Safaris in Two Styles for the Wild at Heart : Camp Kenya : Adventure Served Up in the Lap of Luxury

“I’d love to go, I really would,” said my wife.

“But?”

“Well, you know. Bugs. Snakes. Stuff that eats you: lions and leopards and tigers.”

“No tigers in Africa.”

“OK, but no toilet paper either. No hot water. And food: I like mine completely dead. Look, I’d love to see the elephants before they’re gone. I’d love to see a giraffe at dawn, eating off the top of a thorn tree. I’d love to see one of those sweet little deer-y animals with the long necks. . . .”

“Gerenuks.”

“Whatever. I’m sure I’d love it all, but I am not sleeping on the ground over a mamba hole with tsetse flies up my nose.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” I told her, “but I tell you what. It being our anniversary and all, suppose I take you to Kenya--lions, giraffes, rhinos, the whole nine yards. And promise you soft beds under netting, good food, maybe even a little dance music. And Kleenex.”

“Kleenex?”

“Kleenex.”

“You’re on.”

I take mild issue with Thomas Romeo’s accompanying contention that “Camping is the only way to see Africa.” Agreed, camping is truly a blast. But there are many ways to experience this disappearing Eden, ranging from the suicidal to the sybaritic. I have been lucky enough to sample most of them, usually as the Blanche Dubois of the Bush, relying on the kindness of strangers.

In a gentler time, I had walked through the sleepy villages of Gambia and slept on a chief’s hammock.

I had driven cross-country through the Tanzanian night in a Land Rover piloted by a madman intent on bagging a dik-dik for his brother in Ujiji, and ridden a gravid “mammy Wagon” 100 miles with an infatuated pig on my lap. I had been in a forest fire in the Congo (OK, Zaire), a riot in Rwanda. . . .

Never, never had I done time in what my wife calls “a proper bed.” It was a revelation.

For the Kleenex crowd--which is most of us--Kenya probably is the best bet, for several reasons. First, it’s better organized for the tourist.

Second, Kenya’s terrain (and consequently its fauna and flora) is wildly varied, from desert to jungle to bush to forest to a snow-capped mountain right on top of the Equator.

The trick is to get out of the capital of Nairobi as quickly as possible. It is a scruffy, dysfunctional city with all the charm of Depression-era Poughkeepsie.

Tack a note for friends on the trunk of the thorn tree at the New Stanley Hotel. (If you have no friends, fake it; it’s one of the things you do in Kenya.)

Then scoot.

Forty minutes away by twin-engined bush plane is the Masai Mara, a vast, numinous game reserve just over the border from Tanzania’s fabled Serengeti.

Our gutty little aircraft plunged from the high plains into the savannah, and we were met at the gravel strip by one of Africa’s ubiquitous “Combis”: four-wheel-drive mini-vans, topless, perfectly designed for illegally standing on the seat, head and torso untrammeled, the better to play Lord of Creation.

A meddle of monkeys, four wart hogs and a lone, stately eland later, we drove through the gate of the Mara Safari Club, in time for passion fruit cocktails all around.

Passing through a grand spotless lodge of polished hardwood (the club opened only last December), we were escorted to our “tent.” Tent? Our quarters were to the traditional conception of a tent as the Trump Tower is to a tepee.

Shaped like a Quonset hut in canvas, the tent was easily 30 feet long, not counting 10 more feet of front “patio” furnished with leather camp chairs. Inside were carpets over a stone floor; two large, comfortable beds with netting and electric lanterns for reading; a shower, a toilet, a dressing table with padded seat, mirror, fluorescent light, and 24-hour hot water from an individual outdoor heater fueled by a wood fire. And Kleenex.

Africa can overwhelm even the most fearless, but there are few introductions more felicitous than sitting on one’s own patio, feet up, Tusker beer in hand, overlooking a sharp bend in the Mara River.

In the mud below, an amorphous bulge of hippos lazily jostling for position. Right across the little river, in the high grass, a kaffeeklatsch of baboons, toting their baboonlets papoose-style. Downriver, a monstrous crocodile snorkeling up on a bobbing pair of Egyptian geese, just for practice.

The real adventure was to begin after a dip in the club pool and a buffet lunch in the lodge with more dishes than a Tupperware party.

The real adventure began, of course, on the first Combi run through the vast Mara, teeming with game; and the morning run, and the next evening run and the next morning run--each adding a hundred individual grace notes to future memories of Africa.

It is not the intention here to babble about animals; the section isn’t large enough. Each sally outside one’s cosseting quarters, however, holds its own transcendent moment, as well as its own frisson .

Mara moment: An acacia tree, sequined with vultures, shading a family of sleek and pot-bellied cheetahs after their breakfast run at an unlucky herd of impalas. (The family that preys together stays together.)

Mara frisson : A low-throated midnight scream from an adjoining tent--blessedly followed by a relieved giggle.

A Canadian named Michael, sliding into bed, had toed something warm and wiggling and shot from his sack like a man possessed. It turned out to be an unexpected hot-water bottle.

This, of course, after a five-course dinner, coffee and cognac, a dance by the local Masai and an evening of deliciously gory stories by Mike Clifton, the Mara Club’s “resident naturalist.”

Back into Nairobi and back out again, this time on a Combi ride north to the Samburu Game Reserve, past fields and farms and roadside stores. Samburu is on the edge of the encroaching desert, just this side of bandit country, in terrain as different from the Mara as Utah is from Alabama.

The Sharova Shaba perches picturesquely on the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro River. Its 80 rooms--two tiers of indigenous wood and stone blending so well with the landscape that you can’t see the compound until you’re upon it--are the epitome of luxury in the wilderness:

Over the beds, but still inside the obligatory netting, are adjustable ceiling fans, for cold or hot.

There are cushioned wicker chairs, a modern bathroom, tiled floors, flashlights, bug bombs (which we never used), Kleenex (!) and picture windows front and back, one overlooking river and bush, the opposite one improbably framing a tangle of trees, ferns and a small zoo’s worth of peculiar jumping and burrowing things.

The grounds are imaginatively and impeccably landscaped with natural streams, bridges, magnificent old baobab trees and flowers a Los Angeles florist would kill for.

The dining lodge is open-air, up on stilts, with a 360-degree view that includes a huge, meandering swimming pool below.

And food to match: Just for openers, breakfast comes equipped with eight different juices; scones and rolls and toast and pastries; the standard eggs and cereals, and an open-end choice of bacon, ham, sausages and some tasty if unidentified meatstuffs that it’s probably best not to question.

Routine is the same as in the Mara--if a game run can ever be considered “routine”--with nighttime dance shows by native Samburu and Somali tribes who do things with head and body that Michael Jackson only dreams of.

This is gerenuk country, and reticulated giraffe and oryx and Grevey’s zebra and a whole platoon of critters found nowhere else on Earth.

Samburu moment: A water buck, head and horns as still as a trophy, standing in the grass, only its nostrils moving, telling him a tale of life or death.

Samburu frisson : Coming over a rise and finding our Combi grill to tusk with a pair of extremely large elephants in flagrante delicto. Male elephant charges Combi. Combi is faster. Driver: “Well, I suppose I’d be mad too.”

Like tacking a note to the thorn tree, one must spend a night at Treetops. Obligatory. This is the three-story wooden barracks on the edge of a water hole--a pond, really--just inside the central Kenya’s Aberdare reserve. The place Elizabeth of Britain climbed up as a princess and climbed down a queen. J.S. Prickett, resident griot , remembers.

He was there. Prickett still tells the old tales--the good old tales--and he still feigns annoyance when his nightly talk is interrupted by arrival of the first herd of elephants and the bar/lounge empties in a cacophonous dash for rooftop or camera pit.

Treetop rooms are clean, comfortable but small--just big enough for double-deck beds, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody sleeps.

The pond and banks below are spotlighted, the animals have long since accustomed to the glow, and nocturnal beasties roam the area all night long. There is a late-evening feast at the long communal table, and mostly there is the thrill of just being within touching distance of the mysteries of an African night.

Treetops moment: On the fringe of a circle of elephants trunking for salt is a hard-muscled Cape buffalo, preening and pawing and looking for all the world like what he is--the most feared and dangerous beast in all of Africa.

Out of the night charges another buff, straight through the startled ring of elephants, straight into the braced horns of buff No. 1. No. 1 is knocked halfway across the pond. No. 2 snorts, does a little soft-shoe, and trots back into the forest. We’ll never know.

Treetops frisson : Have you ever had a bush baby up your pant leg?

Sometime or other you’ve got to wind down from all that Combi riding to begin to make the transition back to what is laughingly known as “the real world.” There is no better place in Africa than the Old World pomp of the Mount Kenya Safari Club.

At the foot of what the Kenyans call “The Mountain of the Gods,” the club’s manicured grounds roll out, golf-course green, into an infinity of lakes, groves, gardens and forest.

One may have a massage or a swim or a Combi ride or a shopping spree, or one may sit on one of the terraces and lose oneself in the graceful gyrations of the resident flamingos and egrets and storks and herons and ibises, and plot ways to stay another day.

And there is a coat-and-tie banquet, and a very sophisticated little combo winding up its international-song gig with a rousing chorus of “Jambo, Bwana.”

It’s beyond corny, beyond touristy, and everyone joins in and then toddles off to bed, exquisitely pampered and pooped.

It’s all a far cry from camping out--the antithesis of camping out. In lieu of a campfire there was a pleasant, gregarious man, assigned just to us, who came in to stoke our personal little bedroom blaze as a chill night straddled the Equator.

Somewhere down below, a Kikuyu group was entertaining the late-nighters, doing a series of drum riffs in undulating, intricate rhythms that somehow recapitulated a glorious fortnight in Africa.

On my wife’s night stand was a fresh box of Kleenex.

Camping, shmamping. It doesn’t get any better than this.