Thursday morning july 16.
We left for an early wildlife drive at 6:30 with only tea
and a cookie to sustain us. Breakfast would be waiting for
us on our return. When we awoke at 6 it was almost
completely dark; by 6:30 it was almost completely light.
Daybreak on the equator.
The early hour brought out lots
of animal activity. Almost immediately outside the
gate we can across a herd of buffalo. Job said they
would be very aggressive if we dared to leave the car.
They were certainly staring at us quite a bit. Slowly,
first the alpha female crossed the road, then the rest
followed her.
We saw giraffes, lazily plucking
leaves from the trees, elephants devouring small and
utterly dried bushes, various smaller and larger
birds, and various deerlike animals, all graceful and
quite skittish.
The highlight of this drive was
when Elaine spotted a female lion which turned out to
have two cubs with her. Our guide anticipated where
she was heading and steered the car there. We saw the
lions approach, and pass by, a herd of impalas, all
standing at attention watching the lions. Even though
the lions approached to maybe 20 meters, there was not
a chance that they would chase down an impala. A mere
flaring of a lion’s nostril and the whole herd jumped
back another 10 meters. I saw one of the cubs look
back wistfully as the mother lion didn’t even attempt
to go for the impalas.
Coming back for a late breakfast we were the only ones in
the camp. It feels decadent to have a 5-to-1 personnel to
guest ratio in a hotel.
Our late morning trip was to a village nearby where the
people still lived in a very traditional manner. They dress
traditionally in bright colours and with many necklaces –
though we spotted a toddler in a Winny the Pooh shirt – and
make their own huts from braches held together with bark
and covered with goat hides or plastic. Cow dung also
features in this story. We were told that a woman can build
a home like that in three days. No idea how long it takes a
man, because building huts is what women do. In addition to
cooking for the men, tending to the fields, raising the
children. Makes you wonder what’s left for the men to do.
Well, we twice got a demonstration of song and dance from
the men of the village. The first dance was a welcoming,
and we got to participate. Kind of an East African version
of the Cotton-Eyed Joe. The second time was a more athletic
affair, where men can show off for the women.
We got to see the local school,
where a young woman was teaching a dozen small
children the ABC and the numbers up to 20. They
dutifully recited the alphabet for us, faultlessly.
Children learn there until they can write their name;
then they are ready to go to a real school, usually a
boarding school. Mind you, this class room was nothing
like what you imagine even the smallest classroom to
be: the children were sitting on the ground in a space
demarcated by some shrubs, and the blackboard was a
two square feet piece of slate.
It actually felt a bit staged to us. However, the huts we
were allowed to peek in were probably quite authentic. It’s
hard to image having a whole family, with children and
aging parent, in one or two rooms, but they seem to make it
work.
We made a donation to the school fund. We had also made a
donation to the tribe as a whole when we came in. And upon
our leaving our path was through a “market”: two rows of
girls and women selling jewelry and trinkets. Some of them,
we later found, were coming from a village just up the road
especially for the chance of selling to us. We bought a
couple of necklaces and included a tip for the guide, for a
total of about 20 dollars. God knows what that amount means
to them.
At lunch a second couple showed up at the lodge, and when
we came back from the afternoon wildlife drive there was a
third party, this time of people who were driving on their
own. While this may be very adventurous, we are glad we did
not do this on our first trip. It would have taken much
more preparation, and our guide knows these parks like the
back of his hand, not to mention that he was constantly
exchanging tips with his colleagues on where there was some
good wildlife viewing to be had. When Elaine spotted her
lion in the morning, Job alerted his colleagues and they
were there within a few minutes. One of that party turns
out to live in Kenya, owning a lodge of his own. They knew
what they were doing.
There was time for an afternoon nap and/or swim. When I
woke up from my nap, a large group of zebras was grazing
just outside our cabin. On the other side of the electric
fence, of course.
Thursday afternoon
The drives we had taken so far
have been on one side of the park, where the landscape
changes character quite quickly and you can never see
very far: you see the animals only when you’re fairly
close to them. For our afternoon drive we went in a
different direction where the landscape was much
plainer and you could see much further. Most of the
time we encountered animals we had already run into:
impalas, zebras, and elephants, but on our way back to
the lodge I spotted a hippopotamus in the stream. Job
said he hasn’t seen one there in years. Close to the
hippo was a large flock of Guinea Fowl. Thoroughly
silly looking birds who run single file through the
landscape, across the river bed, and on their way to
god knows what. Also along the river was a hog with
some little ones. Job says they are really stupid
animals, and that was clear to us: our approach
startled mama hog so she ran away from the stream with
four of her babies, leaving three behind. After a
while she realized that they were still at the water
and she started running back. Then she paused,
apparently having forgotten what she was running for,
and returned to the first four baby hogs. Hogs, by the
way, are also very ugly.
Dinner was good, the way the food
has been consistently good at this lodge. I wash my
dinner down with Tusker lager, which is excellent.
After dinner a campfire is lit, and we are entertained
by a young man in traditional garb whose first name is
Kenneth and whose last name is a lot harder to
remember. He plays on a traditional samburu flute.
Well, the design is traditional, the actual instrument
is made out of plastic, since not even the native
tribes are allowed to collect animal parts like the
Oryx horns that the flute is supposed to be made of.
Elaine talks him into letting me have a go at the
instrument. Kenneth uses something close to Turkish
Ney technique which is too hard for me, but I get
sound out of the instrument blowing it like an Anasazi
/Shakuhachi.
