Lake Turkana

Spindly Lake Turkana, the Jade Sea, one of the great Rift Lakes that mark the beginnings of a new ocean…termite mounds twenty feet tall…giraffes, gazelles, and ostriches going about their ancient routines…a horizon that seems to stretch beyond time and space. Located in the vast desert expanses of Kenya’s Northern Frontier, Turkana—the world’s largest permanent desert lake—is an uncompromising scenic masterpiece, made all the more compelling because it was from this region that wanderlusty Humankind began its epic migration out of Africa a couple of hundred thousand years ago.

The famed Leakey family has long been at the forefront of investigating our African origins. And, as it happily happens, the Leakeys and Micato’s Pintos have been family friends for more than a half century. That long relationship with the First Family of Paleoanthropology has enabled us to arrange many Custom Safaris to haunting Lake Turkana, where we can learn and dig and marvel as the secrets of our species are carefully unveiled by dedicated scientific sleuths.

(Along with much fascinating else, Turkana’s gargantuan Nile crocodiles, beings who predate our species by 55 or so million years, are paid their Eocenic respect in Alistair Graham and the great African photographer Peter Beard’s wonderfully eccentric but reliably illuminating Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men. As Graham writes, “At Lake Turkana, we found one of those distant lands where dragons still roam at will.”)