At the time of our marriage in 1975 my wife and I “signed” a
pre-nup. We agreed to have children and to go to Africa. The children came
along in due time, and after forty-one years together, we completed our vows
with a trip to Kenya and Tanzania.
No thanks to me, the planning went very smoothly. Somehow I contacted an outfit styling
itself TrueAfrica. I thought that
I had gotten their recommendation from a friend who had recently visited
Botswana, but no. Well, perhaps
from my sister-in-law, a world traveling physician, not her, either. I must have imagined or dreamed up
TrueAfrica. But whatever fates
placed us in their hands, we were blessed with everything we hoped the trip
would be.
Traveling to Africa requires a lot of sitting in
airplanes. At this time no
US-flagged carrier flies non-stop to east African destinations. Our choices required a flight to a
European capital and subsequent travel to former colonial regions. We chose BritishAir, Houston to London
and London to Nairobi. Two months after the trip I remember nothing of our time
in the air; memories begin at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
We arrived at 10:45PM and retrieved our luggage at
midnight. Airport infrastructure,
at least the baggage handlers, could not manage the near simultaneous arrival
of two international flights. As
we stood around, we met a number of our fellow passengers—a couple of Londoners
on their honeymoon, a 30-year British expat returning to Kenya after visiting
relatives in England, and a 40-something man who became so distressed with
waiting that he had a Trump-like tantrum, yelling at the baggage handlers and
cursing Kenya in general as a disorganized, third class country. Our greatest worry was that the long
delay might have complicated our transit to the Nairobi hotel. Lucky for us Kenyans have first class
patience.
The Fairview is a lovely place, built at what was the edge
of Nairobi in the 1940s. Much has
changed in seventy years, and now the property sits smack dab in the middle of a
gated community that also houses several embassies. Security is tight.
We passed an armed guard at the hotel gate and a baggage scanner before
check in. In anticipation of
President Obama’s visit in 2015, the authorities installed surveillance cameras,
similar to those all over the British Isles, to record street traffic. We inadvertently tested security the
next day as we walked through the hotel gardens. A path that promised a panorama took us to a position with a
view of the garden and the hotel. Across the street rose a high wall with
Kenyan soldiers patrolling its perimeter.
My wife noticed a sentry post on the wall itself, manned by a soldier of
clearly un-Kenyan nationality. She
waved. Rather than returning her
friendly gesture, the soldier pointed and scowled. Almost instantly, a man in a suit hurried up behind us. He introduced himself as the hotel
security chief and told us to return to the garden. Turns out that we had gazed into the Israeli embassy
compound.
Later in the day the hotel arranged a taxi ride to the
Kenyan National Museum, our only tourist foray into Nairobi. The museum holds a
well curated display of the country’s history from pre-colonial times to the present,
sprinkled with skeletons and taxidermied bodies of the country’s celebrated wildlife. The ride back to the hotel displayed
the capital’s not-so-famous rush hour traffic. Automobiles mixed it up with motorcycles, pedicabs and
pedestrians. My wife and I agreed that Nairobi’s drivers are even less observant of rules of the road
than their Latin American counterparts.
The Fairview welcomed us back with an early dinner and a comfortable bed.
Our flight from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro International Airport,
just across the Tanzanian border, took us to the east of the majestic mountain
of the same name. The view from
the plane would be our only glimpse of the peak. Clouds occlude the summit for 300 days of the year, and our
day at Hatari Lodge was not among the favored sixty-five. Hatari (“danger” in Swahili) was the
title of a movie filmed in the locale in 1962. Howard Hawks directed and John Wayne starred, but more
important for the future of the lodge was the appearance of the German actor,
Hardy Kruger, in a supporting role.
The beauty of the area so impressed Kruger that he purchased land used in the filming and
attempted to attract German tourists until newly independent Tanzania imposed
laws discouraging foreign involvement in the national economy. While the property offers fine
accommodations and an open park that attracts game—we saw zebras, cape
buffaloes and a pair of giraffes—its charm pales against that of the Tanzanian
game reserves and national parks that we would see in the days to come.
To cover our wide-ranging itinerary, we made several short
hops in single engine aircraft.
The first, Arusha to Kuro (Tarangire) had a pilot who spoke with a Castillian
accent. He looked so young that
one of our fellow passengers asked how long he had been flying. I was thinking “Tanzian Foreign Legion
Air Corps.” But Luis, from Madrid,
proved older than his looks and had flown several years for Air Excel.
Tarangire National Park is justly famous for its large
elephant population. The park
includes a large marsh that attracts animals when other water sources disappear.
Although we saw elephants everywhere we went, the view of more than 100 in a
single location was unforgettable. We also saw our first lions in
Tarangire. A pride of four females
devoured a cape buffalo as we watched from our open Toyota Landcruiser. We were so close, too close for my
comfort, initially, that we could hear the lionesses crunching the bones of
their kill. As long as we did not
leave our seats, the beasts apparently saw us and the vehicle as an
unthreatening background.
In her pre trip research, my wife identified a site off the
safari track. The Kondoa rock
paintings document ancient human occupation in east Africa. Mary Leakey described the paintings in
a book published in the 1940s, and more recently UNESCO has declared them a
World Heritage Site. To our
request, the tour operator responded that no one had asked to visit Kondoa
before. That should have signaled hatari, but with our intrepid
driver, we set off on the “highway” south. Turns out that despite its cultural importance, Kondoa is
rarely visited, and we discovered why. The track to the paintings is steep,
rocky, and gullied. Only by the
grace of the high-clearance, four wheel drive Landcruiser did we reach a parking lot. Just who did the art, its
significance and its dating are yet to be determined. But clear to anyone with eyes and an imagination, the
paintings show two dimensional representations of humans and prey animals—buffalo
and giraffe. I expect that the
next time that tourists utter “Kondoa,” the True Africa folks will reference
our experience and suggest that they reconsider.
From this point on everything—the fabulous Ngorongoro
Crater, the giraffe colony near the Dunia Camp, waiting in vain for the
Wildebeests to cross the Mara River (but seeing them framed in a double rainbow), and the single cheetah followed by a dozen
tourist vehicles—went by like a dream.
