TALK about a culture shock. One day I was scraping the ice off the windscreen in cold old Oxfordshire; the next I was being served a truly delicious al fresco lunch in about 30 degrees, on a table complete with white cloth and napkins, outside my tent in the Masai Mara Nature Reserve – with a family of warthogs threatening to trip up the waiter, and elephants, buffaloes and zebras grazing in the mid distance.
Flying to Kenya to see the wild animals is truly like flying from one world to another – and the sheer speed of the transition is unsettling.
So much so indeed, at least in my case, that when I arrived at Little Governors Camp, I had to take a siesta rather than setting out on the afternoon Safari Game Drive that was on offer.
And many would say that was a pity because I thereby missed seeing three cheetahs streak across the African plains, at perhaps 60 mph, to bring down and kill a wildebeest – an event witnessed , and of course photographed, by some of my fellow guests at the camp.
Secretly, though, I admitted to myself that I had no regrets. I needed an afternoon to acclimatise before coming face to face with nature quite so raw in tooth and claw.
I had flown overnight to Nairobi as a guest of Witney travel company Audley Travel, been transferred to a small nine-seater aircraft and deposited, after about 45 minutes in the air, at an airstrip apparently in the middle of nowhere, but actually not far from the Lewa Conservancy camp where – or so my copy of the Kenyan paper Daily Nation informed me – Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton.
Even before you come down to earth in the Masai Mara you feel like some alien being from another planet, for there beneath you are hippos by the dozen wallowing away in the muddy waters of the Mara River. And from then on things only get better: even on the short drive by Land Rover to the camp you are likely to encounter wise-looking baboons, pretty gazelles, not to mention dozens of highly coloured birds of all shapes and sizes, such as the electric-blue Lilac Breasted Roller Bird, gleaming brighter even than the brightest British kingfisher, and, if you are lucky, an ostrich or two.
Only human beings are noticeable by their absence; no sign of them anywhere until you disembark from the Land Rover and make your way down well made steps to the Mara River, pausing only to glimpse a crocodile on the way, where a smiling boatman greets you with a cheery “Jambo” (Swahili for Hello) who ferries you across.
Little Governors, with only 17 tents and of course no electricity, is the smallest of four Governors’ camps – so called because they lie on the forested and game-rich banks of the Mara which, before Kenya gained independence from British rule in 1963, were reserved exclusively for colonial governors and their guests.
The camp was the first luxury tented camp in Kenya. It was founded in 1972 by Tanzanian-born Aris Grammaticas, the son of a Greek railway engineer who came up with the idea – thought crazy by many at the time – of pitching “large tented rooms with bathrooms on the back” on the edge of a water-hole. He obtained a concession from elders of the Massai tribe (and that word, tribe, is perfectly acceptable in Kenya) and prospered; slowly but surely promoting the Mara wilderness as a prime resort for Safari tourists, armed these days with cameras rather than the rifles of former times.
Now Aris's two sons, Dominic and Justin, and daughter Aria, employ nearly 600 people in an organisation which in addition to the Governors’ camps also owns two others: on Lake Naivasha and on Lake Victoria, into which the Mara flows, an area now becoming popular with Americans and others as the birthplace of President Obama's father, a member of the Luo tribe.
The word safari means journey in the Kenyan language of Swahili, and in earlier times of course rich Europeans would journey for weeks on end to track down big game, living the while under canvas. These days, though, you can pop off for a few days in darkest Africa at the drop of a hat and endure no discomfort whatsoever, even though you still live under canvas. Indeed, speaking for myself, I found no trouble at all in quickly becoming accustomed to living in the lap of luxury safari-style – even though candles and hurricane lamps were the only lighting after dark.
All the same, it was impossible to ignore the large bull elephant I observed from the comfort of the bar tent on the first evening; in the light of the camp fire I saw him bumbling about outside my tent's verandah, eating the bitter-tasting fruits of the so-called Green Hat trees which sheltered the area. How could he see where he was going, and might he not by mistake blunder into a tent like a tank hitting a small building, we asked each other over a sundowner whiskey?
Daily safari life springs into action at Little Governors at 6am when a tent steward wakes you gently with a pot of strong tea (grown in Kenya of course). That leaves you just time enough to take a shower which, miraculously enough, exists in your well-equipped private bathroom, complete with wc, at the back of your tent. Then its time to turn up for the first game drive of the morning at the Land Rover parking spot across the river.
My first lion turned out to be an adolescent male, perhaps two years old, whom we found snoozing in the clear early morning air – while vultures picked clean the remains of a recent kill nearby. Never have I seen anyone so completely relaxed as that lion. He looked like a soft toy carelessly thrown on a child's bed, regally ignoring the apparent homage of all those humans from distant lands who surrounded him and gawped at him.
My next meeting with lion-kind took me straight back to childhood, to my enjoyment of Born Free, by Joy Adamson (which, incidentally, is being republished next year [2011] to celebrate its 50th anniversary). A lioness looking exactly like the book's heroine, Elsa, strolled by our Land Rover – containing, besides me, two elderly English ladies, a German couple in their late forties, and our driver-guide Joshua – not six feet away from us.
In fact she strolled between our Land Rover and another one which turned out to be occupied by BBC TV presenter of The Big Cat Diary, Jonathan Scott, who bases himself at Governors' in order to follow the lives of the cats he loves. He told us that the lioness would be appearing on our TV screens in 2011 in a new series called Lions: The Truth.
In the game drive that afternoon and during subsequent drives during the next couple of days, I was lucky enough to see giraffes, towering over desert fig trees like so many cranes on a building site, jackals, hyenas, cheetahs and even that shyest of all cats a leopard. But just how wild are these animals? To what extent was I in a sort of zoo without fences watching semi-tame beasts? These were questions that kept nagging at my mind.
Answers came when we were searching the trees near a small stream for that elusive leopard.
These plains and the animals on them are wild alright. I realised this when Joshua, the driver guide, allowed me to step down from the Land Rover at a pretty bend in the river that was somehow reminiscent of the Evenlode (except there was a small crocodile flopping into the water), and I noticed that underfoot were whitened bones and sculls and horns all over the place.
The stark truth is that everyone here feeds off everyone else, and should one of these big cats be hungry even a human might potentially feature as a proteinous morsel.
The Masai Mara was established in 1961 on lands roamed by the Masai, that fiercely independent people who seem to scorn material possessions. It is 589 square miles of wide open country where much of the film Out of Africa was made; and it connects to the Serengetti National Park across the border in Tanzania.
About a third of the Masai Mara Reserve is completely empty of human settlement.
The Masai still herd their cattle about over the other two thirds ,often staying overnight in compounds surrounded by stockades to protect them from the animals. It is a point of contention now that the nomadic Masai receive little benefit from the tourist trade while being excluded from so large an area of the Reserve, and to redress this a little it seemed a good idea to visit a Masai village – for which the inhabitants charge US$25 (about £12) and put on a welcome dance with audience participation encouraged.
Personally I was encouraged at the village to see that Witney company Audley Travel had helped pay for a bio-gas project at the village.
This will be of huge help to women who have the job of collecting firewood over ever greater distances as it becomes depleted. The bio-gas is created from the dung of the cattle.
On the way back to Nairobi I flew over the farm about which Danish author Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa. It is now a smart suburb called Karen. And in Nairobi I found time for a gin and tonic at the Norfolk Hotel where that other tribe, White Kenyans, still foregather every Friday in its cool colonial courtyard.
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