Elephant and Giraffe
I decided to spend the weekend in Mombasa, Kenya’s port and beach resort area. I took a 45 min plane ride from Nairobi, filled with festive wedding party guests. I arrived at the restive sanctuary of the Travelers Beach Hotel. With its open air cathedral ceiling lobby, stucco white and beam design, pool that winds its way from the bar inside the hotel out to the lawn studded with palm trees, it promised to be the getaway I was hoping for. The hotel property ends at the beach and from there you can hear the distant roar of crashing waves out on the edge of the bay where a coral reef protects the town from the vast Indian Ocean beyond. I immediately felt I’d come to the right place to relax and I booked a safari trip for the following day.
At 6:00 on Saturday morning I was greeted by Said, safari independent operator, driver and guide. I also met my safari companion, Alex, a Brazilian, in Kenya on a business trip. We embarked on a mad drive out of Mombasa and on the main road towards Nairobi, navigating around bathtub sized potholes, vans and huge lumbering trucks carrying goods from Mombasa port to Nairobi and beyond to landlocked Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia. After two hours of driving we arrived at the entrance to Tsavo National Park.
Almost immediately on entering the park we saw a family of giraffes somewhat obscured by bushes and Said inched forward to give us the best possible view. I clicked away with my camera, trying to line up the best shot, aware with every click that my battery was going to run out during the trip – little did I know that on the return trip giraffes would be surrounding us right on the road! A few miles down the road we saw a small family of elephants pondering by and not much later we stopped to see a group of zebra huddled together, while on the other side of the road a pair of gazelle were studying us. A little troop of warthogs trotted by purposefully. I was amazed at the quantity and density of animals. If this was representative of the entire 20,000 square kilometers of park, the place was teaming with wildlife. “Was this the way it had been for eons?”, I wondered. How the world must have seemed to be both bountiful and dangerous to humans living there!
My first view of a giraffe, head and neck peering from behind a bush like a prehistoric animal, and felt like I had been holographically transported into a movie set. This feeling of being in a movie persisted throughout the day. At one point I felt like the “Lion King” cartoon characters had all come to life and become real …except that the animals were all in families. Animal culture is not individualistic. Giraffes graze together in nuclear families, the father towering above the others, easily 18 feet high while the mothers and teenagers graze close by, sometimes with a baby tottering about.
Elephant travel as a crèche of mothers with their offspring. Baboons move in great clans of aunts, uncles and cousins, grazing on open grassy areas, pulling tufts of grass with deft fists. Larger birds (we saw many including Ibis, Hornbill, Snake Eagle, Ostrich, all named by Said, who knows his birds) are often found in pairs as well as the tiny Dik Dik the smallest gazelle in Africa, shivering in fear like little rabbits. Herds of Thompson Gazelle are all male or all female, coming together for playful orgies like ancient worshipers of Baccus.
We stopped for lunch at a hilltop camp sporting a domed thatch roof, waiters serving drinks, from where you can see the plains below. Alex (who has contracts in Portuguese-speaking Angola) and I traded stories about our own countries and what it is like to work in Africa.
It rained occasionally during the day and on the return trip the temporary road, for use while the main road was being repaved (we get a few miles of road before each election joked Said with cynical good humor) was quite washed out. We followed a line of trucks crawling along towards Mombasa. At one point we came to a complete standstill, a line of trucks also stopped in the opposite direction also and waited for at least half an hour – I wondered if we were going to get home that night. Eventually the line started again and we passed half a dozen trucks mired axel-high in the mud. When we got back that evening to the peacefulness of the Mombasa Travelers Beach hotel I felt like I had been through several different parallel universes, and entering another one!
If you go to Mombasa:
Safari: Said M. Harusi, PO box 403 Mombasa. Mobile: 0722 707346
Travelers Beach Hotel, travhtls@africaonline.co.ke; phone: 041-5485121; fax: 041–5485674