The Last Great African Safari
This is an account of National Geographic supported expedition down the Omo River in Ethiopia in 1985.
The Valley Where Man was Born
A 600 mile, two month journey down the Omo River through one of the most inaccessible regions on the African Continent. Support from National Geographic, World Wildlife Fund and Yale University.
Early human fossils found by an ancient shore line where the prehistoric Omo River once emptied its silt-laden waters into Lake Turkana, suggest that it was in the Omo Valley where the ancestors of Homo Sapiens made their first steps across the open savannah onto the pages of history. The river has retained its course for the past seven million years and it is conceivable that prehistoric migrations through this very ancient valley contributed to human settlements in the furthest corners of the earth.
The forty thousand square miles of the Omo River Valley lies in the shape of an over-sized question mark across the rugged highlands of western Ethiopia. Its northern head-water, 120 miles southwest of Addis Ababa, lie only a stones throw away from the immense watershed of the legendary Blue Nile, the “Mother of Egypt.” For six hundred miles the brown turgid waters of the Omo flow southward towards the equator through some of the most wild and inaccessible terrain in Africa. The landscape of fortress like mountains guarded by precipitous cliff faces and gorges is so utterly different from anything else in Africa. It is a landscape created by the violent collisions of the vast Eurasian and African tectonic plates around thirty million years ago when titanic forces caused a two thousand mile section of the land to fault and sink, creating what we know today as the Great Rift Valley of Africa.
Much of the present geography is the result of catastrophic volcanic activity that accompanied the creation of the Rift Valley. Such vast quantities of molten magma spewed out across the land that even today the mountains are still capped by as much as three thousand feet of black weather-worn lava. Through this contorted mountain landscape, unlike any other on the continent, the Omo River has carved an impressive gorge of Grand Canyon proportions. The abrasion of this timeless river has sculptured and polished the low lava cliffs that form its banks creating abstract shapes that glint and glare in the tropical sun. Emerging from the mountains the river spills southward for another three hundred miles into the great Turkana depression. Here it meanders through a trackless sun scorched savannah and desert thornbush until finally coming to rest in the jade colored waters of Lake Turkana, the world’s largest alkaline lake.
If the Omo Valley is the place where man was born it is also the place where time stood still. The upper two hundred miles of the river is uninhabited on account of tsetse fly and mosquito, purveyors of the continent’s most pervasive and virulent diseases, sleeping sickness and malaria. The Omotic speaking tribes of this region live
several thousand feet above the river in remote mountain villages which, because of their extreme isolation, have changed little over the centuries. In some of the villages we visited, the boys and women ran away in terror. We were the first white people they had ever seen. Beyond the mountains it is a tall, nomadic, Nilotic speaking people who hold sway and dominate the expansive plains with their large herds of zebu cattle. This is a harsh and heartless land, far from the care and help of the outside world, where the vagaries of the climate can drive a people to starvation and turn their land into desert.
To learn the secrets of the Omo Valley and to gain access to its inner sanctuaries one must travel by river. Beginning as early as 1885 with Count Teleiki’s expedition, explorers have made brief and brutally difficult overland incursions into the lower reaches of the Omo Valley but few came to understand the complexity of the land or it’s people. It has only been in the last twenty years, with the advent of new raft construction technology, that western travelers and scientists have begun to explore this secluded valley. The river, while providing a pathway into the great gorge of the Omo, requires skilled boatmen to navigate the rafts down scores of hazardous rapids that plunge over house-sized boulders and squeeze through narrow canyon walls. Along its banks are great concentrations of wildlife that have virtually disappeared from much of Africa. It is the home for thousands of hippos and crocodiles that bask and lurk in its warm, still waters and eddies. Lion, hyena and leopard stalk its shores to prey on the water buck and gazelle that come daily to drink at the waters edge. This is the “old Africa” preserved by its remoteness and inaccessibility.
Roy Smith
Roy left school in the North of England at 15 to work on a farm. At 18 he joined the British Army and later began leading military mountaineering expeditions, first in Europe then around world. During the 60s he became a safari and mountain guide in East Africa, leading groups to the summits of Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya and the heavily glaciated, Mountains of the Moon (Ruwenzoris). In 1966 he was chosen for the team that made the first ascent of the North Ridge of Alpamayo the last of the unclimbed 20,000 high peaks of the Andes.
Roy came to the United States in 1967 to work for the Colorado Outward Bound School and later introduced Outward Bound into higher education. He was a leader in the development of experiental corporate team-building programs in the early 1970s.
Supported by National Geographic, he led an expedition that made the first winter crossing of the Alaska Brooks Range on skis, a formidable 400 mile, forty day journey pulling sleds. In 1986 he led a major expedition down the 600 mile length of the Omo River in Ethiopia that was supported by National Geographic, Yale University and World Wildlife.