thatcrazycajun | My Kenyan Odyssey, Days 4-7: My real live African safari

Belated birthday greetings to

beki and

jolieblondebear, and a happy birthday today to

filkferengi, who has been far kinder to me than I deserve since I came to live in Atlanta. At least right now, I have an excuse for not returning calls...
What follows is written after the fact and as well as I can remember, since I was forced to leave my Vaio home for the weekend (the dusty environment of the Mara is not kind to laptops).

Saturday, 11 October • 7:00 AM
Barely time for a quick shower and last-minute packing (mostly the Songbird's; I packed last night--insufficiently, as it fell out; more on this later) before the cab arrives to take us to the airport for our journey to the Maasai Mara National Preserve. This massive tract of government-protected game preserve lies south and west of Nairobi, on the border with Tanzania, and we are to spend two nights and most of three days at one of the "luxury safari camps" located mostly on its outer edge, near the entrance to the Mara Triangle Park where most big-game-seeing is done there. Pictures were taken in plenty by both of us in nearly all the instances that are described below, and mine at least will be Flickr-bound as soon as I can get to Net access again for an hour or two.

By Kenyan law and longstanding custom, no one may hunt any of the multitudinous birds and wild animals that live in the preserve save with a camera, and anyone who visits is expected to "take only pictures and leave only footprints." In other words, no souvenirs (other than the ones sold at the camps) and no trash dumping; not so much as a stray feather or bone fragment may be removed from the Mara's confines, nor a used napkin, plastic water bottle or fruit rind left therein. Park regulations require safari guides to keep their charges a minimum 25-foot distance from all wildlife in the park, on pain of an instant and hefty fine; this especially applies to the species known as the "Big Five," so called because of their size, popularity with and danger to humans: lions, elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceri and giraffes.

The airport we will be using today is not Jomo Kenyatta International, at which I arrived in the city two nights previous, but the older, smaller "puddle-jumper" domestic and flight-lesson facility, Wilson Airport. It contains terminals for two of Kenya's domestic passenger carriers, one of which is AirKenya, the one we are flying today.

Sadly, the terminal's small gift shop, while wonderfully stocked with game hats (which SB advises buying to protect from the heat "on the Mara") and touristy stuff, sorely lacks in the pharmaceutical area--sadly for me, that is, as my body has suddenly decided overnight that now would be a good time for one of my twice-yearly attacks of bronchitis. Since there is no medicine available here or there, I will spend the next three days with almost no voice, an endlessly runny nose, a sore throat and a miserably productive cough. On the upside, though, the adjacent coffee shop has a wonderful breakfast available, and despite SB's grumbling about the cost and use of time, we both end up eating while we wait for the flight.

Security procedures at Wilson are laughable compared with those in post-9/11 US airports (or even those at the larger Kenyatta field, across town), even though Kenya had its US Embassy here bombed just a few years ago by some of the same alleged humans responsible for the NYC/DC horror of 2001. Most of the time is spent waiting for the small, 30-seat prop plane that takes us on a three-stop flight, ending at Kichwa Tembo airstrip in the heart of the Mara.

When we finally do arrive at our last stop, we are met by ultra-courteous Kenyan staff of the Mara Siria Bush Camp, the place where we will be staying, who take our bags and load them and us into a white van equipped for off-road driving with 4x4 drive and a lift-off roof, but otherwise resembling nothing so much as an old VW microbus. We are then driven down winding dirt roads (all roads in the Mara are dirt, and some barely deserving of the very name) and pass the Oloololo Gate to the park on the way up the towering Siria Escarpment that lines the western edge of the Mara. It is atop one of the Escarpment's high, flat, tree-and-rock-studded ridges that the camp is established.

We are settled in and fed a "light lunch" of salad, beef chunks in sauce and potatoes with rice and a fruit cup dessert, then put back in the van for a few hours of driving through the Mara Triangle Park in search of fauna fodder for photos. A word of warning, O gentle reader, should you decide to take this trip: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES do game rides in the small van! The thing jounced, bounced and rattled my poor bones like an apple caught in a Cuisinart, and the road-noise deafened me even worse than I already am, to the point I was ready to sleep in the next morning just for a chance to recover my strength and voice. Insist on the larger, much-better-padded and equipped, canvas-topped safari cruiser instead. Your bones and your eardrums will thank you; trust me on this.

On the way back down, we spot a Maasai village of mud-and-daub huts on the hillside, with tribespeople gathered round a fire in their traditional beaded robes. The Maasai are the only people permitted to live in the Mara itself, aside from the park staff in the tiny little houses abutting the park gate; they make their living, such as it is, from this land and the cattle they herd on it as well as from park admission fees. A rugged terrain indeed to live on; but then, the Maasai are renowned as a rugged people, fierce warriors (according to legend) rivaled only by the Mandinka of the neighboring Gambia. They occasionally create a living roadblock herding said cattle across the camp roads, but the cattle move aside easily enough and the drivers all know to slow down.

When we finally do enter the park proper, paying $40 US each for the privilege of a 24-hour pass, the first thing that strikes my notice is the acacia trees. Tall and funneling their branches oddly upward, they dot the landscape in hundreds, yet stand in splendid isolation from one another, never less than a hundred feet apart. SB informs me that this is due to the competition for scarce groundwater; one patch of the park's semi-arid land cannot support more than one such tree in good health. The closer one gets to a water source, such as the Mara River which runs through the park, the nearer to each other the acacias can be seen. In case you're wondering, this is the kind of tall-grass prairie land usually referred to as "the African savannah." ("The African veldt" is slightly different; go Google it if you really need to.) I find myself oddly longing for a chance to actually set foot on the savannah, to touch one of these lonely, ancient trees for some reason. (This longing will be fulfilled tomorrow; see below.)

The remains of the afternoon is spent in search of exotic fauna, and we manage to snag pics of all of the Big Five in this short period save one: the rhino, which, although present on the Mara, is there in far fewer numbers than in Kenya's other game reserves. By the time the sun began to set, we had still not found a rhino and had to abandon the search for the day, as park policy is to clear the land of all visitors by 6:30 PM each night (those staying in lodges on the land get until 7:00 to make it back). This is a security measure, meant to discourage poachers who care less about preserving near-extinct wildlife species than getting big bucks for said wildlife's pelts, bones and other parts...or just a big furry wall trophy.

Back at the camp, we are allowed hot showers (the tents, while quite lavish to anyone not accustomed to SCA-style royal pavilions--like, oh, say, me--only receive hot water at dusk each day, and then but a limited amount), then led through the darkness down a lantern-lit path to an adjacent camp's dining hut, where a lavish full-course dinner is laid out buffet style by a white-clad chef, from hot soup (so soothing to my poor throat!) to a creamy Kenyan dessert tasting like the love child of custard and bread pudding. Then back to the tent and to a fitful sleep despite the comfy, real-mattressed bed; between my coughing, snoring and the generator and toilet tank cutting in and out, it's a wonder my poor beloved and I get any sleep at all.

I find I have forgotten to pack sweat pants and long johns, and regret it the instant my bladder makes me get up barelegged in the middle of the night to find the toilet (yes, an actual flushing porcelain toilet in the tent...though one may not wish to know where the sewage goes). While the Mara isn't as hot in daytime as I had been led to expect, it is fucking COLD at night, especially high up on the escarpment. Pack accordingly if you go, at least two changes of clothes per day; again, this is the voice of bitter experience speaking.

Sunday, 12 October • 6:00 AM
Up with the sun, despite my illness, aches and grumbling...but it all becomes worth it the second I catch a glimpse of one of the most spectacular sunrises I have ever beheld, over the vast expanse of the Mara visible from our rocky ridge-top perch.

We are taking an early-morning drive into the Park today, so as to catch the animals and avians at their most active, before the day's heat sends many of them off to sleep. This morning we are taking along a packaged breakfast, which we will stop and eat in the park. The first part of the morning is spent driving around sections of the park we have not seen previously, coming amazingly close to several specimens of lion, cheetah, hyena and exotic birds.

Along about 10:15 or so, our driver pulls us off the road near a tall acacia tree, parks the cruiser and gets down to let us out, announcing that here is where we will have our late breakfast. He spreads a blanket for us in what shade there is from the tree, opens up a cooler and a canvas bag and proceeds to lay out goodies. (This is sort of amusing to me, as my reading has led me to believe that Kenyans in general find the concept of a picnic baffling; why go to such trouble when you can eat at home, safe from the elements and insect life? But evidently the camp staffs cater to the muzungu [white] tourists in this respect.) Here, I finally get my wish: to stand inside the park itself on Mara soil, in land that has remained essentially unchanged for eons, and touch a tree that may well have been growing here before my grandparents were born. (The bark is warm, smooth and weathered to the touch, just as you'd expect.) The boxed repast is sumptuous, including egg/bacon/tomato sandwiches on good Kenyan bread, fresh fruit, hard-boiled egg, juice box, packet of lemon cookies ("biscuits" here) and a toothpick wrapped in paper, plus coffee and tea served to us in picnic-basket-style cups hot from a Thermos jar. We eat, take pics of each other standing next to the tree, clean up and board the cruiser again to move on.

Returning to the camp for lunch, we are given a chicken dish this time, with potatoes and salad followed by more fruit, this time with a sweet whipped-cream-like topping. SB jokes that the staff evidently wants us stuffed comatose for the next hour and out of their hair. And that's exactly where we are, in our tent snoozing until the steward calls us for the afternoon game drive around 3:30.

Even though the cruiser is a big 4x4 vehicle with collision frame mounted on front and heavy tires, I still think our driver must be a certifiable loony as he drives through and even over bushes tall as a man and closer together than his armspan to get to the wooded spot where the leopard has been sighted. At least six other safari cruisers and vans converge on the same seemingly-impassable copse, leading SB to think of old cop show chase scenes and me to imagine the poor critter whimpering, "What'd I do?!?" I have visions of the cruiser getting hung up on some poor defenseless bush's trunk and us having to be rescued by park rangers or some such, but we do manage to get out under our own power.

Sundown finds us heading out again, back to the camp and another fine dinner, this time in our own camp's main tent and served by staff. We meet a young fellow camper named Niki seated with us, who lives in Sunnyside, Queens, the very NYC neighborhood in which I was residing when SB and I met, and we have fun explaining how we met (at a Star Trek convention) and then the whole concept of a science-fiction convention, which was apparently unknown to her. Then we say our goodnights and head back to the tent and an early bedtime.

Monday, 13 October • 6:00 AM
Once more unto the breach, dear friends...Another gorgeous sunrise over the landscape spread out before us, another cup of coffee and another drive down the hill into the park (and another $40 entrance fee). Still hoping to spot a rhino today, the only one of the Big Five that has thus far eluded us. This time on the road down, a group of mongoose (what's the group term for them? A herd? A flock? A passel?) greeted us at a culvert bridge by climbing out as we passed in our cruiser. We took pics, of course.

Another lovely packed breakfast out on the Mara, under another tall, lonely old acacia tree, was followed by a drive to another ford of the Mara River where we witnessed an awe-inspiring sight: a huge herd of zebra and wildebeest diving into the rapids to cross. The raging current drove them from their initial entry point gradually downstream to where we and at least four other cruisers were parked, but eventually all but a small fraction of the herd made it across, the latter evidently deciding not to risk it...especially with the croc and hippos lying in wait for a shot at snagging a nice wet dinner on the hoof. We return for a lunch of spaghetti with meat sauce, with salad and the same creamy dessert dish I had two nights ago, then rested up for the final drive down the hill to the airstrip and our departure, scheduled for 5:30 PM.

When we finally arrive back at the airstrip for the return flight to Nairobi, the plane is about 20 minutes late. After it does arrive, we find it is an even smaller puddle-jumper than the one we came in on, only seating half as many and having no bathroom...which became much more important to me as we neared Wilson Airport and the afternoon's liquids caught up with my bladder. Thankfully, this time the flight was non-stop. I found the bathroom after landing, SB collected the bags and called a taxi, and we arrived home just after sundown. Nothing having been defrosted in the way of meat from the freezer, we called out for delivery of food from a local chicken eatery and settled in to watch the newly-restored Richard Donner cut of Superman II on DVD before heading to bed. (Review and comparison to come later.)

Our thanks to the Mara Siria staff for providing service and accommodations that met and exceeded our expectations. I told them as we left it was the finest hotel I've stayed in that didn't have a concrete building. We cannot recommend them highly enough to any travelers to Kenya hoping to experience big game close up. And thanks above all to my Songbird, for being willing to make it possible; she paid for and arranged the whole shebang except my daily park admission fee. I've probably seen more giraffes, zebras and elephants in one weekend than I had in every zoo I've ever been to in my life combined, and gotten to see even more exotic ones I'd never encountered before.

Everyone should have this experience at least once in their lifetimes...especially the people of Kenya, if some way can be found to make it possible for the nearly half the nation's population whose poverty-level annual income precludes such luxury. May all the gods, African and Western, and man's good sense grant that the Maasai Mara remains in unspoiled splendor for all eternity. (But can we at least do something about improving those *&%$#! roads?!?)

Tomorrow: a long drive north to another Kenyan national park. Stay tuned....