Simba!

My most recent flurry of travels included flying from Somalia to Calcutta with a layover in Kenya, permitting me to revisit a favorite haunt.

The vast, sprawling city of Nairobi, and both of its airports, butt right up against a premier game reserve, Nairobi National Park, the splendid legacy of a time when the city was little more than a tiny high plains retreat for British colonials. Imagine if New York's Central Park was the size of Queens, and roamed by herds of wild game. The park holds all of the so-called "Big Five," the animals on the "must see" most-wanted list: elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, lion and leopard.

As the city expands, the pressure on this real estate must be significant, but so far the park survives, ringed by dozens of miles of electrified fence, minimizing contact between urban human and dangerous wild game. The insensate Buffalo is the most dangerous; it will rear and charge and trample you under its mighty hooves before it has even evaluated what sort of threat you might pose. The hippo, separated from its offspring, or rushing back to the safety of the water, will flatten you like a diesel road roller. In East Africa, the elephant, a genial creature by nature, has had too many unpleasant experiences with humans. It does not trust you, and the rogue, lone male will sometimes attack even your vehicle. For all these reasons and more, it is prohibited to descend from the car in many African game reserves.

But this regulation makes birdwatching difficult. One wants, always, to follow that elusive call into the bush, to peer deep into shrubs, to get out of the car and stroll in the forest. I cautiously ignore regulations against walking in Africa. After all, millions of carless Africans have been living in relative harmony with all these animals for years. If someone is occasionally munched, or flattened, that is the way of things. I accept that. In Rwanda's Akagera National Park I have camped, alone, where I liked, hiked into the acacia forests, startled giant crocodiles at the edges of the swamp, and even skirted herds of elephant on foot. Always keeping a healthy distance dictated by respect, but not paranoia.

On my last trip to Nairobi National Park I had therefore fearlessly gotten out of my hired taxi whenever I spotted a bird, which is to say, almost constantly. But on this visit, within minutes of pulling through the front gates, I was embarrassed  to be busted by a park ranger, who pulled up short in his green Toyota Landcruiser when he saw me standing in the road, some fifty yards from my van and driver. "What you are doing is very dangerous. And it is not permitted," he said, in crisp, officious, post-colonial English. "Yes, sir," I said.

"Return to your vehicle at once." After I complied, the ranger drove up and held a brief conference in Swahili with my driver, the excellent George Olukuye. Then he sped off, and George and I wrestled open the safari pop-top of the van. "He said that if he sees you out of the car again, you will be fined," George told me. I fumed. Birding out of a van, even a convertible one, was not what I had had in mind.

Tourists in game reserves demonstrate a herd mentality, as if eager to prove they are not so very different from the animals they are watching. Pause for a few moments looking out of the top of a van through binoculars, and every other van within sight will hurriedly u-turn its way back to your patch of track, fearful of missing something. "Een ornitholoog," I heard one disgusted dutchman tell his family, after they sped over, only to realize that I was looking at a small, nondescript bird.

An Ostrich might get a pause and a glance, but what most visitors really want to see are the Big Five. Two drivers passing in the track pause and ask each other if there have been any rhino sightings. "Simba?," they ask, in hushed tones. The lion is king. It is possible, but difficult to see. It is perhaps at the top of the list for most visitors. (You could spent twenty days of layovers here and never see a leopard, so that spectacular cat generally remains in the realm of fantasy).

Imagine our joy, then, as we were driving slowly up the track, to come upon a lioness, drinking from a puddle in the road.

In the natural state of things, unless startled, harassed, or abnormally hungry, the lion does not attack we humans. Like bullies, they prefer prey smaller than themselves. The phenomenon of the man-eater, of the lion that has tasted human flesh and found it to his liking, gives one pause, but the presence of lions is not normally enough to keep me in the car. (However, I would never get out of a car in the presence of a lion).

Where there is one lion, there are generally more, and as we sat, parked in the track, watching and waiting, another one appeared from an insignificant shrub beside the road, just the sort in which on another day I might have searched for a singing bird. If they are unlikely to attack humans, they also care little about them. Simba is not scared of you, and he will walk languidly across the road and examine your car with a slow twist of his powerful neck.

Soon, three lions had settled into the shade of the only shrub found on our patch of savannah. Had you told me that the lone bush, above, provided sufficient cover for three lions, I would have laughed at you, but I saw the lions go in to it and become invisible. Had I not seen them I must admit that here I would happily have gotten out of the car after looking around, certain that there was no big game, no threat, just open bush. A lesson learned.

Half an hour later, when we passed back that way, they were still there.

Somaliland Safari

More on this later, but the people of Somaliland would like you to know that they represent a politically distinct entity unaffiliated with the terrorists, warlords and pirates of Somalia. That this autonomous enclave on the northern side of the Horn of Africa remains unrecognized by any other government annoys them. Security, hospitality, and chai are all comparatively abundant. Travel, even independent travel, is possible here.

At the end of a recent film shoot in and around Hargeisa, I squeezed in an all-too-brief safari with wildlife guide extraordinaire Abdi Jama. Emerging from the Somali bush this morning, we drove directly to the airport, and I'm writing to you now from the wifi convenience of the very comfortable Ole Sereni Hotel in Nairobi. Here's a slideshow:

Saïd, packing the truck in front of the Ambassador Hotel, Hargeisa

Passing the Airport on the way out of the city. Camels occasionally wander onto the runway at inopportune moments.

Random obligatory shot of cute rural toddlers.

Obligatory shot of self in desert.

Big sky country.

Abdi Jama enjoys a Somali chai.

Minuscule mosque in teensy windswept village on the Tuuyo plains.

The end of the day on the Tuuyo plains.

Improvised rain cover.

Camp One.

Termites can be a problem.

But they make beautiful houses. No two alike.

Abdi Jama, stalking the Somali Lark on the Tuuyo plains.

The crew. Chief cook and bottle-washer Saïd, birder and bushman extraordinaire Abdi, and my personal security force, Mustafa.

On Safari

An Archetypal Acacia

I don’t know how my fellow sound recordists feel about it, but for me our chosen profession is exciting not in and of itself, but because it leads to innumerable fabulous adventures. No sooner had we disembarked from two weeks on a factory ship in the Indian Ocean, than cameraman and bunkmate Axel Baumann and I found ourselves driving north across the bush. We went from Mombasa to Nairobi, and then beyond, towards the Ethiopian border, to Samburu, a Kenyan national reserve. Here we were to film in the days ahead. For now, blissful time off: the vagaries of scheduling the boat journey had left us with a full forty-eight hours to do nothing but wait for our producer, look at wildlife, and eat from the abundant buffet at our lodge.

The baboons shall inherit the earth

Samburu is a deservedly famous safari destination, and was my first taste of what spotting game is like in a touristed spot. Several upscale lodges and tented camps are dotted along the winding river at its heart. After dawn coffee and biscuits the mini-buses and pop-top land cruisers depart at 6:30 AM sharp in order to have two and half hours of drive time and make it back for breakfast. Dirt tracks wind through riverine forest, acacia scrub and savannah. Nobody is without a camera, and the drivers keep in frequent contact with one another. providing alerts as to sighting opportunities of the so-called “big five,” the largest and most desirable animals. The lesser creatures which interest me just as much, like the tiny Pygmy Falcon or a gaggle of the exquisite Vulturine Guineafowl (2887) don’t make it on the radio, let alone the drabber songbirds like Donaldson-Smith’s Sparrow Weaver, which looks like a tidy overgrown House Sparrow but is rather a local specialty. A healthy group of giraffe or a family of elephant, however, can quickly find itself surrounded by its own gaggle of minivans. In the open bush country the vehicles are visible for miles, and the gathering of cars attract more of their own kind, including private drivers out of the radio loop who drive hastily up, fearful that they might be missing something. There are moments when the whole exercise becomes a rather amusing demonstration that the herd instinct is alive and well in the human species.

The very odd and beautiful Vulturine Guineafowl

But the skies and spaces are huge, and I’m not complaining. The experience remains utterly sublime, filled with breath-taking episodes. Furthermore, without the significant dollars spent by wildlife spotters to justify conservation efforts, this majestic place would likely disappear.

The drab yet exciting Donaldson-Smith's Sparrow Weaver, preparing to weave

I will now describe the most sublime of our many sublime Samburu moments, and don’t read this if you are the sort who likes their travel narratives free of gloating. If you only enjoy stories that offer schadenfreude, recounting the author’s myriad struggles and moments of comic suffering, you had best stop reading right now (and perhaps buy my book instead). The tale I am about to tell is not for those easily made jealous.

Je suis le Giraffe

After a spectacular day of being driven about in the African bush with our heads thrust out the top of a minivan, we headed back toward the lodge across the flat, acacia-dotted floodplain. From luxurious proximity we had watched Elephants, Buffalo, countless Giraffe, hordes of baboons, Grevy’s Zebra and Grant’s Gazelle. Ornithologically, too, it had been a splendid day, filled with such avian delights as Tawny Eagle, White-headed Mousebird, Rufous Chatterer (2893), and Buff-crested Bustard. We were close to the lodge, and to celebrating the day over a cold bottle of Tusker.

The stripes of the Grevy's Zebra are the most elegant of all

The setting sun dappled the stands of acacias with leopard-spot shadows as the weaver-birds flew back to their clusters of intricate hanging nests. Scanning for the last birds of the day in the passing treetops, I spied an elongated pale stretched shape, an anomalous blob near the top of one of those archetypal slope-roofed acacias, the stuff of setting sun picture postcards of the African landscape. “St-st-stuh-stop….” I whispered urgently for perhaps the fiftieth time that day. But I added one new and important word: Leopard! Our driver squeezed down on the brakes. Little following turrets of dust wafted past the side mirrors. “Shhhhh,” I said. “Right there, very close. Very, very close. In the nearest tree. Shhhhh. Back up, about twenty-five feet.” He did, and there it was, perhaps twenty yards away, stretched out along the horizontal upper portion of an acacia trunk, one of two adjoining trees, with nothing behind but low, dense, marshy bush. Creamy white, daubed with its own personal camouflage and dappled with the orange and shadows of the setting sun, the muscular beast turned its languid lemony eye on us, yawned, and relaxed back onto its branch. It was difficult to breathe, faced with such stunning views of this most difficult of large wild cats. “You guys are so very lucky,” whispered John Chavanga, our fixer, from the front seat. “Oh, my.” In the binoculars I could appreciate every spot, every rippling muscle. I soaked in the abundant length of the cat’s whiskers. Beside me, I knew, Axel was doing the same through a 300mm lens.


Minutes went by. “It’s amazing it is still there, putting on a show for you,” said Frances, our guide and driver. “Showing you everything. I have rarely seen one stay for so long. Soon he will go.” And indeed, the cat began to stir, cricking its neck and gently placing a paw further down the trunk, as if testing its exit. Without haste or urgency it walked and jumped its way down to the ground, then walked directly into the enveloping bush behind. We were quivering with excitement, exulting, and hi-fiving over this splendid sighting. The show was over, what a finale to a perfect day!

"Alright, if you nuisances insist on parking there, I'm out of here!"

I’m not sure whether Frances started the car again immediately, or if we sat there luxuriating in silence for a few more moments, or even whether I more heard or saw what happened next, but from behind the two trees there came a violent thrashing of the brush, a rippling movement. I’m now certain I heard it, as well, a rowdy crashing through the bushes. The leopard came streaking back out of the bush and bolted up the neighboring tree in perhaps a fiftieth of the time it had taken to make its languid descent a few moments earlier. Only just behind it followed a charging lioness. She cruised into the clearing, stopping short at the foot of the tree. The leopard looked down in panic. The lion looked up, evaluated. The trunk was narrow, the new cat much heavier than the fugitive. She paced, below, the leopard never letting her out of sight as he turned on his branch. Axel switched lenses. The lioness gave it up as a bad job and strolled back into the bush. Nonetheless the leopard continued to twitch with paranoia; it was no longer worried about us, mere humans in a land cruiser. Frances radioed. Everyone had already gone in, except for one microbus from the Serena Lodge. Eventually, it drove up. We had spent so long enjoying the two-act spectacle that by the time two very grateful ladies arrived and we exchanged whispered greetings, we had had our fill, and we left them alone to enjoy for themselves the leopard, still sitting nervous in his roost.

Simba! (looking resentfully up at the toothsome snack she just missed out on)

All photographs by the illustrious Axel Baumann

Camping in Rwanda, Part One

Only about a two hour drive west of the capital, Kigali, Rwanda's Akagera National Park is a collision between a series of parallel acacia-clad golden mountain ridges, and the Akagera River and its broad valley, which cuts through them. After filling my cooler with ice at the renovated Akagera Hotel, a formerly decrepit relic that on my last visit was literally occupied by baboons, I drove north along the "mountain circuit," and then cut down a valley to continue along the edge of the marsh.

Camp One: There are a variety of possible campsites dotted about the park, and every intersection of two jeep trails is marked by a numbered cement pillar corresponding to a point on the map, so assuming one stays on the tracks, it is almost impossible to get lost. As the sun started to set, I chose a campsite and drove back up onto the ridge to sleep on this promontory overlooking the valley. Note my immaculate tent installation in the lower right hand corner.



Camp Two: On the shores of Lake Rwanyakizinga. This is one of the best spots for elephants in Akagera, and although I thankfully didn't encounter any right where I camped, I saw one on the way in, about a kilometer before I arrived, and then three more grazing in the papyrus when I left the next day. Not one unnatural sound intruded to disturb the snorts of the hippos, the kloo kloo kloo calls of the fish eagles and the splash of pied kingfishers dive bombing the lake.

The immeasurably baritone belches and yawns of the hippos grazing on the far spit, half laugh and half cough, were so loud that I felt certain they had to be coming from the reeds just in front of me instead of from a thousand meters across the water, where I could see them wallowing. Through the binoculars I watched families of warthogs coming down to feed, their tails held straight up, perpendicular to the ground. A goliath heron, the world's biggest, roamed the shore and varieties of antelope snuck down to the water's edge to drink, looking about in paranoid fashion. You would be extraordinarily lucky to see any of the big cats here, but the antelope certainly know that there’s always the possibility one could be about.

Fire, and dinner: a double dose of Ramen with blanched tomatoes "Al Fresco"

The next morning I walked along the shore and found a few hippos that had moved over to my side of the lake in the night.

Elephants are most easily found in the northern reaches of the park, perhaps because fewer people drive all the way up there. Although they are not easy to see, signs of them are everywhere, from enormous chunks of dung left in the track to sizable acacias rendered into puny matchsticks.

When the elephants are feeding they will snap trunks in half or uproot entire trees to get at the uppermost leaves. Along parts of the northern lake circuit there are patches of forest that look as though they have been devastated by a tornado, and in many places I had to drive off road to circle around downed trees.


Camp Three: Perched on a high and breezy mountaintop overlooking the spectacular chain of lakes and vast papyrus swamps along the Akagera River. I won't presume to tell you what you are thinking. But what I think you are thinking is something like: "that's funny; his tent doesn't look nearly as spiffy at Camp 3 as it did at Camps 1 and 2.... It doesn't look quite so much like a tent commercial." If this is indeed along the lines of what you were thinking, then you absolutely have a point. After driving four hours of kidney-lurching rutted jeep track up the side of the mountain, fighting a near-constant assault from battalions of tse-tse flies streaming in through the windows and into my ears, I was ready for a quick dinner and a good sleep. Only when I finally arrived at Camp 3 and got the tent out of the car did I make the unpleasant discovery that I had left the tent poles back at Camp 2. Luckily I had a boom pole in the jeep with which I managed to improvise this elegant structure. Still, rain would have been most unwelcome.

This is what comes of what I was thinking that morning when I packed up, which was "hey, I have a car, with three empty seats in it. Why bother to pack up the tent in its bag? I'll just cram it all in here somewhere.”

The tent calamity did nothing to diminish the indescribable tranquility of sitting out on my own personal remote scenic overlook, soaking up the approaching evening as the sun lowered in the sky behind me. Thinking that the light was just getting nice for some landscape photography, I got up and went to get the camera from the car. Looking up at the ridgetop I saw, sticking up out of the grass and peering at me, this immediately recognizable neck.

I pursued the confused beast, who was probably wondering what on earth had gone wrong with my tent setup, and why I had put it directly in the way of the usual giraffe route down to the river.

The next morning, after a slight detour to collect my tent poles, I continued the “lake circuit,” reaching the very northernmost section of the park, where some of its most spectacular savannah is to be found. Wild game was abundant.

I had forgotten to bring my Kingdon, and my large ungulate identification skills are a little rusty, but I believe this is a magnificent buck Kudu, with one of his wives just to the left. [UPDATE: Oops, my bad. This looks much more like a Defassa Waterbuck, Kobus ellipsiprymnus.]

Even the non-birder will appreciate the spectacular plumage of the Southern Carmine Bee-Eater. My complete bird list from two trips to Akagera can be found in the “comments.”

I’m good enough with my large ungulates to know that these are Cows. Cattle remain the major threat to the park. Before the genocide Akagera was three times its current size, but the turmoil of the war led to large-scale invasion and settlement of the park by refugees and squatters. It is still a huge park proportionate to the size of the country, and the current borders are well protected. These longhorns are outside the park perimeter but in places where the route runs near the edge of the park territory the graze line exactly followed the park boundary markers, with long grass on the park side and nubbly razored stubble on the cow side. Unless significant numbers of visitors come to Akagera and deposit their hard currency in the park coffers it will be all to easy to understand if over time the current rules are relaxed and grazing cattle are again allowed inside. Population is extraordinarily dense in Rwanda, and protecting a vast, unpopulated wilderness like this park requires a major political tradeoff. I drove for three days without seeing anyone else, camped where I chose, saw abundant wildlife in great variety, and spent as much on the entire experience as I might have paid just in one day's entrance fees at a game reserve in Kenya or Tanzania. This is a major bargain, and you should rush over and visit right away.