Hilary’s Travels

I spent my last 5 days in Kenya traveling through the west of the country and exploring the Rift Valley and Maasai Mara National Reserve. I was accompanied by my friend Ellen who had just completed a business trip to various cities in Africa, ending in Nairobi. We had hired a tour company which supplied us with a driver and van, created an itinerary and set up our accommodations. It was an interesting trip, if rushed and despite ongoing friction with our driver.

Here are some highlights of the trip:

Hell’s Gate Park, where hot water oozes out of the ground and a warm river cuts through the valley floor exposing earth striated with hues of red.

Lake Bogoria where boiling water spurts out of the ground on the shores of a hot salty lake, host to a large flamingo population. The flamingos promenade in stately lines as if choreographed, burbling constant messages to each other. From a distance the lake seems to have a ring of pink around its circumference.

A walk in a forest on the edge of Lake Baringo, where a local guide described the flora and fauna. We received a fascinating account of the life cycle of termite ants and the wily habits of weaver birds. We also visited a reptile museum housing snakes, turtles, lizards and crocodiles, lovingly cared for by the manager.

Our first night at Sarova Lion Hill Lodge, pure luxury in the middle of a national park. A balcony looking out over the plain and lake below, the sound of tree frogs in the night, a sunken bathtub and calming tasteful colors. A sumptuous dinner laid out for us and four chefs stir frying fresh meat and vegetables by the plate.

A glimpse of a leopard in Lake Nakuru National Park, disturbed from his afternoon nap by a bevy of tour vans and photo-snapping tourists. The leopard rose from the dead branch he was lounging on and stalked haughtily through the line of vehicles, completely ignoring the intrusion of tourists as if did not exist.

The unabashed sexuality of baboons, all the males from the dominant patriarch to the tiniest youngster sporting erect penises.

The beautiful vista over Maasai Mara National Reserve, the savanna stretching over gently rolling hills of yellowing grass, purpling in the distance with the Mara River cutting a wide ribbon of mud red at the base of a line of hills. Wildlife dotted across the Massai Mara plains; small herds of zebra, gazelle and wildebeest.

A close-up view of a cheetah with her five kittens and the spectacle of her hunt: stalking a Thompson Gazelle grazing nearby. The gazelle became aware of danger, but seemed fixated by it, stamping nervously and looking in the direction of the cheetah. Suddenly it bolted off away from the cheetah and then inexplicably turned around and ran straight for it. It stopped within about 50 meters and the source of its dilemma emerged: a baby gazelle appeared from the grass to suckle its mother. We watched in horror as we observed this tender moment about to be destroyed by death. The cheetah pounced, mother and child separated, and the cheetah caught the baby gazelle and broke its neck. The mother circled around and watched as the cheetah ate her offspring.

Here are some of the less pleasant aspects of our trip:

Bumping along on pitiful roads for endless hours. We each got rather accustomed to it and at the end were actually able to read as we bounced. The second day was particularly tiresome as we were in the van for eight hours for two and a half hours of sightseeing. We had awakened at 5:30 am for this outing and as I tried to catch a siesta at the back of the van I couldn’t help but wonder if this was actually a vacation!

Interactions with the driver who fancied himself a ladies man and may have been under the delusion that his innate charm would make up for lack of service and attention. Little things added up and got on my nerves: for lunch on the first day purchasing us each a tiny pastry and refusing to buy juice because it was too expensive; having to be reminded to bring the packed lunches and then leaving them on the seat in the baking hot van for six hours, making the chicken too risky to eat; constantly forgetting to bolt down the forward seat which swung forward dangerously every time there was a big bump; lying about the proximity of the Mara River so that he wouldn’t have to take us there, the list went on. Ellen and I decided not to tip him feeling that his behavior detracted from rather than added to the enjoyment of the trip. He had the gall, though to call me after and ask for it even stipulating how much it should be, whereby I informed him that we had not intended to tip him and why.

The second night after bouncing over endless dusty roads, arriving at our hotel to find that the whole town was out of power. Our meal was paltry (instant soup and frozen fish sticks). I managed a cold sponge bath to wash away the red dust.

The numerous tour vans in Maasai Mara National Reserve who crowd too close to the animals, the drivers jockeying for position as if the closer they got to the animals, the bigger their tips.

The contrast between our mostly opulent accommodations and the poverty we saw everywhere: sad ramshackle kiosks lining the road selling a pitiful array of supplies, women standing by the road with their produce to sell: bags of maize, jars of honey or handfuls of oranges; worst of all, at the entrance of Maasai Mara Park, desperate Maasai women trying to sell handicrafts to the rich tourists who drove in. Barred from the park itself and their traditional way of life compromised, the Maasai were not even provided with the benefit of a market in order to sell their wares in a dignified way to the tourists who bring millions of dollars a year to the area.

I spend a lot of time with cab drivers. They take me to and from work, about 30 min each way when traffic is not bad and I have hired a few to take me on trips around Nairobi. I learn a lot from them. They tell me about the political situation – unanimously they say the previous regime (under Daniel Arap Moi) was very corrupt, swindling the country of most of its profits and that the current, democratically elected regime (under Mwai Kibaki) is better. They are my informal tour guides, pointing out areas of interest as we drive by.

They greet me by name and if I have not yet met them they always introduce themselves. They are dignified, well read and educated. Most are outgoing and if you indicate the desire to talk, will oblige with accounts of their lives, their hopes and dreams, the political climate, what is going on in the city. They are a fabulous source of information. One public holiday I was looking for a foreign exchange bureau and I called one cab driver, Waynayna. Within a few minutes he had gotten back to me with an answer, saving me hours of frustrated searching.. They are punctual, always arriving 15 min earlier than booked.

I have my favorites. Issac has three children and tells me about his work, the necessity of providing well for his family and the importance of being kind to people. “Hilary”, he says, “it is always important to be kind. To all people, to animals and to the environment. There is not enough kindness in this world!” Another driver, Joseph, has seven sisters, one who is a nun, another is a doctor with her own clinic in their home town. He runs tours for the cab company also and his greatest joy is to go to one of the National Parks and to view the wild animals. One Monday when he picked me up he entertained me with a vivid description of what he had seen that weekend; lions killing a wildebeest, a crocodile attacking a zebra whilst its herd watched placidly. On another occasion we passed a bus stop where his wife happened to be waiting and he asked if we could give her a lift. I obliged and after he had dropped her off on our way, he confessed that they were not actually legally married but had a two-year old child. I enquired if this was a common and accepted practice and he said it was fairly common, but that he was to undergo a cleansing ceremony, involving being beaten with dried dung. What seemed to be holding back the marriage ceremony was the price of a dowry, which was competing with the need to get a better education in order to get a better job.

Yesterday I was taken to visit a boy’s orphanage in Thika, a town north of Nairobi. I think even Dickens would have been appalled. I first visited the archaic kitchen, which seemed not to have a scrap of food in it, presided over by Thela, an enormous woman with a toothless smile. Adjacent to the kitchen was largish room, once a dining area, now housing a few logs for firewood. I asked where the boys now ate, “Oh, just standing up”. Outside several boys were sorting corn and beans, which, along with a little cabbage, was their constant and only diet.

Boys were housed in dark dormitories crammed with bunk beds and when I entered a dorm about a dozen, ages 10 to 18 were watching a porno flick on the TV, which they quickly turned off. The oldest, John Minor had lived there since he was nine years old. They all smiled shyly at me and posed for my camera.

My host, John Cook, now a teacher and aspiring businessman had, himself, grown up in the very same orphanage and he continued to visit regularly to inspire the boys. John pointed out the tree he had planted, now 30 meters high, in what had once been a garden, now a neglected area where rubble had been allowed to collect. He spoke about the decline in the orphanage since he had lived there. Run by the municipality, the manager of John’s childhood had taken an interest in the boys and insisted they plant a garden and maintain the place. He had checked their homework and the boys had known a strict but caring regime. The current manager obviously had no such interest and I wondered if he ever visited the place and if he did how he could walk past the stinking latrines, the former garden which now contained one forlorn banana plant, the broken windows, the unused dining area, without intense shame and consternation.

John drove me back to Nairobi and spoke to me about his childhood. He had been abandoned by his mother at the age of five and had lived each day looking for food in garbage bins and ditches. At the age of eight he had been taken into the orphanage. He had done well at school and his teachers had encouraged him. He said that, at the age of ten, he had decided how he was going to live his life and that it was going to be a good one. He had imagined the family that he would have and the life that he would lead. Now he has two sons and lives a productive life. He runs a soccer club, encouraging boys of 15 to 25 to learn the sport and feel pride and accomplishment. He tries to help the boys get an education so that they can escape the poverty trap and get good jobs or start a business. He mentioned five boys who were waiting for funds ($400 USD/ year) to be able to go to college and by the time we had reached Nairobi, I had decided to pay for one of the boys to do so.

John Cook standing beside the bed that once was was his.

Today I traveled through the stunning countryside north of Nairobi in a hired cab.

Climbing up out of the city, one passes roadside vendors selling bananas, cabbages, lambskins and trinkets. Donkeys start to show up as a mode of transport. The fields are fresh and green. My first view of the rift valley was breathtaking. At the edge of the escarpment, the land drops away in two giant shelves, the bottom of the valley thousands of feet below. In the distance sits black Mount Logan, an ancient volcano and reminder of the Rift Valley’s violent origin.

Cutting across north of Nairobi heading east I passed through villages busy with woman hauling baskets suspended from their foreheads, men painfully wheeling carts with enormous loads of sisal grass fodder, children steering wheelbarrows, donkeys laboring under giant cargos, goats trotting about alertly. I passed tea plantations the low bushes stretching out in neat rows across the hills. Lower down and markedly warmer, coffee plantations appear. I whizzed past spectacular blooming trees with giant orange flowers, gently mauve Jacaranda trees, handsome lone Cedars. Further on and lower still, the vegetation is dryer, more yellow and space.

I visited the bustling vegetable market in Thika, filled with pyramids of potatoes and tomatoes and hills of cabbages, carpets of pineapples. Women in colorful skirts bartered and gossiped. A stick-lean young woman with black horse teeth wearing a black covering on her head vivaciously chatted with me in Kiswahili. Men waved and clowned for my camera.

On to Del Monte pineapple plantation, 6000 acres of pineapples stretching as far as the eye could see. In the middle sat the factory where pineapples are canned and juiced. Neat little suburbs of houses outlined by hedges surround the factory, a sharply hierarchical world of supervisors houses separated from lower middle managers houses separated from middle managers.

Outside the Del Monte plantation, about a mile along the road are the slums where the fruit pickers and planters eek out a living, denied a regular job or benefits with the classification of “seasonal worker”, even through the season is year round.

I visited the Blue Posts Hotel where two rivers converge, from two different watersheds, each descending past the hotel with a waterfall, now red with eroded soil and much reduced in volume due to deforestation and urbanization. A wedding reception was underway, the bride and groom promenading across the grounds, the guests seated with a view of the African band warming up.

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