Wednesday july 15: Nairobi to Samburu.
The room at the Holiday Inn was good but unexceptional; the
rest of the hotel was quite unusual. For instance, the
restaurant opened to the outside air, so we had breakfast
looking at the exotic vegetation and the strangely coloured
birds picking away at food remains on the terrace.
At 7:30 we met Job who was going to be our guide for the
rest of the trip. It turned out that the two of us were the
whole company. Apparently they can make things work with
putting every couple or family that signs up for a safari
in a van with driver of its own, or maybe the tourism
industry is not doing too well.
We started driving out of town. The scene was similar to
the night before though precisely reversed: then we were
driving into town, seeing masses of people streaming out of
town at the end of the day; now we were driving out of town
without much of an interruption (save for an overturned bus
which was being hauled off the road unceremoniously) while
the other direction, into town, was a massive, though
unusually colourful traffic jam.
Not everyone drives in Kenya –
gas is at US prices -- so plenty of people were
walking to their job, including one well-dressed
gentleman reading the newspaper. As we got further out
of town the stream of people walking to work gradually
turned into individuals and small groups carrying
various goods on their backs, on their overloaded
bicycles, and in one case on a small dromedary.
The most popular form of
transportation for the comman man (and woman) is the
matatu: small busses for a dozen passengers. We saw
them loading and unloading everywhere, in town and
outside town. Most of them had names that spanned the
range from religion to popular culture -- the most
obscure one I saw was called "Crunked".
We passed through various small
to medium size towns, but the signs of habitation
never really left off. In between every two maize or
coffee or pineapple fields would be a small cluster of
buildings, usually containing one bar, one butcher,
and one cell phone shop. Everything very colourful.
Another constant was the groups
of cows and goats grazing somewhere in the fields off
the road, guarded by a single man, sometimes young
boy, and once a girl absorbed in a book while her cows
were grazing, roped to a post.
We saw a few markets where women,
again very colourfully clad, were sitting with mounds
of fruit and other wares. For a while we were wishing
we could have stopped in such places and walked
around, taking fantastic pictures. This illusion was
dispelled when we had to stop at a security stop and
the guide warned us to close the windows: as he went
in to show papers our van was immediately surrounded
by people who insisted on selling jewelry and fruit
and whatnot. It was then that we realized that
mingling among the crowd would have been completely
out of the question. We would immediately be
surrounded by a crowd of people too aware of how much
richer we were. Not a pleasant feeling.
By around 2pm we were at the Samburu camp. The word camp
conjures up tents and straw huts. Well, this was more like
fancy contemporary architecture inspired by tents and straw
huts. Everything looked great and everything was open to
the outside air, the bar, restaurant, and in the cabins the
walls are screens to the outside. When we arrived, in time
for lunch, there were just two other parties: one couple
and one family. Judging by the number of tables that was
less than one third of the capacity of the place. Tourism
is probably not doing too great this year. We had a
pleasant lunch, a short rest, and then went into the
wildlife reserve for some animal viewing. The other two
parties also left, in their own vans. We all had the roof
raised, so most people were standing to have a better view
of the landscape, and pretty soon of the animals.
We had already seen some zebras
and reticulated giraffes when coming into the camp
(and quite a colony of babboons, some of which greeted
us by humping each other in the middle of the road)
but now we added to this impalas, oryx, and our
favourites, dik diks, a sort of deer barely a foot
high and extremely cute. The male dik dik is
recognizable by thimble sized horns, and both sexes
can run quite fast and are somewhat shy. You would be
shy too if you were the size of an hors d’oevre.
On the other end of the size
spectrum, we watched half a dozen elephants pull some
shrubberies completely to pieces. Seeing them reach
for the tastiest bits of green with their trunks was
comical. No leopards showed themselves that day, but
we (almost literally) ran into one very lazy lion that
was resting by the side of the road. She could barely
be bothered to raise her head to see who was coming to
gawk at her.
Two very peevish looking
ostriches guarded a bunch of youngsters. They look
like you don’t want to mess with them.
Back to camp and dinner at 7:30. The food was great, the
Tusker beer refreshing, and on returning to our cabin, the
night sky was empty of clouds, full of stars, and even
provided a falling star if we needed divine assurance that
the rest of the trip was going to be just as good.
Wednesday night. Our cabin has insect screens for walls,
with curtains on the inside and rolled up canvas against
rain on the outside. This turned out to give a very nice
natural airflow in the middle of the night when a breeze
picked up. It also turned out to be somewhat noisy, as
every part of the cabin was flapping in the wind. Much as
if it had been a tent, I guess.
