She usually gave a warning before charging. This time she didn’t.
There are too many elephants in northern Tanzania. I worry each time I guide here. The normal dozen people crushed to death annually surged a few years ago to two dozen. Fortunately, my car squeaked out of a dangerous situation.
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.
We started out with a day of touring near where we’re staying, at the gorgeous Hemingways Resort in Nairobi’s suburb of Karen.
What struck me most of all about the day is how much more interesting these standard attractions have become, as the facilities and guides have improved so much.
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.
Our 15-day journey through Kenya and Tanzania ended at Ngorongoro Crater, one of the most majestic landmarks earth has to show. Although it rained a little and was ominously overcast, the game viewing was good.
We saw about 20 lion, many elephant, lots of antelope though no big herds, plenty of hyaena and a bunch of other stuff, including the serval. That’s not a rare cat, but it’s very rare to see it.
We left the main road at around 9 a.m. We returned to the main road around 3 p.m. How many cars did we see? Zero. How many roads did we follow? Zero, Zilch.
How many people? About 6 nomadic Maasai. How many wildebeest, zebra, eland, gazelle, ostrich, hyaena and jackal? I can’t be sure. Maybe a million. Maybe a million and a half.
We left before dawn in search of leopard. Most safaris do find a leopard but not all, and together with the rhino it’s very difficult to find. Tomorrow when we head to the crater to end the safari, we’ll exhaust our chances. There are no leopard in the crater.
There were spits of rain, but the sunrise seemed to push the clouds away. It seems to be very wet all around us, but right here it’s still very dry. Many animals have left. No one had seen a leopard for days.
Monday we flew into the southern Serengeti over Ngorongoro Crater then south of Olduvai Gorge. There should have been tens of thousands of animals. There weren’t. Much of the area was dry as a bone. It shouldn’t have been.
How could we ever find the great herds in this? Were there even great herds left?
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.
My little group of two couples, close friends, arrived Nairobi at night from London and by 9 a.m. the next morning they were braving the city’s challenging traffic for a very special visit.
I’ve traveled back and forth to Africa all my life countless times, and probably most of those are through London. Why London?
An English Breakfast.
Fastest Way.
Some may have trouble accepting these simple and obvious truths, so let me elaborate.