March 2007 © Janet Davis
After breakfast, we checked out
of the 
DeHavilland Dash aircraft for the short
flight to
The reverence with which the peak
is viewed by the African people is described by Peter Mathiessen in his
fabulous 1972 book The
Tree Where Man Was Born: “At
19,340 feet, Kilimanjaro is the highest solitary mountain in the world. Mt.
At Amboseli’s airstrip we chose a safari van from the 6 awaiting us and introduced ourselves to our Micato guide, Nathan Masambu, and the two wonderful couples who would be our constant road companions for the next 2 weeks. Having the right chemistry with your van-mates is important as you spend hours and hours making conversation (or not, depending on how early you awoke and how much wine you consumed at dinner the night before) and banging elbows as you search for the perfect vantage point from which to shoot wildlife. And we couldn’t have asked for a better guide than Nathan, who’d been escorting safari guests for more than 20 years and knew the Kenyan parks and their animals intimately.
On the way from the airstrip (where I saw my very first Amboseli bird, a golden palm weaver tending its suspended nest in a red-thorn acacia) to Ol Tukai Lodge, our camp for the next 2 nights, Nathan pointed out Maasai ostriches, a Kori bustard (the heaviest bird of any in Africa), a blacksmith plover and a gaggle of Egyptian geese.
Most thrilling of all were the elephants, in the process of returning to take advantage of the long grasses and abundant wetlands which were the result of unusual early winter rains. Normally, the period between the short rains in late fall and the long rains of April-June is relatively dry, but this winter had seen flooding and ongoing rains, making local farmers unhappy as they struggled to seed crops in the damp soil.
The elephant may be the largest land animal on earth but it walks as quietly as a mouse and is very nimble too. We discovered this as our vehicles were surrounded by a procession of elephants, large and small, crossing the road to reach the marsh. Nathan checked behind to make sure we could retreat, if necessary, but the huge animals paid little attention to us other than to ensure that their young were following closely behind.
Amboseli’s 1500 African elephants
(Loxodonta africana) are the best
studied of any population in
In The Tree Where Man Was Born, Peter Matheissen described their family structure: “Elephants travel in matriarchal groups led by a succession of mothers and daughters – female elephants stay with their mothers all their lives – and this group may include young males which have not yet been driven off. Ordinarily, the leader is the oldest cow, who is related to every other animal; she may be fifty years old and past the breeding age, but her great memory and experience is the herd’s defense against drought and flood and man. She knows not only where good browse may be found in different seasons, but when to charge and when to flee, and it is to her that the herd turns in time of stress. When a cow is in season, bulls may join the cow-calf group; at other times, they live alone or in herds of bachelors.”
We watched families of elephants wallowing and playing in Amboseli’s muddy shallows, some picking up dirt with their trunks and tossing it overhead and against their flanks to give themselves a mud shower, thus keeping their skin cool. Nathan said the dust also prevents insects and ticks from getting into the skin wounds the animals receive while browsing and rubbing on trees. Another cooling mechanism is the flapping of their large ears, which are criss-crossed by a network of blood vessels so unique that they aid the researchers in identifying them.
I was amused by a rowdy young
elephant using its trunk to grip a large stick, smacking it repeatedly on the
water to cause a big splash just the way any little boy might behave to get rid
of excess energy. On the plain nearby,
a bull and female were mating (giving rise to the inevitable safari jokes about
the male elephant’s “fifth leg”). From
Nathan, we learned that the gestation period is 22 months and an elephant
mother nurses for 2 years until her baby develops its tusks, at which point she
stops feeding it. Females become sexually mature at 11-12 years
of age; males at 13-15 years when they leave the family group. Nathan told us that an elephant is the only
animal with two knees, and he showed us how to discern, by the length of its
respective tusks, whether an elephant is “left-handed” or “right-handed. Although an elephant eats 400-500 pounds of
grass per day, it digests only about 10 percent of that. (Read more on elephants.)
As we drove to the lodge to check
in, we saw a pied kingfisher and several glossy Ibis in a papyrus marsh; a
white-browed coucal on a palm branch; and
Our first 
taken away by its mother for a 2-3 day
“imprinting session”, during which time the young one will memorize the pattern
of its mother’s stripes which, like fingerprints, are different on each zebra.
Finally, we arrived at the safari lodge where we would spend the next two nights. Ol Tukai Lodge is a charming property. Opened in 1996, it has 80 guest rooms set in small cottages overlooking Kilimanjaro and the Amboseli plain. I walked the grounds to shoot the impressive yellow-bark acacias (Acacia xanthophloea), otherwise known as “fever trees” because the early settlers believed the tree was implicated in the disease. Given that it grows in swamps and marshes where mosquitoes breed, and given what we now know -- that mosquitoes are a vector for the yellow fever virus (the yellow caused by jaundice) -- it was natural to connect the tree to a deadly illness with an as-yet-unknown cause.
We finished lunch and headed to
our rooms for the customary mid-day rest.
A swimming pool refreshed those still trying to cope with the time
change from
A few hours later, we headed out on our afternoon game run,
spotting a lilac-breasted roller and an owl before the radios crackled that two
cheetahs had been seen up ahead. Like a
traffic jam at an end-of-season sale, the road near the animals was soon
clogged with vans from numerous safari outfitters. This was our introduction to the reality of
safari tourism and its burgeoning popularity, especially in
As we focused our binoculars on the ears of
the cheetahs hiding in the grass, the sky became ominously dark as a
fast-moving dust storm approached over the plain. Since Amboseli means “salty dust” in the
Maasai language, this wasn’t at all unusual and we yanked the van roof down and
closed the windows as the storm neared, lashing the vehicle with wind, rain and
dust which quickly turned to dripping mud.
Almost all the other vans had left for the lodges but Nathan decided to
wait it out.
Sure enough, as the storm had almost passed over, the cheetahs rose in the long grass, looking around nervously to make sure the bad weather was over and it was safe for them to go. Then they loped across the road in front of us. Victory, in safari terms, goes to those who sit and wait! “Sawasawa, Nathan,” we said, which is Swahili safari lingo for “Okay, let’s go!”
On Monday morning, we arose before dawn to hot coffee, a beautiful sunrise and an early game drive. This would be our normal routine, since most animals hide or sleep in the mid-day heat and are active in the cool hours of early morning and late afternoon and evening. As we left the lodge, we passed a troop of yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) climbing down from the trees and walking along the road.
Just outside the lodge, on the edges of a
seasonal lake that Nathan said would disappear in September-October, we saw
waves of lesser flamingoes (Phoenicaias
minor) eating algae, the beta-carotene in the algae producing the pink
color of their feathers. There were also
great pelicans, white-faced whistling ducks, black-winged stilts, great egrets,
long-toed lapwings, sacred ibis, sandpipers, avocets, big Goliath herons,
cattle egrets, seagulls, grey herons, striped swallows, red-billed teal,
black-bellied bustards, ring-necked doves and a tawny eagle.
As we drove, we passed lots of
termite hills or termitaria, conical structures we would see throughout the
parks of
As we returned to Ol Tukai,
Nathan informed us soberly that there was “a problem” and we would have to stop
on the road outside the lodge. We got
out, somewhat worried, and followed him down a path 
through some shrubs and trees, only to arrive
at a large clearing with tables set up and a breakfast buffet complete with
champagne, made-to-order omelettes --
and those pesky yellow baboons attempting to crash the party (they also have a
taste for malaria pills, we were warned).
Just another of Micato’s happy little surprises! Then it was back to the hotel for a rest.
After lunch, we heard a talk on Maasai culture by a native elder, folowed by a short nature tour of Ol Tukai’s grounds. While walking, we met Soila Sayialel, Project Manager of the Elephant Trust, who gave us more information on Amboseli’s elephants. She also told us that the Trust’s work has helped the Maasai live more peacefully with the elephants, but when there are human/elephant conflicts, i.e. when an elephant kills a cow, the Trust will often arrange compensation for the cow’s owner.
Our Monday afternoon game run ended with a mysterious trip to the top of Observation Hill with a 360-degree view of the park. There, we were treated to one of Micato’s famous open-air cocktail parties (and an explanation for the strange clinking noises we’d heard in the vans). As the drivers and guides uncorked wine bottles and arranged glasses and snacks on folding tables, we gazed around us at the savannahs, plains and hills of Amboseli’s 392 square kilometers.
Before long, our party was visited by small groups of young Maasai men who worked very hard to convince us to buy their beaded jewelry and wooden clubs. Under the watchful eyes of our drivers and guides, they bargained energetically.
Amboseli’s pastoral Maasai
population has a fragile relationship with
One of the sad realities of moving from park
to park to see as much of East Africa as
possible is that you often feel you’ve only just arrived somewhere magical,
when it’s time to pack up and depart.
So, knowing that tomorrow we would be in the vans on our way into
Tuesday morning saw us checking
out of Ol Tukai Lodge and departing Amboseli.
As we would be leaving
We drove to Namanga at the Kenyan border where we visited a rest stop and curio shop whose parking lot was surrounded by masses of colorful bouganvillea vines. We said goodbye to Nathan, the other Kenyan drivers and guides, and met David and Wilbert, our Tanzanian guides. After running a chaotic gauntlet of villagers selling trinkets, we had our visas stamped in the Tanzania Immigration office, then boarded two large buses for the drive to Arusha. En route, soldiers doing a spot check pulled over our bus and demanded that Josephine, our young Micato guide, show them her documents to prove she was a Tanzanian citizen.
At The Arusha Hotel, we ate a
lovely lunch on an outdoor loggia overlooking a garden filled with heliconias
and other tropical flowers. Though the next leg of our journey had been
scheduled as a flight from Arusha to Tarangire,
a bridge outage between Tarangire’s airport and the park itself meant it
would now be necessary to drive the 75-mile journey. After lunch, we said hello to our Tanzanian
safari driver
Next: Tarangire National Park, Tanzania
Nairobi Ngorngoro Serengeti Maasai Mara Mount Kenya