African Diary

The following seven posts on Caves and Hills were written during a recent three week Safari in Africa.

With guides at Richard's Camp, Masai Masai

From Nairobi we flew to Amboseli in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.  Onto Tsavo by road. The main Mombasa highway was a white knuckle ride as the two lane road was heavy with container traffic from the port of Mombasa. At speed bumps women selling tomatoes clustered around our vans.

Bush Breakfast after Game Drive at Galdessa

In Tsavo we stayed at Galdessa on the banks of the Galena River, then flew to Masai Mara for four nights.  After Masai Mara onto to Laragai flying over infamous Happy
Valley. The pilot, Kathy regailed us with gossipy details.

From Laragai we drove to Lewa Wild Life Conservancy for the last four nights.

Brunch at Borana Ranch

The journey was planned by Linda Dyer Millard who introduced us to her cousins, 4th generation Kenyans, and to Lewa Wildlife Conservancy where, until recently, she was a board member.



Here is my thanks to Linda, read on the last night at a spectacular Bush Dinner in a quarry at Lewa.

Dear Linda, our Oddessy is almost complete

So what can we say of this glorious treat

An inside look at an amazing place

That in your heart has a large space

You’ve guided us through desert, swamp and forest

Always ensuring we see the best

Your enthusiasm is contagious and care unsurpassed

And the breadth of your knowledge of Africa vast

Amboseli was such a good place to begin

In the shadow of Kili we all settled in

Then drove through salt flats where dust devils danced

Watching ellie and hippo, we were entranced

To Galdessa where Mugabe greeted us all

And our first bush breakfast you did call

This lifestyle we took to very fast

Sundowners, bush dinners - the die was cast

At Roberts Camp a suit of armor watched us all

While lion, leopard and cheetah had us in thrall

Onto Laragai and a wonderful change of pace

How we enjoyed that beautiful place

Then Lewa rendezvous so special to you

Created by a dedicated band of a few

Schools, rhino, poaching we have learned so much

And more, Lewa has your unique touch

So thank you dear Linda from the depths of our hearts

For your inspiration, guidance, every part

Kenya now is a sweet memory for us too

we can’t thank you enough - and Steve too

Angela Neal Grove, Lewa, October 3, 2012

Into Battle: Man's Best Friend

Tony, Tiba, Toffee and Tash are a crack K9 patrol of bloodhounds working on the front lines of the poaching battle in Kenya.

With elephant and rhino poaching now in the hands of organized crime the war is high tech.  Drones, helicopters and Google earth are among sophisticated combat tools.  However man’s best friend has a role. There is still a need for paws on the ground.

I visited these professionals on the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy.  I wanted to see them at work.  Before I got out of the Land Rover Tony was on his hind legs with a large soft chestnut-colored paw through the netting of his pen in greeting. These are not attack dogs. The work of Bloodhounds is tracking. It is fun for them and they excel.

With three handlers we set off to track a quarry. A footprint of a poacher is all that is needed. One handler played poacher. A piece of sterile gauze was placed over his footprint, then taken to Tony for him to get the scent and we were off.

Tony was focused and fast. I was trying to take notes and photographs which was a challenge as he raced through the knee-high grass and brush. He did some circles and some back-tracking which enabled me to catch up. Favorite hiding places for poachers are trees and warthog dens. Toby has seen and tracked it all. We were off again, even faster this time.  Then, success.

Tony was on his hind legs with his huge paws on the shoulders of the “poacher” who was hidden in a dense thicket. There was no escape for the quarry. Tony got a treat and let go. He seemed to be smiling.

Of the four blood hounds at Lewa Tony and Tibia are males and Toffee and Tash females.  They live in large grassy pens and are taken in at night to protect them from predators. Their diet is rice and meat.

Bloodhound training begins at 7 months.  They begin work after 9 months and are perfect at 12. They train daily with rotating handlers to learn different scents. They work for 8 to 10 years then retire.

This team at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Northern Kenya, close to the lawless Somali border, is sometimes borrowed and deployed by Kenyan police. They are used to track robbers and criminals. In crowded situations they are especially good as they are  friendly and non-threatening.  Its all about nose to the ground and getting the job done.

I was impressed. This quartet of consummate professionals is highly trained and effective.  When I drove out of the compound they all galloped to the end of their pens in a farewell gesture. Man’s (and women’s) best friends to be sure.

There will always be an England

A 16th century suit of armor stands on the verandah of Richard’s Camp in the Masai Mara, Kenya. This is the heart of big-game country where hunters once gathered over sundowners to discuss the day’s trophies.  Today it is the long lens hunters comparing  notes on images of the big five. Silently watchful the suit of armor has witnessed it all and so much more.

What medieval craftsman created this suit?  For which war?  Did it protect its owner from a lance-weilding French horsemen? Was the suit used in the War of the Roses?

The owner was clearly diminutive and it was made to measure, no doubt. The craftsman must have painstakingly hammered the pieces into shape on a wood-fired anvil, knowing that the owner’s life depended on his work.

And what fine craftsmanship. In 2012 the suit still stands ready for action, shipped out from England, along with the ancestral coat of arms. It is a shadowy presence at dusk when a roaring campfire throws off welcome heat for the cluster of sundowner sipping guests. This is when bullfrogs croak, crickets rhythmically clack and hyena’s who-hoop.  Masai escorts with spear and red shawls escort guests to tents through the latern-lit trees. 

This treasured, quintessential piece of family history clearly could not be left behind in England gathering dust or sadly placed, forgotten, in a museum glass case. Here among the lion, elephant, and hippo, which neatly munch and crop the lawn during the night, the suit is right at home, again part of the action. Along with afternoon tea on the verandah, egg and bacon breakfasts, Marmite, and claw foot bath tub in the trees the proper and expected status quo is maintained. To a Brit it is very comforting, however incongruous. Qintessential Keep Calm and Carry On.

TTFN

Life on the Galena River

My tent is on a small wooden platform overlooking the Galena River. At night snorts from hippos and whooping calls of hyena punctuate the blackness. The dawn is a golden time when the light shimmers on the water and life on the river awakens.

   

The water is low before the rains and elephants can wander through the shallow waters to the other side where there is a sandy beach. There they have dug a mud-bath and take turns to wallow, blowing trunkfuls over their backs. They emerge with the dark pinkish copper glow of the mud - the 'pink elephants' of Tsavo are famous. 

After the elephants a colony of baboons lope down the beach. They are followed by bush buck who drink deeply.  Beach life on the other side of the river is an endless and unfolding scene.

Further downstream the river widens out and the water gurgles and plunges over flat water-smoothed rocks.  Long tawny crocodiles sun themselves on the rocks by pools, with one amber colored eye keeping a watchful eye for morsels. In the deeper water hippos are submerged with ears, eyes above the water. They also watch.

The palm-fringed wide sandy beach below my tent has fine golden sand. It would be a perfect idyllic cover shot for a glossy travel magazine.  It is also enticing.   But this beach is deserted.  The camp’s resident elephant, Mugabe, occasionally checks it out and he is not good at sharing.  The downstream  crocodiles and upstream hippos are similarly not user-friendly. I decide not to tempt fate.

The river is at its lowest.  Rains are expected in about three weeks, the water will rise and cover the rocks where crocodiles now bask. Throughout the year a major source of water for the Galena River is snow-melt and water from the shrinking glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro.  If these two sources disappear no one is sure how this will affect the river and its wild life.  But for now the banks and the river belong to elephants, bushbuck, baboons, crocodiles and hippos. 

TTFN

The Threat of Mugabe

Galdessa,Tsavo East

This morning Mugabe woke me up. At first there were stealthy footfalls then a crackling sound as something snapped under his feet. I felt his presence very close. I looked outside and he was standing about ten feet away.

Named after the Zimbabwean dictator “Because he is so mean and has a temper,” Mugabe hangs out around the palm thatched bungalow tents of the Tsavo camp. This full grown African elephant, with his wrinkled leathery skin, gigantic ears and impressive white tusks, breakfasts on trunkfuls of fresh leaves from acacia thickets outside my tent. Because of his unpredictable disposition and other wild interlopers I must have an escort each time I leave.

At 6:15 I left to join a bush drive and sure enough he was still there.  Not content with waking me up, he trundled into my pathway and just stood staring at me. I retreated. Elvis my tent guard, and Masai escort with ceremonial spear, waited until Mugabe felt the urge to take off to find another breakfast bush.

He will be back.  While I am at Galdessa Mugabe, it seems, will be part of my life.

TTFN

Satao Elerai Camp, Amboseli National Park

Amboseli is all about Kilimanjaro.   Shaped like an enormous Christmas pudding, the mountain is a looming presence in the park.  It is the first thing I see in the morning when I open my tent flap. Some mornings long ribbons of gauzy mist enshroud the base. On others it hides behind banks of of clouds. "The mountain is shy," explains a Masai.

When Kilimanjaro is visible at sunrise the top is frosted with gleaming crystalline white,  pale pink and gold.  This appearance heralds the daytime pageant which begins with a dawn chorus of crickets, and birdsong. All that is left of the velvet blackness of the African night are lion, hyena and kudu prints in the dusty elephant paths.

Kilimanjaro stands 19,000 ft and its volcanic legacy has completely shaped Amboseli. The vast tracts of the land are salty white traced with animal tracks. In some places even the termite mounds are an ashy gray.

Once entirely within Kenya (British East Africa), it is said it was given to Kaiser Wilhelm by his doting grandmother, Queen Victoria. He had complained he did not have a volcano in his territories and she had some to spare in Uganda and Kenya. So, allegedly, he received Kilimanjaro as a birthday present from Her Majesty and the map was redrawn.

Today the snowy cap and glacier are endangered like much of the African wildlife. Satelite images of the crown reveal rapidly shrinking ice.  In ten to fifteen years experts estimate snow and glacier will be gone. Currently the run-off water from the volcano feeds watery swamps where hippos and elephant wallow. The water table supplies water to support tree and bush life.  What will this mean for Amboseli Park, the wild animals, the Masai who herd their cattle and goats there? No one knows.

But this morning Kilimanjaro was the first thing I saw. The remaining snow gleamed. Strings of gray elephants plodded along age old tracks at the base of the volcano, once given by a Queen to a Kaiser.  This morning Kilimanjaro seems like the essence of Africa.

TTFN

No elephants on this trip yet.  These are from my 2004/5 visit.

Rushed to window this morning to see what I could see in the park outside.  Four giraffes loping along and a couple of gazelles.  Not bad for a Sunday morning.  Cacophany from weaver bird nests hanging in adjacent tree.

Went to lunch at beautiful home of Linda's cousin.  Lunch was outside under an arbor - a proper English Sunday lunch.  Conversation touched on Al Qaeda operative recently taken out in Mombasa which has caused riots there.  Several thought it work of Israeli Mosad. Then upcoming elections in Kenya was discussed. Ten candidates, one of the most popular has proven links with Al Qaeda.  That lead to security concerns.  6 suicide bombers was intercepted this last week - fortunately.  Heading towards American Interests.  The Norfolk Hotel?  bombs and lots of amunition 4 apprehended, 2 got away.   Now I know why we are staying here.

Looking forward to taking off to the bush tomorrow.  Somehow lions are more predictable.

On the way back from lunch got caught up in bad traffic. Noticed construction project headed up by Chinese.  They are a huge presence here. It is unlikely poaching will cease while Chinese money is pouring into the country. They have just completed a 12 lane highway right through the heart of Nairobi. High speed rail is also planned.  Currently it is quicker to walk.

Dinner at Carnivore included sliced bull's testicles, ostritch balls and crocodile tail.

And so to bed.

TTFN