We do finally see hippopotami on the boat ride back to the country club. Our trusty skipper, the sleepy Kenyan with a soggy canoe and a one-lung, asthmatic outboard, offers to ferry us around the island until we find what we are looking for. He assures us that he knows all their hiding spots. We are reticent to harass the hippos once our captain notifies us that they have been known to attack and overturn small boats, and that it’s actually hippos that “claim more lives in Africa than all the other animals combined.” But he ultimately allays our fears by promising that hippos are rarely aggressive in the daylight and only when separated from their young. He further claims that he regularly moves within their pods to fish, as this is where the schools amass to feed off the crumbs dropped by the munching giants, so we are reassured. Although Pami has just been reminded of my incorrigible knack for flashing a come-and-get-me wild animal bulls-eye on my forehead, she by now trusts the locals to know the real deal. She’s game. And we are in Africa.
We find hippos all right; tons of them swimming, sunbathing, rolling, and splashing around in the shallows. All along the way, our tiny craft encounters boats mashed full of smiling tourists trussed up in coast-guard orange life vests, bobbing along in much more seaworthy craft. But Pami and I are eyeball-to-eyeball with the hippos. We reach out our hands and pet them, getting damp from the nostril spray of the mighty and affably unthreatening hippopotamus. And that night, just like the happy hippos, my wife and I enjoy a little rolling and splashing of our own in our room’s beast-sized, claw-footed bathtub. After nearly two months of marginal bathing facilities, any tub can make Pami ecstatic, even the one in Lake Naivasha, where the brown water gets only lukewarm and merely dribbles out of the rusty spigot.
At dawn the following morning, we head out early for Samburu. Harrison says it is a long drive and in fact it is eight rock-hard-road hours long. He expresses concern that we might miss our buffet lunch. Pami explains that we’re pretty carsick anyway and that we’d be fine stopping at a roadside duka (a small kiosk or lean-to selling household basics) for karoti (carrots) and ndizi (bananas). It’s what she’s been used to doing in Kenya. Again, Harrison tells the dead-tourist story and insists that Sanjay will be upset with him if we miss a single scheduled meal. We make it to the lodge just as the staff is dismantling the buffet. So we each grudgingly fill one plate, take it to our seats, and are hurriedly ushered back to stack yet another. By the time we return to our table, a couple of the dozen cheeky monkeys swinging wildly through the open-air lounge have already made mincemeat of it, which suits us just fine.
Samburu’s topography is different from Masai Mara’s. Unlike the Mara with its spectacular Esoit Oloololo Escarpment that forms the western border of the Great Rift Valley, its life-sustaining Mara River, and famous Serengeti Plain, Samburu is a river valley. It boasts an open savannah, natural springs, and a desert scrub habitat. It is also loaded with wildlife and lush vegetation. Although we see many of the same animals in both, there are some subtle differences. For instance, the Grevy’s zebra is indigenous to the area and there are gerenuk that balance on their hind legs to eat from the tree branches. Harrison is excellent at giving us information about the animals. He tells us that he went to university to become a safari guide. It is well into our week together and our driver is beginning to open up and speak about things that matter to him, like politics. Later, I wonder what he would say about the revolution that is on the verge of erupting in his homeland. While I’m in Kenya, I don’t detect a shred of the storm of passion and violence that will soon rend this gentle country apart.
Harrison is wearing a jersey with “Iowa Hawkeye’s Junior Varsity Soccer Champions” emblazoned on it. I am about to ask him who he knows in Iowa when I catch myself, realizing that he probably has no idea what the logo means and that in all likelihood he has never even been out of Kenya. I do ask him if he owns a car, though, and he laughs at me. “Only the wealthy or the crooked have a car in Kenya,” he scoffs. “They are known as the wabenzi, named for the Mercedes Benzes they drive around in.” He also tells us about the Indians who came to Kenya as slaves of the British, worked during the early 1900s to help build the railroad to Mombasa, and ended up settling here. Indians are primarily the local business owners today and seem to be somewhat resented by African Kenyans.
Similar to in Masai Mara, we take early morning and late afternoon drives in the park. Although the terrain is different, the situation with the safari guides is the same. They communicate with each other on their vehicles’ CB radios to find out where the wildlife is. The constant staticky buzz generated by the intrusive boxes creates for me a distinctly off-putting sensory memory of Kenya. Sadly, it won’t be the only one. When there is an animal sighting, the radios come alive with chatter as a couple dozen assorted safari buses charge en masse, boring down through the crisscrossed, tire-matted savannah to jockey with a smorgasbord of manic foreigners from around the globe, who hope to catch that once-in-a-lifetime photo op. It reminds me of sport fishing, when some lucky boat with an electronic fish-finder zeroes in on a big school and is suddenly descended upon by a fleet of waiting vessels that seem to emerge out of nowhere. At one point we queue up in a frenzied gridlock to catch a glimpse of a leopard lounging high up in a tree with its fresh kill, a gazelle. Frowsy, pale heads and camera-clutching hands emerge from the pop-up tops of off-road vehicles, ranging from rugged Land Cruisers to rattletrap Nissans and everything in between. Rush hour in Samburu.
Harrison insists that we visit the Samburu tribe’s village, which we really don’t want to do if it is going to be anything like the Masai Mara experience. I don’t know if he is getting some sort of kickback, but Harrison is persistent. We relent, and it turns out to be quite interesting indeed.
We are told that the two tribes of Samburu and Turkana, with two separate cultures, are co-existing here because one has been displaced by war. The Samburu are more like the Maasai; they speak the same language, wear similarly colorful bead necklaces, and recognize age as playing a crucial part in determining social status within the tribe. The Samburu male circumcision takes place in early adolescence and signals a boy’s transition to manhood. He is qualified to be an elder at around thirty years of age. The females undergo genital mutilation on the day of their marriage, usually around sixteen years of age. In so doing, it is believed that they will no longer be motivated to have intercourse for pleasure and will therefore be less likely to stray from their husbands. There is no such expectation of the men. The Samburu families live in a clutch of huts made of branches, dung, and mud, surrounded by a fence of thorny twigs. These fences are a stunning statement of one of the unspoken horrors of foreign civilization’s intrusion upon the continent. They stand as an appalling testament, a washed-out graffiti sculpture of impaled garbage and commercial debris, discarded trash from supplies dumped on the continent by well-meaning nations, that has blown from god-knows-where across hundreds of miles of African wilderness and left to rot in the blazing sun and rattle in the crazy wind. Pami takes several photographs of this phenomenon. Sometimes only a picture can truly tell a thousand sad words.
The Turkana are similar in appearance to both the Samburu and Maasai, have a similar language, and are primarily herders. They have the reputation of being the most warlike of the three so we figure it is likely their tribe that has been displaced due to conflict. The Turkana also have the interesting distinction of being one of the few local tribes that has voluntarily given up the practice of circumcision. I notice that many of the men bear tattoos and I ask about this. Our guide tells us, “The tattoos denote the killing of an enemy, those on the right shoulder representing the killing of a man and those on the left shoulder indicating the killing of a woman.” Pami and I exchange wide-eyed nods as we proceed to the exit. Again, before we can leave, we are obliged to pay a fee and to buy some trinkets. I make the fateful mistake of buying a wild boar tusk from one of the old women.