Where The Wild Things Are: 10 Days in Kenya
The Masai Mara National Reserve on Kenya’s southwestern border with
Tanzania is blanketed with large mammals, so heavily in fact that it
takes a day or two to register that the animals are real and not
holographic or cutouts from a National Geographic photo spread.
This is what happens when you combine a life spent mostly staring into a
computer with the ease of international travel. One day I’m in Crown
Heights, Brooklyn; 24 hours and four airplane meals later, I’m on safari
in the African savanna. The rapid change of scenery can give vacation a
dream-like quality. What unsettles the reality principle further is
that the animals stare right back at our vehicle, look right down the
barrel of my lens for a good long while before scuttering off. I feel
like the animal. It is the antelope that watches me.
Chief among the gawkers are giraffe, who as the tallest terrestrial
animals are exceptionally fit for surveying the lay of the land, and the
wildebeest, the most abundant mammal in East Africa and also the least
visually appealing, with a jerky half-sideways gait and a devilish face.
This animal is known in the safari community for its annual migration:
What happens is that every year more than a million wildebeest, joined
by zebra and other antelope (of which the wildebeest is one) move in a
clockwise direction from the Serengeti in northern Tanzania, up into the
Mara, and then back down again. It’s one of nature’s great symphonies,
plus lots of the wildebeest give up the ghost to lions — so there’s
something for everyone.
The wildebeest is so silly looking it’s tempting to hop out of the
vehicle and grab it by the chin, which is discouraged for reasons of
personal safety and just common decency. But even if nobody (else) is
talking about it, somebody must be thinking it. Because physical contact
with the animals, on many different levels — studying them, showing
them off, protecting them from poachers, protecting visitors from
injurious contact with them, land appropriation and management issues —
is, after all, the central component of this whole safari business. It
(the desire to touch or even tackle said wildebeest) also hints at a
fundamental question that is no doubt vexing Hemingway readers and
admirers of the great and swashbuckling President Theodore Roosevelt:
Will there be blood?
A Brief History of the Safari
What comes to mind when we think of a classic safari experience is a
product of both fact and fiction, a combination of the 19th and early
20th century exploits of European colonists in Africa — in East Africa,
mainly the British — and the portrayals of these events in books and
film.
These guys and gals were a colorful lot. Frederick Selous:
naturalist, hunter, guide, specimen collector, soldier. Beryl Markham:
horse trainer, hunter, bush pilot. Denys Finch Hatton: aristocrat, big
game hunter and love interest of Karen Blixen, whose autobiography,
Out of Africa,
was adapted as the Academy Award-winning film of the same name. Robert
Redford plays Finch Hatton, which, in my experience, seems to be a good
approximation of the genteel European descendants you find in Kenya
today, though perhaps more handsome.
Americans came over as well, guided by the likes of Finch Hatton, or
in the case of Teddy Roosevelt, big-game hunters R.J. Cuninghame and
Leslie Tarlton. Roosevelt went to East Africa for several months in
1909, a joint venture with the Smithsonian Institution that yielded
23,151 specimens, 5,013 of them mammals, an experience he recounted in a
monthly column for
Scribner’s Magazine (those columns were published the following year as a book,
African Game Trails), and in a silent film,
Roosevelt in Africa,
by the wonderfully named Cherry Keaton. Most of these specimens ended
up in the U.S. National Museum in Washington, D.C. — today the National
Museum of Natural History — though only one, the square-lipped
rhinoceros, remains on exhibit in 2013. In other words, this whole trip
was a pretty big and exciting deal for Roosevelt and for museum-going
Americans in general.
Hemingway would famously go on several hunting trips to Africa, inspiration for the book
Green Hills of Africa (also first published serially in
Scribner’s)
and for the stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro”. The lore of the safari increased in direct
proportion to the amount of times Hem walked away from plane crashes.
(“His head was swathed in bandages and his arm was injured,” The United
Press reported after his second crash, “but the novelist, who is 55
years old, quipped: ‘My luck, she is running very good.’”)
But the world has changed, particularly in Kenya where hunting big
game has been illegal since 1977. (There are plenty of places to hunt
the so-called “Big Five” — elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, leopard — on
the continent, including South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana,
Tanzania and Zimbabwe.) The purpose of the ban is multi-pronged, but one
assumes its driving force is to slow the decline of the large mammal
population, which in the parks of East Africa has nevertheless halved
since 1970, according to a study published in the journal
Biological Conservation.
Hunting, i.e., what we talk about when we talk about hunting in the
U.S., isn’t exactly the problem; large mammal populations in southern
Africa, where hunting is allowed on a permit basis, have rebounded in
recent years. Ethical arguments aside, issuing permits for hunting can
create a revenue source for conservation and for local populations, an
argument with many proponents in Kenya today.
The more nefarious threats to the Big Five are large scale poaching
on behalf of foreign agents (to satisfy the Chinese market for elephant
tusks and rhino horn, for example), the bushmeat trade (animals sold at
rural and urban markets in Africa), and the general creep of an
expanding human population on animal habitats.
Glimpses of Wild
So while Roosevelt revised the hyena population by negative four on
his African safari, this morning I’m staring at the herds of wildebeest,
zebra and gazelle down the barrel of a Canon DSLR, from a seat in a
Toyota Land Cruiser. This is the safari adventure de rigueur in Kenya
2013: an educational and photo tour with varying degrees of luxury. It’s
possible to go on safari in east Africa with a great variety of tour
organizers, among them
National Geographic and the very same
Smithsonian Institution that funded Roosevelt’s trip. I’m a guest of the
Kenya Tourism Board and of Extraordinary Journeys, a tour provider that
specializes in luxury safaris. Aside from the obvious amenities, the
more expensive camps are also ideally situated in the heart of prime
wildlife viewing areas.
We’re out early because morning and evening hours are the most
promising for spotting lions, cheetahs and leopards, not to mention in
Kenya’s equatorial climate the middle of the day can be downright hot.
It’s beautiful here. The sky is big. The horizon is an uninterrupted 360
degree panorama. Acacia trees provide occasional spots of shade for the
animals. Acacia in the Mara has a more typical, vertically-inclined
posture than in central Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, where the
treetops are broad and flat as if warped by the curvature of the Earth.
It doesn’t take long to get tired of seeing wildebeest and zebra
(though not the Thomson gazelle, with which I feel some inexplicable
bond), even elephants. It’s something of an honor to share the same
ground as these beasts; it’s just that from my seat in the car I don’t
have the sense of awe and wonderment I’d expected from a safari. Things
seem too neat. Not that I want our Cessna to crash next to an elephant
herd or a baboon to steal my lunch, but this is
Africa man.
We encounter a pride of lions, about eight of them, straw colored and
splayed out on the ground. Lions, unlike the other animals out here,
don’t give a shit about humans taking pictures from vehicles; you don’t
get to be king of the jungle by sweating passers-by. In the distance a
Land Cruiser from another camp approaches. (Guides from the various
camps in the Mara communicate with each other by radio to improve the
total amount of Big Five viewing.) A hundred yards away the vehicle
blows a flat. There are rules on safari. One of them is don’t get out of
the vehicle around predators. Rangers are called to the scene while the
other guide changes the tire. The lions, meanwhile, have roused
themselves and now sit on their haunches, motionless except to breathe,
staring directly at the guide until he’s finished the vehicle
maintenance. Here we’re witnessing experts in their field: Like a
surgeon conducting a heart bypass or a cellist performing a solo, a lion
peruses the menu.
In the afternoon I go running with Dennis, a driver at Serian Camp,
where I’m staying for a few days. Dennis competes locally in the 800m.
His brother was member of the Kenyan running contingent at the Sydney
Olympics. He has a big smile and good running posture — leaning slightly
forward at the ankles. He doesn’t speak much English and I speak no
Swahili, so we spend the next hour and a half running quietly through
the Mara. A herd of at least two dozen impala darts in front of us, each
bounding 20 or 30 feet in stride. Wildebeest stare. Zebra graze. Dennis
chases after a hyena and hoots at it. I hoot at it. I secretly want
this afternoon jog to turn into some kind of dangerous encounter I can
regale my friends with back home. The time I outran a gazelle. Ironman
triathlete improbably outfoxes angry bull, rides away at 60 mph on
Thomson gazelle. A mix of fact and fiction. Dennis would probably keep
my secret. Maybe it’s enough just to have the opportunity to run with
some giraffe in the background. At 5,000 feet above sea level, under the
hot sun, my lungs and face burn.
Thoughts Over Sundowners
The day’s final game drive is going along fairly predictably until we
see a topi — a type of antelope fond of standing on mounds — staring
into a swath of long grass. Other animals pause nearby as well, giving
whatever’s under surveillance a wide berth. Our guide puts the truck in
first and inches toward it. Maybe its a predator, is the consensus. A
shiny sphere pops up. It looks like a turtle shell from a distance. No
turtles out here, though. As we approach it’s clear we’re looking at
people hiding in the grass. Four pop up directly in front of the vehicle
to avoid being run over. Then two on the left flank and two more on the
right. They’re wearing traditional Masai shukas and carrying spears.
They assemble quickly into a group and make for the river, the border
between conservation land and the village where they probably live, our
driver explains. He calls the rangers to report the incident.
Back at Serian Camp our group sits down with Adrian and Roisin, the
camp managers, for cocktails, or “sundowners” as they’re called on the
safari circuit. I’ve taken to drinking Campari and soda so I don’t get
lit up too quickly. Adrian wears the traditional Kenyan kikoy, a
colorful fabric wrap — like a sarong — which is gutsy, fashion-wise, for
a guy. He’s had an exciting day, he tells us, tracking down Masai
teenagers illegally hunting lion on the conservation land.
Olamayio,
as it’s called, is a right of passage in the Masai tribe native to this
region of Kenya — but it’s also illegal since the Masai have agreed to
receive rent for the conservation land in exchange for vacating it.
The teens got away. Good for them. I don’t want to see a bunch of
kids go down for chasing lions with nothing but a spear — that’s a
pretty cool thing to do. And good for Adrian, whose mischievous smile
seems to indicate that he relishes the possibility of things not going
exactly as planned, the possibility of adventure.
And this is one of the things we’re after when we travel: adventure.
I’ve never been much for going places to look at things and have
somebody tell me about them; I’d rather read it all in a book (except
for a cheetah — I’m goddam ecstatic I saw a cheetah). Killing things and
dressing them in the field is one type of adventure, the one Hemingway
and Roosevelt favored in East Africa. It’s helpful to remember that
Roosevelt was accompanied by some 250 guides and porters along his trip,
and that he stayed in a tent with a tub and a library; he wasn’t
crawling on all fours through the bush with a Winchester. Much of the
time the entourage was just looking at wildlife and taking photos.
Another type of adventure is discovered more subtly, by looking for a
rip in the seam of the ordinary that helps you learn something about a
place and see your own world differently. That this is possible on
safari makes it worth the trip. A few weeks in Kenya is just enough time
for a run with gazelle and a glimpse of
olamayio, reason
enough for a return trip. Who knows, maybe I’ll even go somewhere where I
can hunt next time. Watch your ass, wildebeest.
