Lake Jipe: Trip II

A small inlet for the local fishermen to access the lake

We had gone to Lake Jipe once before (Trip I) and we've always talked about it having great potential for 'bush camping' but for whatever reason we haven't returned in nearly nine months. We decided to try to return and scout a few things. First, since the lake is surrounded by high reeds that prevent you from actually seeing the lake, we wanted to see if we could find an entry point and get an idea on how much it would cost to go out with one of the fishermen. Next, we wanted to scout the area for bush camping, basically, a place with nothing and no one around. And third, we wanted to get a realistic idea of how long it would take us to reach there, since when we bird we often move at a very slow pace. In the end, we only go the answer to one of these questions!

We left Moshi at around 8am and reached the road to Lake Jipe by about 930am. The winds around the north end of the Pare Mountains and as a result, the weather is extremely difficult to read. There were massive storm clouds that were coming from the north but it was hard to tell what was staying on Mt. Kilimanjaro, what was coming at us, and what was going around the other side of the mountain.

The way to the lake took us five hours at a birding pace, and we also ran into one brief, though powerful storm. We reached the lake so late that we didn't have time to scout for bush camping and the only guys around to question about boats were drunk. We didn't spend much time at the lake since you can't see much anyways.

On the way back we hit a huge storm and the road kind of wove around the edges of the storm. It was a pretty surreal experience as we were getting blasted by rain, then we were in light rain in the sunshine with a huge rainbow, then in the clear, and then back to sheets of rain. I snapped a pretty cool picture of a massive double rainbow that we could see from end to end but unfortunately it was raining so hard that I couldn't get a picture to justify it. Still, it has been many months since we experienced a hard rain and the drive through the rivers and puddles was a lot of fun! Plus, we got the answer to our question; what took us five hours to drive birding only took us one hour driving straight through the rain!

Checking out the lake

This boat had holes in it and was full of water

You could see the red dust that was kicked up by the storm coming. It looked very disconcerting!

Insane double rainbow.

The goats were trying to get shelter. It looked as if a magnet had attracted the goats to the side of the house.

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Local fishing net.

This was the first storm that came, and it hit us hard.

After the first rain a layer of clouds surrounded the top of the North Pares.

The North Pares provided a beautiful backdrop.

Ana sees that a storm is coming. Even though we were headed that direction, we didn't hit that storm.