find this expression – and anyone’s insistence upon using it – obnoxious). There are reportedly no lions in Hell’s Gate, but my boss told me that they do sometimes migrate through the area, and she once encountered one there. The guide furnished us with his own story about running a flat tyre and meeting a leopard at dusk.

In stark contrast to the grassy plains below the cliffs, the gorge in Hell’s Gate cuts through a green forest filled with birds and monkeys. We left our bikes near the tourist amenities and climbed down the stairs into the gorge, the bottom of which was wetted by a nail-deep stream. As we carefully walked along this shallow current, stepping into the water when we had to, the guide told us how in rainy season, the gorge fills up with water and is off limits to tourists. A few years ago, several tourists died in a flash flood in one section of the canyon, and it has been closed to all visitors ever since. Apparently, the gorge was a major inspiration to the animators of the Lion King, who turned it into the home of the film’s evil hyenas and based the rock that Mufasa fell from on its promontory. The guide told us that the wall of echoes featured in the film too, but I don’t recall ever having seen it in its entirety.

The bike ride back to the gate was much more strenuous than the ride to the gorge. The sun was now blazing and the path, which had seemed flat on our way down, revealed its incline on the way back up. Not far from the gate, my companion gave up, and I soon saw my guide pulling up by my side pushing an empty bike as he rode his. The other tourist got a lift from a passing car.