Out of Africa

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  • Image Borrowed from Wikipedia, My photos long since faded

Here are my scattered memories of Africa – Summer of 1981.

We drive down a dirt road in one of the Kenyan National Parks. Our guide, Henry(our tour group takes up two buses and we have two guides, I can see our other guide’s face but I can’t think of his name. He is actually the driver, but I will go with Henry for the sake of the story) stops and points out some elephants in the distance. Standing up in the bus, the roof of the bus opening up into a canopy so that we can stand and take pictures unobstructed by windows but safely within the confines of our vehicle, I cannot see the elephants. I look and I and I look and I look, Henry pointing off in their general direction. Finally, I detect some movement. No wonder, from this distance, their grey bodies actually blend in with large rocks in the landscape. I hope we will get closer than this but I’m impressed that our driver can spot these far off literally, mammoth-sized animals. Towards the end of the trip, I am much better at spotting creatures. It takes time to train the eyes and mind to pick creatures out of the landscape. Fortunately, more often than not, the beasts are right up in our faces.

We turn the corner in our VW bus, an elephant blocks the road and squares off. This one I spot right off without any help from Henry. The elephant is larger than our bus. And she is pissed that we have entered her personal elephant bubble. Our driver stops and slips the gear into reverse, backing off slowly. The elephant trumpets and charges. Our driver slips the gear into neutral and revs the engine. The loud noise neutralizes the charge.

A snake slithers in the grass as we walk from our hut to the dining room. The snake is a black mamba, a highly venomous and aggressive snake; the bite will kill a human in half a day. A soldier lifts his semi-automatic rifle, bashes it onto and crushes the head of the snake. Monkeys watch the bloody scene from their perch up on a thatched roof, waiting for an easy meal from cooperative or sloppy diners.

An entourage walks past us. The room is alive with whispering and gossip. I am told that it is William Holden, a famous actor that owns the hotel that we are in, the Mount Kenya Safari Club. I do not know or recognize him. I have seen the film Stalag 17, the movie that inspired the comedy Hogan’s Heroes, and the Wild Bunch, though I can’t remember if I saw the films before or after I saw William Holden. He died later that year. Our tour group meets an old matronly woman in a long dress and lots of heavy jewelry, like a character from an Ernest Hemingway novel, sitting in the hotel lobby. We sit in a large circle with her at the focal point. I don’t remember what we all talk about, but I remember that after talking for quite a while, she remembers everyone’s name and story without exception, and I have already forgotten hers.

The Kenya Safari Club was a staging area for another amazing place called TreeTops. On this in between day, of all the things I could of done, I go golfing. No one else is on the course, one of the craziest courses I ever try to play. The tees hit off of cliffs over corn fields and into valleys and back up again. My caddy is a local, a guy I guess to be about my age. After the first hole, I figure out that he intends to play. I give up a couple of balls for him to hit and we play on. But I am way over matched by the course, (I am over matched by most courses), and I lose all my balls to corn fields and ponds and whatever hazards presented, well before I complete the eighteen holes.

Treetops is a hotel in the trees. I remember an armed guard escort, as we walk from the end of the road, to the hotel. My mom and I squeeze into a very small room, more like a compartment on a train than a full hotel as I remember it. The hotel overlooks a watering hole with a natural salt lick that attracts the animals. At an altitude of some 7000 feet, I remember the night turned very cold as warthogs and rhinos visit the oasis in the sky, their breaths visible in the waterhole illumination.

We stop at a tribal village of dirt huts. We pay for the privilege of meeting the villagers. The moment we step off the bus, I and everyone else who ventures out, are accosted by colorfully dressed women, with expanded earlobes and heavy neck rings, selling jewelry. Ten women shove jewelry in my face and give me no room to move. I am very uncomfortable with this extreme violation of my personal space. Eventually, we are freed. A couple of us are invited into a hut, a cylindrical mud structure with thatched roofs. Inside, I have to squat down and I am leaning up against the wall. At this point, I am informed that the walls are re-enforce with dung. I quickly surrender my purchase from the wall.

Our tour group, what I remember of it, consists of two octogenarian couples, who wear bandannas over their faces to keep the dust out, and suffer mightily from the bouncy rides on the dirt roads. Most of their conversation centers on their meds, I vow that I will be more diverse in my conversational skills if I ever make it to that age. One day, parked out in a huge heard of wildebeest, also called gnus, George gives me this joke, which I’ve used about a hundred times since, given the opportunities at zoos and the safari park: “No gnus, is good gnus”. The other group comes from New York City and are gay. They are well-spoken and intelligent people. One of the men does voice overs on commercials that I have heard. The other does paintings for hotels and offices but feels compromised and stifled lacking artistic control over his subject matter. He and his partner act worse than most married couples that I can think off, constantly bickering at each other throughout the trip. One of the gay men is single and aggressive, going out to bars and picking up men. The early 1980s is the time that Aids made the leap from Africa to America. In hindsight, it makes me wonder. I remember another English guy with a couple of tweenage kids that have the worldliness of well-traveled adults. I can’t remember if they were in our tour group or if we just ran into them a couple of times.

At some point we cross over the equator into the Southern hemisphere, my first time. Henry points out Mt. Kilamanjaro. I can’t see it. We are near the border of Tanzania, at that time, in much greater political turmoil than tourist savvy Kenya. I remember the story of tourists robbed and abandoned on the Serengeti by soldiers. I strain my eyes to look for the mountain beneath the large band of clouds. Henry tilts my head up. The snow-covered flattened peak rises above the cloud line. Whoa! I am stunned at the size. On our later prop-plane flight from Nairobi to Mombasa, we fly at eye-level with the top of the peak.

We travel from park to park, Tsavo, Amboseli, Maasai Mara, Mt. Kenya and a couple of others that I don’t remember, even looking at the map. The wildlife is always stunning – elephants, lions, rhinos, hippos, crocodiles, water buffalo, gazelles, giraffes, zebras, gnus, ostriches, warthogs. The warthogs left quite an impression on me, strutting about the water holes with a regal ugliness, impressive ivory tusks jutting out from their flattened faces, stiffened tails pointed to the sky. I take hundreds of pictures using my grandfather’s 200 millimeter zoom lens shooting rolls and rolls of film. One doesn’t truly appreciate the power of the digital camera until you’re stuck changing rolls of film while the wildlife runs off or how cautious one is in judging whether or not to take a shot for fear of wasting film. Film is finite! Still, I think at least half my portfolio is birds and lizards. I remember being quite impressed by Maribu storks, scavengers with featherless heads, long conical bills, and penetrating eyes waiting for the opportunity to move in for a meal. I wonder if these pictures still exist in a shoe box in the dark corner of a closet?

After the photo safari, my mom and I fly to Mombasa on the Indian ocean, a town I mostly remember for the mosques. And then on to Malindi. I snorkeled in the Indian ocean, the Indian ocean home to dangerous rock fish and poison tipped urchins. The tide was crazy, receding something like a half mile out. I walked out to greet the ocean but ended up swimming back, the towel I left on the sand at low tide, quickly consumed by and lost to the incoming tides. On the way back in, I must have swam over a jellyfish. I swam quickly towards shore not sure what was going on, a stinging sensation on my arm and stomach, the stinging sensation turning into a burning sensation. I never saw it. When I got to shore, I had small welts diagonally across my left arm, stomach, and right leg. A man pointed out the condition on a sign just off the beach of all the maladies one might encounter. Sure enough, it looked just like the picture of a jellyfish sting.

I am sitting on the boardwalk. A black man passes by on a donkey. He looks straight at me and says “Some tourists no good.” Maybe I looked at him funny and didn’t realize it. Maybe he just didn’t like tourists.

I still have memorabilia from that trip scattered about my house: wooden figures, stone hippos, a green malachite mask that my mom talked me into buying, a wooden giraffe letter opener. The only pictures I have are the memories imprinted on my brains. I vaguely remember wanting to come back with a Masai spear and shield. Times were different, I sure the stewardesses (yes, they were still called stewardesses back then, not flight attendants), would have been happy to help me store such a trophy in the overhead bin or under the seat compartment in front of me. But if I did, I’ve long since skewered or impaled my enemies, (or was it my brother), with said souvenir.

Marabou stork, Leptoptilos crumeniferus edit1.jpg

  • Image Borrowed from Wikipedia (Muhammad Mahdi Karim), My photos long since faded