Well now, social media – this same Facebook that you’re now using – may be the most powerful political tool on earth. Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta has even bettered Trump tweets by unfollowing his Deputy President.
Kenya is agog. First of all, you do know what “unfollow” means don’t you?
Infidelity, sexual deviance and pornography are now all OK, and this is as monumental a cultural change as gender rights. American-led it is spreading across the world. Example which follows is Kenya.
The acceptance of what only a few years ago was considered immoral and unethical is aggressively rationalized by churches, especially evangelical ones as political necessity. Religion has unmasked its piety. If Jesus or Muhammad only knew.
If there was no animal library for Lion King and Disney had to make them all up, the mountain bongo would be the first created.
Larger than a deer, it’s as cuddly as a panda. Huge spherical eyes drip with love. It walks delicately through deep forests like a water thrush, its wiggly nose forever sniffing flowers. But what puts it on the ToysRUs shelf is its gorgeous thick chestnut coat with pure white stripes like icing over candy.
When I was a young safari guide, we almost always saw bongos. Today they’re all but extinct, but! The news at the moment is exceptionally good!
In this topsy turvy world developing countries with huge social needs like Kenya are much more aggressively pursuing organic farming and containing climate change than the U.S. Do they know something we don’t?
Yes, or stated more correctly, they know something we stubbornly refuse to see at the tip of our nose.
Travelers and investors alike are going to have shift the way big game safaris are enjoyed and operated as a result of indisputable climate change over the equator. And this, of course, is actually incidental to the disruption caused millions of equatorial African residents.
I’ve seen first hand the melting of the glaciers in Alaska, and now I’ve seen first hand where some of that water falls: onto the equator and it’s unbelievable.
Grevy’s and twigas and giant hogs, oh my! We got almost all of them! The point of the Kenyan extension to a big game safari in Tanzania is to see all the unusual and rare game not found in Tanzania.
The Aberdare National Park is a highland rainforest. There are several in Tanzania, but none as large and none that still have the rare game we saw there. In Samburu, a remarkable ecosystem at the very edge of the great desert, dozens of animals and birds are found nowhere else.
We are in a “safari camp” called Saruni in Kenya. It’s the only “camp” in the Kalama Reserve, 220,000 extremely wild acres that sit just on top of Samburu National Reserve. I’m hard pressed to think of a more beautiful place for tourists to stay in all of East Africa.
Later today and tonight we begin our game viewing, but arriving just for lunch it was universally decided to just “hang out” for the rest of the afternoon. You can imagine why.
Most Americans traveling to East Africa for a big game safari only visit Tanzania. This is a switch from a historic situation that began when safari travel earnestly began in the 1960s right up to the first Kenyan political trouble of the early 2000s.
But Kenya is coming together, again and personally I think for a good long while. There are wild animal aspects to Kenya which simply can’t be replicated in Tanzania, and that’s how my group began their safari here.
Ole Kisemei took me to the highest point in the Mara this morning, Kileleoni. The view was magnificent, but what we saw going up and down was even better.
What goes around comes around. My private deck, in my private villa, in a hidden valley along the Mara River is only a few miles but more than 40 years away from where EWT began its first safaris in 1976.
Reheated “safari soup,” cold chicken legs and warm wine that’s gone off is replaced with gourmet minestrone, perfectly seasoned beef wellington and the finest South African cab. The grit and cold water, long-drop toilets and hard spring beds have been replaced with comfort and elegance the likes of which you could also find in Tuscany, the Belem coast, Milford Sound or outside Yellowstone.
Difference? Thousands of wild animals.
If we left Saturday morning as planned and drove to our next destination, there was no doubt we’d get stuck. If we flew out we’d miss our next game park, Amboseli, because there were no connections that would work.
The rains have pummeled Kenya. Though heavy rains aren’t so unusual they don’t arrive with this intensity before mid-April. And remarkably we arrived our first lodge in dust and heat with the staff bemoaning there hadn’t been a drop of moisture since December 6. The next day we woke up to dripping ceilings and in 24 hours Oldonyo had received almost a fifth of its entire annual rainfall.
The seasons changed in front of us. We flew into Chyulu Hills near Tsavo in Kenya in the dry season, and two days later the veld had transformed with some of the heaviest rains I’ve ever seen. It was beauty incarnate.
The Chyulu Hill is this relatively small area of ancient crushed volcanic blowholes now covered in verdant bush. It stands above the great grassland plains that ultimately touch Mt. Kilimanjaro, so as we left the hills to game view in the plains, Kili was always in view.
I was in Nairobi yesterday watching a brilliant protest backfire miserably.
“Rowdy Kenyan youths” (as described by the police) deflated the tires of more than 200 vehicles on Kenya’s main highway at the peak of rush hour causing a nightmare traffic jam that backed up the city for nearly a whole day.
After all their hard, creative and persistent efforts it’s heartbreaking watching Kenyans now destroy their beautiful society. Then again the heartbreak feels the same when I think of what Trumpism is doing to America.
The Kenyan government defies court orders to turn the country’s TV stations back on. The Trump government defies laws passed by an overwhelming vote in Congress to impose Russian sanctions. Yes, there is protest and outrage but not enough so both governments prevail in their anti-democratic slaughter of freedom and liberty.
Hopefully the remarkably stupid Kenyan government has learned its lesson, but it remains to be seen.
Today Kenyan courts ungagged the country’s three major TV networks. Tuesday the government pulled the plug on the networks for covering the mock swearing-in ceremony of the loser in the recent national election.
As you’d expect the first moments’ back-on-air was a press conference of the mock government and faux president who would never have drawn this amount of attention had the government not gagged the TVs in the first place.