Return to Mara

The week before leaving Tenwek, I took the opportunity to return to Maasi Mara and the Safari Club, which my wife Cheryl and I had visited on our 25^th wedding anniversary in 2002. Maasi Mara is a game preserve, which is however owned by the Maasi who still live here in small villages, still keep their cattle (sometimes mixed in with the game) and still hunt lions that endanger the aforementioned cattle. The Mara means the “spotted land” and indeed from the slopes of the escarpment, which commands the landscape, the wide expanse seems strangely dotted with solitary trees at orderly intervals as far as the horizon. This is in contrast to the area further south, the Serengeti in Tanzania, which is essentially treeless.

The Safari Club is situated in an oxbow of the Mara River, a reliable watercourse except in a drought year. The river protects the thatch-roofed lodge and canvas tents on three sides and an electrified fence on the North side. Nevertheless, evening strolls without a guard are rigorously discouraged. The Safari Club is that odd mixture of opulence and exigency which means to me “This is Africa” although in a larger sense I think any sentence that begins with “Africa is…” is immediately suspect of over simplification. The entire African continent and its many diverse peoples are immune from any easy summation of its essence.

On our arrival in 2002, we settled into a large and well-appointed, if rustic tent, with two single beds, modern plumbing and solar heated water. Looking out the front porch however was the curve of the river and the red wall of the fine-grained silt, which makes up the banks, falling 30-40 feet to the river below. In the curve, parked it would seem by a careless attendant, were about a dozen dark grey to startlingly pink hippopotami. Supposedly, the hippos had chosen this site as it was free of crocodiles due to rapids above and below this stretch of the river. They are accustomed to laze away the hot afternoons in the Mara River, with occasional sallies-forth into deeper water after some hippo domestic quarrel with loud grunts and mouths agape. After dark, however, they emerge, climb the steep bank and walk single file to browsing areas, returning in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied , like a drunken sailor coming to port, by hubbub, loud halloos, grunting, fussing and fracases. For those who sleep lightly, hippopotami are not good neighbors. In the morning, deep but surprisingly narrow furrows in the landscape show where the hippos have slunk out and back to the river.

Cheryl and I spent the time at Mara doing game drives interspersed with leisurely meals, and conversations with the many other guests and staff. Once while we were eating a late breakfast in the high-ceilinged dinner room, we were assaulted by a blood-curdling growl, morphing into the squeal of a pig-sticking ending in the heart-rending cry of an injured child. It seemed to emanate from the very air around us, lasting for about 10-15 seconds. On catching our breath and looking around, none of the several waiters in attendance seem to have heard a thing. What we finally discovered was that the thatching of the lodge was inhabited by tree hyraxes. Hyraxes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrax are small critters (the “coneys” of the KJV of the Bible) who oddly enough are most closely related to elephants. Now that we were in on the secret, we waited for another outburst and ourselves pretended to be stone deaf.

The game drives typically start shortly after sunrise and our 6AM wake up call, by the tent attendant, was ameliorated by his leaving a pot of cocoa and a plate of several excellent almond macaroons. Over time, this procedure, however, had not gone unnoticed by the local troupe of Verbit monkeys who had learned to reap this harvest. By following the attendants at a casual distance, they could whisk away the food before a groggy guest could retrieve it. Being duly warned we made a point of arising in a punctilious fashion at the first call.

One of our cherished memories is that of the naturalist, an authentic old East Africa hand were there ever such a one. He was tall, and thin wearing his grizzled beard, a slouch hat, khaki hunting shirt, shorts and knee socks with aplomb. While normally in Land Rovers, we scheduled a walking tour with him early on our final day.

Cheryl and I were the only ones who arose in time and thus had an entourage of our own. On the walk but we had security in abundance; a uniformed guard with a shotgun and two Maasi warriors in leather kilts, red plaid, spears and dangling pierced ears. The walk took us around to a number of sites just outside “the wire” but it was not without drama. As we rounded a curve, we saw about 40 yards off, a spotted hyena, acting strangely stiff-legged.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“Hunting you, I would imagine,” was the naturalist’s immediate response.

He turned out to be a regular gossip about the political life of Kenya since its independence. He had marked and ardent views on the character of the personages of the day, especially in regards to the Leakey’s, that family of fossil-hunters and scholars cum politicians who successfully bridged the era from British East Africa, the colony, to The Republic of Kenya.

“Humph, now Richard (Leakey) has been made the curator of the National Museum, very improper. He hasn’t got the education, too political, much the wrong sort of precedent, doncha know. His daughter, Louise now, London educated, you see, good lass, should see the family name right, I should think. Married some Belgian chappy though….”

Observations on nature, Maasai marriage customs and drinking habits were interspersed with the experimental reaction of the Tsetse fly to zebra herds (confusion and apparent nausea ), the nature of butchering hippos and his preferences in game meat (Eland and an opinion in which I concur).

It is now eight years later and I returned to Mara not only to take a break but also to revisit this wonderful place since I was a mere two hours drive away. I was scheduled to leave in the early morning but could not go until noon, as the ward and nursery were so busy. Collins, my driver, gave me a running commentary of the trip; pointing out the sights including his hometown and stopping in a cloud of red dust when he saw his father walking home from the elementary school he runs. “Habari gani’'s” and welcomes exchanged we were on our way again shortly arriving mid-afternoon in time for a late game ride with Leo who would be my guide and driver for the next two days. Where Collins was spare and lively, Leo was quiet, large and capable, seemingly able to drive the deeply-rutted game trails, talk non-stop (via radio) with the other drivers as they compared notes as to where the game might be found, point out the open side of the Land Rover at a distant gray blotch and call “Tembe! (elephant)” simultaneously.

The Safari Club has much changed, having been renovated after being sold to the Fairmont chain. The tents are now on smooth stone platforms, the beds replaced by a queen size four poster, the plumbing and lighting ungraded to reliable (i.e. between 6AM and 11PM). The shower especially is a wonder, as it supplied authentically hot water and in adequate volume to justify the name. I muchly appreciated this as the first night we finished the game drive after 6PM (ie in the dark) during a driving rain storm we had watched sweep in from the east. I walked to my tent in the deluge and arrived wet and cold. A hot shower and a pre-dinner pot of tea was a welcome restorative.

With the change in ownership, the lodge has been roofed in tin and the thatching and Hyraxes removed in consequence. The waitress was obviously just new, very earnest, very nervous and quite proper to the mzungu mzee (old white man). No amount of banter made her relax or stop fussing with me while I contented myself with looking about at the new décor in the nearly empty dining room and reading my book on Swahili. In the past, on a Friday evening there would have been several presentations regarding the game in the area and even a dance demonstration by the local Maasai.

Hyraxes, thatching, naturalist and dancing were gone, leaving the evening strangely quiet in the rain.

The following day, Saturday, I went on two game drives morning and evening, the landscape again threatening with dark clouds welling up in the afternoon behind the escarpment. This time we ventured up the slope in search of rhinoceroses. Rhinos, I was told, favor a higher, cooler and more shaded environment in the wet season Moreover, these came with their own posse, an army detachment, stationed there to discourage poaching which has reemerged after the political turmoil of 2007-2009. Leo pulled up and motioned us to get out when he sighted a large bull “White” Rhino (properly “Wide Rhino”, for the shape of the mouth). We happily followed snapping pictures as the animal stalked off uphill until one of the guards urgently called something in rapid Swahili. Leo immediately herded the Belgian family I was riding with and myself back into the Land Rover saying “That is not the right rhino, the zamu (guard) says he is too arrogant.” While I was trying to picture a humble rhino, we moved about a hundred yards uphill and found two young males grazing. This time we were able to get within about 20 feet of one of them as he methodically grazed on the short grass and young shoots. We took turns taking “bragging rights” pictures of each other with a rhino in the background. On coming back to the Land Rover, a cartridge box labeled “TIPS” was prominently placed in the middle of the trail. We all left a contribution.

Coming back to the Mara, we spotted a walk of giraffes. A group of giraffes is a “walk” as they will move from place to place single file at regular intervals using their seemingly sedate stride, covering 8 feet at a time.

We arrived as a group was leaving a browsing area, walking by the vehicle about 6 feet away. One giraffe remained, apparently scratching an itch in his right ear using a tree branch (some 18 feet above us) for the purpose.

Over the three days I went on four game drives, each time seeing much that I had seen before and yet always something new I had never seen: a family of mongooses getting up to sunbath after the cool of the night; a young lion apparently oblivious to a snout covered in about a few dozen black flies, a secretary bird laboriously taking flight, a troupe of baboons racing the vehicle and pouring over the trail in front of us.

Sunday, Collins was there to see that I packed up and got off on time despite the wet roads. As I was leaving, I surveyed the river from the veranda behind the lodge, spotting the sinister shape of a crocodile a hundred yards downstream from the gray-and pink hippos grunting in the shallows of the oxbow of the River Mara.