Letter from Nairobi - The Annual Migration and More...

Nairobi Sept 13th 06

Excuse the silence but we have been stuck in darkest Africa where rain still brings down communications.

It has been a fabulous trip with lots of genuine Africa moments to remember.
We started off in Nairobi over two weeks ago after flying here from Amsterdam with John and Judy Wilkinson, our friends from Portland Oregon, and like the gathering of the animals for the annual migration here we all came together Nairobi to fly to the Maasai Mara the most remote preserve in Kenya. It happens to be part of the Serengeti plain ( it is just the Kenyan name for the northern Serengeti.)

Nairobi is an interesting place - imagine 4 million peopled town with no major roads what so ever so as many people seem to choose to walk as drive here. Maribou storks sit on traffic lights and not surprisingly with the grid lock, half the traffic is foot traffic, this is strange as many of the people are still wearing formal business suits as they walk what is obviously miles to work, this formal attire must be a true hang over of colonial days. For a tourist, walking in Nairobi is a danger ous place and our driver locked us into our vehicle from the outside.

Our first plan was go to to Lake Nakuru to see the million flamingoes which gather here each year. The 80 mile road (which happens to be the main Pan African highway leading to Uganda is so carved with potholes (big enough to swallow a small car) that it took 4 hours to go this distance, traveling along with such heavy laden trucks that you could almost see the deterioration taking place. Almost the entire way to Nakuru is lined with shacks with such grand names as 'the Imperial Hotel' which was all of 20 ft by 20 ft. The roadside is scattered with the baboons, monkeys zebra and endless little stalls so all of Africa sitting on the side of the road. We got stuck in a giant traffic jam where there was a standoff in the middle of the bush. Might being right, traffic going to Nairobi took over both sides of the road, snarling traffic coming from the city. Our driver, in a minivan, took off into the bush guided by the odd local, until we eventually climbed a steep bank to get back onto the 'freeway.' Africa is synonymous with patience, and other minivans filled with at least 16 people each sat waiting for the lone policeman to untie the knot like a giant tangle of cords behind my computer/phone set up.

Lake Nakuru is in a small reserve that has lovely rolling bush and beautiful lime green fever trees throughout - the site of a million flamingoes it cannot be described and the only thing I can say is that the site looks like an African version of Money's Water Lilies. The blue lake below and the blue sky above and the shimmering misty flamingo pink in between.

Poor Judy Wilkinson on that day had a dental emergency and missed the trip to Nakuru and landed up having to go to Nairobi hospital to visit a dentist. This visit was arranged by the American Embassy for her to see a Dr Patel - on arrival she was asked some personal questions and not long after ascertained that she was booked to see Dr Patel the gynecologist (there are 4 Dr Patels at Nairobi hospital) anyway all was well and the next day she went to Nakuru.
John Wilkinson also had a bizarre situation in Nairobi. We went to see orphaned giraffe and while standing watching them on a raised viewing platform a giraffe took exception to John not giving her a treat and head butted him (Materazzi style) totally shattering his hearing aid - it happened instantly - I saw it all happen in a split second as the giraffe used the side of its jaw to administer a well placed karate chop to his ear, not even dislodging his hat. I am wondering how he is going to word his insurance claim.

We gradually all assembled in Nairobi meeting with Chuck and Diane Newman, from Florida, Barry and Joan King, from South Africa JOhn my brother and his good friends Tom and Lyttleton Hollowell from North Carolina. We all flew on a charter the 40 minute flight to the Maasai Mara - where game has to be cleared off the runway before landing.
We stayed the Kichwe Tembo in the luxury of a tent - an oxymoron to the sound of it - but the tents had everything you could want. The tents have zippers on them which are tied closed as the monkeys can unzip the zip, baboons are totally banned from the camp because they have figured out not only how to unzip the tent, but untie the laces too.

On the first night we had a wonderful dinner and enjoyed all the excitement of being in the far away bush. The dining and bar area are completely open thatched buildings, elegantly set tables and beautifully presented food keeps coming. I felt I was back in the Colonial Africa of my youth where elegant evening dinners were standard nightly fare. The camp looks down onto an open plain filled with thousands upon thousand wildebeest, and zebra. Giraffe and elephant wander through the herds.

That evening talk got to bull frogs which apparently have teeth. On getting into bed Joan King was greeted by Barry her husband leaping out of bed with amazing agility as he said he had a frog in his bed which turned out to be a hot water bottle.

We had all come to see the masses of animals cross the Mara River. Last year our friends only saw a crossing on their last day so we knew we were lucky enough to see the animal crossing on our first day and in fact saw 6 separate crossings on subsequent days - we also saw plains filled with as many as 200,000 wildebeest all standing there at one time having survived the crossing of the Mara river.

The animals always have a reception committee of giant crocs waiting to take away the injured and infirm. Mara River crocs are massive and can grow up to 17 feet. One watches the gathering herds of wildebeest and zebra on the other side of the river, they begin grunting anxiously to get across. It takes hours (and sometimes days) until one brave soul makes the plunge into the river and then all the others following like lemmings and often jam up into dangerously congested groups, like people running out of a football stadium. In their anxiety to get across some dont follow the safe low ground where they can leave the river bank but some wildebeest threw themselves off 30 foot cliffs - it was terrible to watch and we saw 2 wildebeest badly injured - lying there obviously with hips and legs shattered ,then one was taken right in front of us by a giant croc and they other poor soul lay there for some other less fed predator to take him (we hoped sooner than later for he had no chance to survive). It was awful to see but we felt a little better to hear that this year's crossing had less carnage as the river was low and the casualties less. No one can adequately describe this force of thousands of wildebeest and zebra hurling themselves into the river and possible death.


The Maasai Mara (which means spotted land) is dotted with acacia trees which are dotted in between the misty wheat colored grasses as far as the eyes can see and the mere expanse of this land is overwhelming (a little like the expanses of Wyoming is my only equivalent) It has a "garden of Eden untouched by human kind of feel to it (although this is not so). The Maasai tribe tall and thin (300,000 of these stately people live within the Reserve) in their traditional bright red dress live here amongst the animals. One day some Maasai stopped our car to ask if we had seen their goat and this was not a mile away from a pride of lion.

Dave had a wonderful birthday (he always does ...Sept is a lovely time to have your birthday) We had a lovely pre-lunch celebration with the group and then we sat and watched the sun go down over the Mara river with cocktails and as the night came on we watched hippo coming out of the river to graze. Joseph our guide surprised us and instead of taking us back to the camp for dinner, he took us for a dinner in the bush - we came around the corner and there under a full moon was a long elegantly candled and set table waiting for us for a special dinner in the middle of the plains. It was quite haunting A Conga line of staff began singing Kuna Metata (means no worries in Kenyan a birthday song apparently) and accompanied by odd insruments like knives forks serving spoons and mugs - conga-ed to Dave with a beautiful cake, then the a lady from the other table (a South African opera singer) sang Amazing Grace, Dave's favorite hymn. The only thing that could have been better would have been to have his children and grandchildren with him too.

Our group was incredibly enthusiastic - a lot of the group became what a British lady told me were called "Twitchers" i.e. people who check birds off their bird list. One day while the Twitchers in our group were trying to identify a little brown bird on one side of the vehicle a lioness was walking on the other side.

It was hard to leave this incredible setting but after 7 days on intense game and bird viewing it was time to move on.

The morning came to leave and a troupe of monkeys bounced on our tent to wake us up and a warthog grunted as she and her 6 little babies rooted outside our tent and Isaac our tent custodian once again, as he had done daily, and whispered "Jambo (hello)" as he carried our freshly brewed coffee and cookies to our bedside and greeted us with his smiling face to awaken us for another day and other adventures.

More later..........

Part 2
Last night I woke up with rain dripping very close to my head, the sound of the water on the tent was loud, blob blob blob, it went on and on.... the problem was that I was no longer in a tent in the Mara but back in my bed in Lubriano, Italy. No doubt another project looms to further expand my Italian builder vocabulary.

We left the Mara and said goodbye to the main part of our group and flew to Amboseli National Park which is at the foot of Kilimanjaro. Not knowing whether we would ever be back to Kenya, this seemed like a perfectly sound idea.

As the small plane landed at the Amboseli Airport (just an airstrip in the middle of the plains), dust devils of wheat colored sand five stories high swirled all about us. All around us they dotted the horizon. It looked as though we were landing in hell and not in a game reserve.
Our guide book had warned us that Amboseli was under threat by poor land management, with too many elephants and too many "Van der Beests" (as our guide in the Mara called the thousands of mini-vans filled with tourists.) Van der Beests up until a few years ago could drive off road in Amboseli, what with this and elephant stripping off all the bark on the acacias,things had fallen apart. At one time the wildebeest and zebra of Amboseli had been able to migrate to the Mara but today with the growth of Nairobi the animals are stuck in this park.
In the Mara, the re-birth of the annual cycle and the regeneration had been a joy to watch, but here "the center cannot hold" (Yeats) and it was sobering to see when nature is tampered with how in a short period desertification can take place.

We spent two nights at the Amboseli Serena Lodge which is surrounded by very lush woodland and gardens. All this is a painful reminder of what this park once was. The Hotel and its grounds are well fenced off with high voltage fences and we saw an elephant gingerly reaching over the fence with its trunk to sample a few delicious leaves growing in the hotel grounds and that are now gone from its habitat. Stealing apples from a forbidden orchard in the middle of a parched land.

Of course with the reduction of habitat monkeys were all over the camp. One tried to grab my binoculars off the table. I also saw a monkey get into a cupboard under the tea and coffee station on the hotel verandah, but what was most amazing is that he crept in to the cupboard and closed the door behind him. I told a waiter passing by, he opened the door and there was the monkey in the back of the cupboard sitting there with two handfuls of sugar packets.

It was all a scene of animals making do with what they could.

Of course we were coming from the trip of a lifetime in the Mara, and were spoiled rotten. If we had been coming from any other game park that we had ever been to, we would have been quite content to see quite a few herds of elephant, hyena cubs, and prodigious birdlife.

Kilimanjaro itself has been affected by this desertification in the region and the cap which once boasted snow, to look like Mt. Fuji all year round, now only has seasonal snow. The mountain itself is one massive mound of a volcano, rather than a spiky mountain. It looks from the bottom as though you could walk up it and back in a day. This of course is nonsense as it takes a week to trek up to the summit.

It was with a certain amount of relief that we flew back to Nairobi for a couple of final nights to wind down from what was a truly fantastic trip. So it was migration in reverse, just as everyone had come together in Nairobi so everyone peeled off, leaving Dave and me to switch off the lights.

The day had come to leave. While I was in the hotel lobby an awful lot of commotion was going on. People were swarming all around each holding a walkie talkie. A man came up to the person next to me saying "Good morning Your Excellency!" This was a dead give away and I looked at the man standing next to me, and then in the same glance at a big portrait of the P.M. in the lobby.

"We have a match".

I said "Good morning Your Excellency, you have a wonderful country" shook his hand and left.