Inglis in Africa: Ngorogoro Crater, Roses and Ice-Cream

Sheep at sunset

Kitengela Glass African Map

The fluffy white cloud cascading over the crater rim above us provides a magical frame for our early morning game drive in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. We have dropped a few hundred metres from our chilly crater rim campsite and in the evolving dawn have descended into this extraordinary spectacle. At 19.2 km in diameter, 610m deep and 304 sq km in area it is the largest unflooded and unbroken caldera in the world. It is said to support a resident wildlife population of up to 25 000 animals and as the warm African sun pours forth her golden rays we are welcomed by huge herds of zebra and wildebeest. Our early start has been worthwhile and we arrive before the constant procession of commercial tour trucks and for a couple of hours enjoy this paradise in relative isolation. A lone cheetah on the prowl, an ancient tuskless elephant, belligerent buffalo and lethargic lions keep us occupied during the dawn until we find a peaceful little lake for breakfast where pods of hippo wallow and inquisitive guineafowl peer at our cornflakes. By now the commercial operators have arrived and a mammoth procession of brown or green Landcruisers stop and spew forth their cargo of khaki clad clients, lipsticked and lensed to the max. We are surprised to find that we are the only independent visitors to the park and attract inquisitive stares and questions from amicable Americans…”Say, is that really your own car….you don’t have to have a guide?.....did you really drive all the way from South Africa?” The decision to come into the crater was not easy; at US$420 (R3000) for 24 hours it has been a massive blow to our budget and of dubious value. The campsite is $5 basic where we tussle with cold showers and leaking pipes and a cooking area swamped by commercial operators and their punters. Our other option would have been to take a 3-day commercial trip to the crater and Serengeti, but that would have set us back about US$1500 all up! Such is the scene here now and although I am glad we have had the privilege of experiencing this I wonder whether the intimacy and price of our KZN parks is more appealing.

Back in Kenya a lucky break gets us a visit to one of the massive flower farms providing flowers to the world. Margot’s diary provides a good report.

“Last Friday we visited a flower company near Lake Naivasha called Oserian Flowers. Kenya is famous for its green houses and at Oserian they use them too.. A friendly man called Roddy Benjamin took us for a visit of the factory. Roddy is the man in charge of the rose department. Oserian is a big flower company that exports their flowers to Europe, USA and even Australia! Roddy first took us to see the packaging and storing place. “After the roses have been picked”, he explained “we store them in a fridge at 4 degrees centigrade to keep the roses from opening.” We went into the fridge and it was freezing cold! “The farm was established in 1974”, he shouted over the buzzing noise of the generators, “So it is quite new!” “Clank” the door of the fridge slammed shut behind us. We went up some stairs into the store room. We all had to put on some colourful pink coats. Then we went down to the place where they package the roses. “We have about 4.5 thousand workers at Oserian and 600 acres of land which makes us the biggest single standing flower farm in the world.” I was trying to get all that he said down on paper but didn’t get everything. These are some of the facts I got;
Oserain farmers harvest the good roses twice a day
The green houses are 4 acres in size
Most of the workers work 7and half hours per day
They pick about 1million stems per day
The factory sells the roses to supermarkets for about 10 eurocents per rose or 1 Euro for 10 roses, but the supermarkets sell them for 40-45% mark-up.
The roses have four days between Oserian and their destination and have one week shelf-life in the supermarket.
After that we went to see the baby roses growing. They use 70% hydroponics to grow the roses in pumice which they mine on site. Oserian’s carbon footprint is 12% that of Holland flower producers. I loved the smell of the purple roses because they smelt like Turkish Delight. The thing that amazed me at Oserian is that they use tinsy-winsy spiders that eat the bad bugs on the roses!”

The next day we climb extinct volcano Mt Longonot with stunning views of the Rift Valley and Lake Naivasha. At over 2500m elevation, the 500m climb to the summit is hard work but we revel at the exertion and the girls don’t even bat an eyelid at our suggestion to circumnavigate the crater which takes a further 3 hours! The crater floor has thick bush and we see a few Zebra and bush buck. Sadly the path is badly littered and heavily eroded and I think that these Kenyans need a couple of New Zealand rangers over here to show them how to look after a national park!

In Nairobi we are spoilt again this time by Sylvia Cassini. Sylvia lives in a beautiful 1930’s Cotswold stone house in Embassy-chic Nairobi. We met her and her two young children on Safari in Botswana and she had invited us to stay. She is of Italian descent, Kenyan born and bred and Oxford alumni and has worked at everything from furniture design to cartography to project management. She calls a spade a spade! We feast on her delicious Italian cooking and with rare tender fillet washed down with a chilled Sauvignon, we are in heaven! We use the time to restock, do some school and even wander the shops where we treat ourselves to Italian ice-cream. I get the Pathfinder serviced and discover that I didn’t really need to cart all the spares up from RSA, they have them here, and the Nissan dealer makes ours in PMB look like a baby! The price is steep but then I figure I’m paying for reassurance too! The drive home in Nairobi rush hour traffic turns my beard grey. Gridlock by mini-bus is a scary concept and how I get home unscathed I’m not sure but breathe deep sighs of relief. Thank God for Garmin and “Tracks for Africa”. We take the girls to the David Sheldrick elephant orphanage and are entertained by habituated little ellies that are bottle fed specific soya milk formula and have carers that live with them 24/7, even sleeping on a bunk in their stables! Maxwell is the blind habituated Black rhino who has also been hand reared after his mother abandoned him. The hope is to reintroduce most of these animals back into the wild.

From there we drive on a rough road to Kitengela glass where we see how glass is blown and marvel at the red hot furnaces fuelled by recycled engine oil and melting recycled bottles. The place is eccentric and quirky with all manner of colourful glass creations and contraptions scattered about and we are fascinated by the ‘inventor-artist’ Toombe as he tinkers with an old wooden briefcase that is being converted, with a myriad of recycled gadgets, into a magical case with a secret opener known only to the owner!

It takes us two hours to escape Nairobi and we make a mental note to return only when the Chinese roadworks are completed. The ‘ring-road’ is no more than a congested parking lot. The Tanzanian frontier beckons and we are welcomed by views of Africa’s highest mountain, Mt Kilimanjaro.