Safaris in Two Styles for the Wild at Heart : Camp Kenya : TENTING: the Thrills Without Frills

I couldn’t be sure how many were out there. They had just shaken me from a deep sleep, a herd of cavorting hippopotamuses bellowing like out-of-tune tubas as they blundered and splashed in the dark waters a hundred feet from my tent.

No one had said anything about camping with hippos, I thought as I listened to their midnight mirth on the shore of Lake Baringo. I lay awake most of the night, tracking their sounds through my canvas tent and waiting to sidle into the darkness to the distant latrine. But even when the revelry subsided and the camp seemed calm, the snorts and grunts of a lone hippo grazing between the tents kept me stranded inside.

By the time I finally left the tent, the African sun was burning through the dawn clouds. The hippos were back in the lake resting, only their heads poked through the water, brown bumps peeping at the shore. We eight campers peered back, shaking our heads in awe and amusement at our obnoxious neighbors. I walked toward the lake to get a closer look. Two hippos yawned, showing cavernous, pink mouths. Others paddled closer, then circled out in single file and disappeared into the lake.

“Camping,” a friend said as we walked back to our tents, “is the only way to see Africa.”

That’s the sentiment that convinced me to go camping for the first time. Until then, my idea of roughing it had been staying at a motel without an ice machine. But as our group reached the halfway point on a two-week camping safari through Kenya’s most popular lakes and game parks in the summer of last year, I couldn’t imagine better accommodations.

To be sure, there are more comfortable ways to go on safari. One can see elephants grazing or lions playing in the high grass as easily from a lodge as from a campsite. But to fully experience the world beyond a minibus window, camping is authentically best. The sound of a hyena prowling outside your tent wraps you in the romance and reality of Africa.

The snow-covered peak of Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro loomed through a sheath of clouds like a celestial being. On the blazing plain below, a bearded wildebeest scampered before a dozen grazing zebras, darting and leaping in a lunatic dance. A jackal ran ahead of the bus, then dived into the brush. A small herd of elephants grazed near the horizon.

We had just arrived in Amboseli National Park after a four-hour trek on the dusty, pockmarked roads from Nairobi. Our guide, Joseph, sat amused in the driver’s seat, politely jerking the minibus to a stop with each oohhh and aahhh from behind. “We will get much closer to the animals,” he said. “Are you sure?” someone asked. “Yes, yes. I am sure. Trust me,” he said, then laughed.

A 30ish member of the Kikuyu tribe with extensive knowledge of the game parks, Joseph not only tracked animals but maneuvered the minibus to within a few feet of fighting elephants and feeding lions. Amboseli, one of Kenya’s smallest game parks, is famous for its herds of wildebeests, Burchell’s zebras, water buffaloes, gazelles and a handful of the endangered rhinoceroses, but it’s the elephants that seize the imagination.

Although the elephants have been heavily poached for their ivory during the last decade, the gray giants seemed to be everywhere in Amboseli. They grazed in herds numbering from a few individuals to a few hundred, always with sentries posted for their only predator, man.

Alongside our minibus, a calf tried to filch a bunch of grass that another calf had shaken free of dirt. A bull inexplicably dropped to its front knees and kicked its hind legs like a circus performer. Two juveniles squared off in play, their trunks entwined, one driving the other like a sumo wrestler into our shadow.

At dusk we drove to our campsite, marked by a stone in a cluster of thorn trees surrounded by the the dusty plain.

This is the no-frills camp. Those wishing more pampered treatment can choose from several luxury tour operators who offer campsites with permanent tents and private baths, meals served on fine china and good wines. But we were comfortable enough in our rickety abodes, sleeping in bags on thin foam mattresses and dining on staples--lots of bread, cheese and fresh fruit. The cost was about $1,200 each.

Our first night in the bush was cool and quiet; it surprised me. I expected the night to be more menacing and claustrophobic. The cook managed a good meal of pasta, potatoes and beans on a fire that brought our group together under the sparkling canopy of the Southern Hemisphere. Over drinks, we traded stories of travels and careers, and drifted into the darkness to our tents.

During the next few days our routine was to drive in the morning to view wildlife and return in the heat of the day to camp, some to sit at the shaded table to read or write letters, while others washed clothes or napped.

One afternoon I followed the sounds of laughter from my tent to the edge of camp, where three young Masai herdsmen leaned against a minibus, talking with a few of our group. They wore traditional red cloth, tied like a toga over their lanky frames. Elaborate red and yellow earrings dangled from their spool-sized lobes. Their hair, braided and matted with red ocher and fat, stained the backs of their necks.

The eldest of them let us examine his weapons. He appeared to be in his 20s, but no one was sure--years are not counted by the Masai. We touched the sword and spear he used to protect his cattle from predators. The Masai protect their herds fiercely, for not only do they measure their worth in cattle, they live on milk and blood drawn from living cows.

We spent two more hours together. They were intrigued by our jewelry, cameras and sunglasses. Then they returned to the bush to watch their cattle graze under the high sun. We went back to writing and reading about the people of Africa.

After three days in Amboseli, we headed north through the lush forests and grasslands of Mt. Kenya, then out on the plains to the Samburu Game Reserve. We set up camp on the sandy banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro, a muddy oasis amid a parched landscape of desert scrub and savanna that’s home to a range of wildlife. It’s one of the few places in Kenya to see the reticulated giraffe and the Grevey’s zebra, together with Marabou storks, gazelles, dik-dik and gerenuk (varieties of antelope), and, of course, vultures.

Samburu brought home the usual risks of camping: a snake near the latrine, warnings of scorpions and of crocodiles. An unusual risk, too: “There has been some trouble with Sudanese refugees,” our guide said as he explained why two guards armed with machine guns had been hired to patrol the camp.

Sudan was 300 miles from our camp, an unlikely source of danger. Only after our return to the United States did the reason become clear: In July, 1989, poachers and bandits were believed to have slain five tourists, including a Connecticut woman, in the game parks. Since then the Kenyan government has stepped up patrols and instituted a shoot-to-kill policy against poachers. The U.S. State Department currently says security has “improved markedly” but cautions against solo camping.

We moved west from Samburu to Lake Baringo in Kenya’s lake region in the scar of the Rift Valley. The rough roads carried us slowly through the late-morning bustle of small villages. A man, twirling a blade of grass in his teeth, walked his bicycle past a woman balancing a basket of vegetables on her head. Outside the villages, herdsmen pushed their goats and cows through the valley fields.

The most famous of the Rift Valley lakes is Lake Nakuru, where, in one of the world’s greatest bird spectacles, 2 million flamingos gather in alkaline waters to feast on its algae.

One sees a bustle of pink and white as the birds skittishly preen, feed, honk and flap. Their spindly necks and legs belie the gracefulness they reach in the air, black-spotted wings and outstretched bodies in effortless flight which concludes with a running splash in the shallow waters.

The national park at Lake Nakuru pales in comparison with the others; we saw only a few water bucks and oryxes there. But, as with the hippos at Lake Baringo, the best wildlife encounters took place at the campsite. As we set up camp under the tall acacias, water bucks grazed in the lush green grass, dozens of Vervet monkeys skittered about and a handful of baboons retreated to the bushes behind our tents.

At night a group of bush pigs crashed through the food tent, bumbling in the dark through the cans and pots. The cook screamed to scare them off, and a few of us laughed as he muttered about his sleepless night.

We left the Rift Valley--and the only campsites with showers and toilets--for three days in Masai Mara, the largest and last game park on our safari. The Masai Mara Game Reserve ranges over 974 square miles that adjoin the Serengeti Plain of Tanzania and is famous for the more than 1 million wildebeests and thousands of zebras, gazelles and antelopes that migrate there once a year.

We found instead a smattering of gazelles, giraffes, topi and anxious predators amid an Edenic landscape of grassy plains and acacia trees.

A male lion, his ribs showing through an emaciated body, moved slowly along the plain. The wind rustled his black mane. Behind him, in the golden camouflage of the savanna, three lionesses licked and nuzzled their cubs as they grappled for milk.

On the horizon, five giraffes marched in a row, heads bobbing in unison. Shafts of light broke through a low cumulus canopy onto hundreds of Thomsen’s gazelles as they grazed.

These and other images that unfolded during the next three days enraptured me as we crisscrossed the vast Masai Mara. Even the driving rainstorm that shortened our last game drive and toppled my tent left me secured by this noble, pristine landscape.

It was our last night on safari. The rain had soaked my tent and sleeping bag and left me only a small spot to sit on. I waited for the storm to end, remembering a conversation I had with a Kikuyu merchant at a roadside stand.

“How do you like our country?” he asked.

“It is quite beautiful,” I said.

“Yes, but it is only beautiful to the foreigner,” he said. “To us it’s only very poor.”

Indeed the realities of Kenya--the potholes of its capital, the poaching of its wildlife--belie much of the land’s romance. Some of us carried Karen Blixen books and other adventure stories to help us imagine a world long gone.

But as we drove through Masai Mara for the final time, a shared, primeval heritage still seemed to beat on these vast plains. It was quiet and empty and I watched the bus tracks dissolve in the grass. I wished to see a giraffe or gazelle for the last time, but there was nothing, only a solitary, crooked acacia twitching in the wind.