March 2007 © Janet Davis

To celebrate our 30^th anniversary, my husband Doug & I joined 34 other travellers on a 2-week safari to Kenya and Tanzania.

It was presented by Micato Safaris of Nairobi and New York. Voted the best safari outfitter by Travel & Leisure Magazine for four consecutive years from 2003 to 2006, Micato offers a superb safari experience – comprehensive, well-organized, safe, educational and fun, with lots of little surprises up their sleeve to delight travellers at the end of long days on the road. Our safari lasted from February 23 to March 9, normally the dry period between the short and long rains, but this winter (which is summer in East Africa) had been unusually wet and the animals fed abundantly – and sometimes hid from our view -- in the long green grasses.

The Essence of Safari

The word safari is Swahili for “journey” and this journey was unlike any other we’ve taken. It introduced us to a landscape both mythical and magical, an enduring and vast palette on which nature paints in myriad brushstrokes and hues. There are the bold, jutting, vertical lines of the cliffs, volcanoes and intricately folded ridges of the Rift Valley, as glimpsed from the window of our small plane. The pale horizontal washes of green, taupe and gold that color the endless grassy plains of the Serengeti. The squiggly brushstrokes of the muddy red rivers like the Seronera and Mara. The sparkling whites outlining the soda lake shores. The dark-green swirls of the red thorn acacias carpeting Ngorongoro’s slope and the Mondrian-like blocks of savannah, bush, hills and sky in the Maasai Mara.

And animals -- everywhere animals! Birds in fantastical hues. The heralded big five of the old game hunters, beginning with the towering elephants trooping in absolute silence between our safari vans to reach Amboseli’s abundant swamps so they could splash in the water and wallow in the mud. Massive Cape buffaloes pausing in their grazing to glare at us over wet, black noses. A desultory male lion lumbering through Ngorongoro’s flowery grasses to plop languidly in the shade of a safari van tire, ignoring the cameras clicking just above his maned head. An elusive leopard cub crouching, then jumping into a twittering flock of birds in the shrubs near the road. An orphaned rhino with a sanctuary all to himself in exchange for enduring the caresses of endless pilgrims like us. Antelopes of all leaps and sizes. Graceful giraffes with their long, steady gazes. Legions of wandering wildebeests and zebra herds in all their striped splendor. And hippos surfacing in the murky Mara River with a surprisingly quiet whoosh that sounded for all the world like the softly exhaled breath of any swimmer in a summer lake.

We learned a little – not nearly enough – about the people of East Africa. While we struggled to sort out the differences between the many tribes, our task was made more enjoyable by getting to know some of the members of those tribes. There was George Omuya, our Kenya guide who was working for Micato while writing his master’s thesis in business administration. George is Kisii. And Alfred Mutai, our other Kenya guide, a Kalenjin. Nathan Masambu, our favorite driver, was Luhya. We met Kikuyus too, and of course the intriguing Maasai who told us the story of their people, danced and sang for us, and invited us to tour their manyatta and see how they live in their little mud-and-dung-walled bomas.

What follows on these seven web pages is a journal of our 13 days on safari. I have written it in some detail so I’ll be able to recall all the amazing elements years later. I’ve also tried to expand my knowledge of what I saw in Africa, by learning when I got home what I might have discovered there, but simply didn’t have the time to absorb.

Those who wish to skip the prose will hopefully still enjoy the photos. And for larger versions of these photographs, as well as a few additional images, I invite you to have a look at my Africa photo gallery.

Nairobi – Feb. 23-24:

After a 7-hour flight from Toronto to London, where we stayed one night to catch the wonderful (and highly-recommended) musical ‘Billy Elliott’, and a second 8-hour flight from London to Nairobi, we were greeted at Jomo Kenyatta airport in the early hours of Saturday morning by our Kenya guides George and Alfred. With our big, green Micato safari duffel bags in hand, we were shepherded onto a bus for the short ride to Nairobi’s venerable 100-year old Norfolk Hotel, where we sleepily by-passed the bar and headed straight to bed.

Bright and early some 6 hours later, we met the other 34 trip members for breakfast, followed by a general briefing by Philip Rono, our genial Safari Director, and a lilting talk by Rakita, a Maasai elder who acts as an “ambassador” on the lifestyle of his people. Then, wearing our new Micato safari hats, we boarded the buses for our Nairobi-area tour.

Our first stop was the Giraffe Centre in Langata, just outside Nairobi. Established by Jock and Betty Leslie-Melville in 1979 as a sanctuary for the rare Rothschild giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi), it is currently home to thirteen of the tall, graceful creatures, one of 2 sub-species of the common Maasai giraffe (G. camelopardalis tippelskirchi). Native to western Kenya and eastern Uganda, the Rothschild’s once-plentiful numbers were decimated through loss of their habitat to agriculture; they were also victims of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who enjoyed using them as target practice for his troops.

With their dictinctive lower-leg “white socks” leading the way, the giraffes approached the Centre’s feeding platform where they exchanged giraffe kisses (the 18-inch prehensile or clasping tongue is said to impart antiseptic properties) for pelleted food. We learned that a giraffe’s blood pressure is more than twice that of humans to pump blood up that 6-foot neck; that their normal gestation period is 15 months but can be prolonged three months to ensure favorable conditions; they can run up to 55 kilometers per hour; and that they normally live 20-30 years. With a population of 426 Rothschild’s giraffes now in the wild (including many bred at the Centre) and a generation of Kenyan schoolchildren educated as to their needs, the Giraffe Centre is a good example of the recent focus in East Africa on the priceless heritage of wild animals, often held in contempt by earlier generations of Africans, especially nomadic herders, who saw them as a threat to their livestock.

Back on the bus, we were off to the Karen Blixen Museum. Built in 1912, the house and its surrounding gardens were home to Blixen from 1917 to 1931, centered on what was then a 6,000-acre coffee plantation. These were the Colonial years when the Ngong Hills were known as the White Highlands, describing the European settlers like Karen and her husband, Count Bror Von Blixen, who emigrated to Africa to make their fortunes. (For background on the White Highlands, read this Wikipedia entry; and to capture the mood of the times, read this 1959 article in Time Magazine.)

Countess Von Blixen would not, of course, have ensured her place in Danish and African history were it not for Out of Africa, the book she wrote on her return to Denmark after drought and the Depression forced her to give up the farm. Under the pen name Isak Dinesen (it was unacceptable for women to write such books), she began her memoir with the immortal line: “I had a farm in Africa...”. Interestingly, the 1985 film with Meryl Streep as Blixen and Robert Redford as her English lover, the wild game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton (a relationship that began after Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from her husband Count Bror von Blixen, whom she later divorced) forms no part of the book at all – an obvious omission because Blixen was writing as a man.

For me, the book was infinitely more interesting than the movie, with Blixen carefully describing her relationships with her African farm workers, members of adjacent tribes and other colonials. Having just read it, I was eager to walk through the rooms she described, to see the cuckoo clock that so delighted the young Kikuyu goat-herders who crowded into the house to hear it chirp out the hour. “As the cuckoo rushed out at them, a great movement of ecstasy and supressed laughter ran through the group. It also sometimes happened that a very small herdboy, who did not feel any responsibility about the goats, would come back in the early morning all by himself, stand for a long time in front of the clock, now shut up and silent, and address it in Kikuyu in a slow sing-song declaration of love, then gravely walk out again.”

I also paused at the mill-stone table behind the house where Blixen had sat with Chief Kinanjui, head of the local Kikuyus, as they finalized the penalty for a shooting accident on her farm and where she watched the stars with Finch-Hatton (her lover, though the language in the book was necessarily ambiguous). “From the stone seat behind the mill-stone, I and Denys Finch-Hatton had one New Year seen the new moon and the planets of Venus and Jupiter all close together, in a group on the sky….”.

As we left the museum and drove down Karen Road, past the Karen Shopping Centre, Karen-this and Karen-that, I recalled a passage at the end of the book as Blixen prepares to leave Africa. “I had consented to give away my possessions, one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of”.

It seemed paradoxical, yet fitting, that the sad, lonely woman who had written so movingly of her last days in Africa should now be remembered in the streets, buildings and parks of the Ngong Hills she had once so adored. (For more on Karen Blixen, visit the Danish site devoted to her life, family and work.)

Soon, the bus was wending its way even higher into the lush, green Limuru Highlands as we approached our final Nairobi area stop, the Kiambethu Tea Farm. Established in 1910 by the first family to farm tea in Kenya, it has been home to four generations, including the original owner’s grandaughter Fiona Vernon and her husband Marcus, who now operate a lovely restaurant out of their home. As we strolled the grounds before lunch, we were entertained by rare black and white Colobus monkeys gambolling on the roof while myriad sunbirds nectared in colorful salvias in the beautiful gardens that had been planted by Fiona’s mother.

Lunch at tables on the lawn was followed by a tea lecture from Fiona, who demonstrated how it is only the top two succulent leaves and uppermost bud of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) which are harvested. As she spoke, I sneaked away to the gate at the bottom of the garden, where Fiona’s resident forest reserve expert, Richard Kimani, showed me the fields of tea plants and posed for my camera.

Soon, we boarded the bus back to the Norfolk Hotel. After a brief rest and shower, it was back on the bus -- this time to cocktails and dinners at Lavington, the home of Micato’s gracious owners, Jane and Felix Pinto. With a twinkle in her eye, Jane told us how Micato got its name many years ago, explaining how she abbreviated the name of their original company, Mini-Cabs & Tours, to the first two letters of each word. A sumptuous buffet was followed by a birthday cake and “Hakuna Matata” greetings sung and danced by the Lavington household staff for all whose birthdays would fall during the 2-week safari.

As the evening and our first day in Kenya came to an end, we boarded the bus back to the Norfolk, marvelling at the energy and organizational skill of Micato and the Pinto family.

Next: Amboseli National Park, Kenya

Tarangire Ngorngoro Serengeti Maasai Mara Mount Kenya