The First Kora Attempt

Everybody publishes their successes. Very few publish their setbacks. This entry exists because the failure is part of the archive, not separate from it.

In early 2025 our first attempt to reach Kora ended before it reached its destination. The plan had been straightforward on paper: drive east toward the Tana, ford the river at a known crossing, and reach the old Adamson camp and Elsa's grave on the far side. Paper, as it turns out, does not account for the state of the road, the level of the river, or the hours lost to ground that looks passable until you are on it.

We turned back. Not dramatically — there was no single moment of crisis — but through the slow accumulation of small obstacles that, added together, made arriving irresponsible. The grave remained out of reach. The camp remained unseen.

It would be easy to leave this out of the story. The temptation in documentary work is always to present the clean version, the one where the destination is reached and the footage is gathered. But the difficulty of reaching Kora is the story. It is why the place stayed off the map of public memory for so long, and why what survives there has survived.

So we recorded the attempt as faithfully as we would have recorded a success: the route, the decisions, the point at which we turned. When the second expedition returned later in the year, this is where its account begins — not at the trailhead, but here, at the place we did not reach the first time.