Kenya's View

Where The Wild Things Are

We played parent on a wildlife-viewing holiday in spectacular kenya. oh yes, the kids were all right

Without his siblings around, he seems to have become a lot more serious.” We are discussing a two-and-a-half-year-old, but this is no kindergarten. We are in the middle of the Solio Reserve in Kenya, a 17,500-acre ranch spectacularly framed by Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountain range. The object of our psychoanalysis is a lion recently kicked out of his pride as young males customarily are to prevent in-breeding.

The bigger problem, naturalist Pete Fleck explains, is that the other five male lions in his age group in the reserve are brothers and will naturally band together to form a pride. Unlike tigers, for instance, lions are social animals, but the young male staring back at us in our Toyota Land Cruiser about twenty feet away is doomed to a solitary life. Cohabitation with females seems out of the question. Hunting on his own will be a challenge; being alone rules out attacking giraffe or large eland because only lions in a pride would succeed against such powerful prey. “He can’t form a coalition,” says Fleck. “He’s going to have a rough ride.” Male lions in the wild typically live to be ten to twelve years old, but this handsome lion doing a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer yawn nearby seems destined to have a tough life.

The narrator in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi argued persuasively that zoos are better places for lions and tigers than being exposed to the challenges of living in the wild. I can’t help wondering why this two-and-a-half-year-old couldn’t be put up for adoption.

Such encounters with animals that make you foolishly want to alter the course of their lives are part of the charm of travelling in Kenya with the family-owned Tamimi, which operates four properties across the country under the name The Safari Collection.

Before my nephew, Rohan, and niece, Rhea, and I had a twenty-minute audience with this Hamlet who will never be king, we had spent more time than seemed decent taking a close look at a white rhino midden—or dung heap—learning about how the dominant male drops his dung in the communal toilet shared with others in his group. The dominant male stomps on the dung with his hoofs, part of an elaborate ritual of marking his territory. While we watch, the full-grown male white rhino paces the ground menacingly,  sending a young male backing away anxiously towards his mother.

Although grey, the rhinos are called ‘white’ because of a corruption of an Afrikaans word that described their distinctive lips rather than their skin colouring; the white rhino was imported to the Solio reserve from South Africa. Just under 25 rhinos were introduced to the reserve by Claude Parfet and her husband in 1970. Today, there are 177 white rhinos and 56 black rhinos despite the challenges of protecting them from poachers seeking their horns for the insatiable and immoral Chinese traditional medicine market—the bane of India’s tiger population as well. 

Sitting on the roof of Solio’s Land Cruiser, my niece and nephew are riveted. “He looks like he is posing for us,” says Rhea, 12, of the male white rhino. Rohan, 15, has been peppering Fleck, 22, with questions since our first game drive, minutes after we arrived off long flights from Bangalore and Hong Kong, respectively, on a Tuesday evening. On our second drive the following morning, Fleck points to an eagle high up on the most perfect yellow-fever tree in the forest. Rohan, who has the advantage of binoculars, confidently declares it a “crowned eagle” and so it is. Not for the last time on the trip, I feel a rush of avuncular pride.

I had hoped for the chance to bring Rohan and Rhea on a trip to Kenya with Tamimi ever since I first travelled with the company to the Masai Mara in the Serengeti to witness the wildebeest migration in August 2009. It was the happiest of journeys at an unhappy time. My father, who had been playing tennis with his sons every morning in January, had died in June of pancreatic cancer. I spent summer irrationally angry with the world because I had been orphaned much sooner than I expected. Then, as if a gift from providence, a travel writer cancelled at the last minute on that trip to the Mara and I went instead.

The extravagance of the wildlife—tellingly the small plane we were flying in to the Mara air strip in 2009 had almost landed on the backs of a half-dozen zebras—all around us on those early morning drives through plains too large for the human eye to take in will stay with me for the rest of my life. On the opening page of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen says of the Kenyan landscape, “The views were immensely wide. Everything you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.” There may be vistas of similarly awe-inspiring natural beauty in Canada and the US, but these do not give the impression of also having accidentally chanced upon the docking of a flotilla of Noah’s Ark.

I didn’t for a second think my nephew and niece would be disappointed by Kenya, but I was nervous at the outset of the trip because they had never travelled overseas without their parents before. As a single man, I had never been the guardian of two children. Although I would not go as far as Evelyn Waugh in describing kids as “defective adults,” there are many days when I think he has a point. My mother once archly observed that if I had children, she and my father would go to court seeking custody. Now, I was to be on a six-day journey with kids without that handy child-minder—TV—and mostly without the Internet.

I needn’t have worried. Going on a real-life National Geographic adventure turned out to be the best diversion of all. The managers of Tamimi’s properties also seemed especially attuned to the needs of children. In the couple of days we were at Solio, Rhea was so at home that if she wasn’t in our room, she was almost certainly in the office of the manager Ava Paton. Fleck took Rohan fly-fishing on our second day and the two caught three trout between them. “I am so chuffed that he did so well,” said Fleck, with a smile as wide as the mountain road. The landscape of the Aberdare National Park defied imagination, seeming more like the moors of Scotland than the landscape of Africa. The Aberdares is where Princess Elizabeth was staying in the Treetops lodge in 1952 when she learned of the death of her father. Jim Corbett famously wrote that “a young girl had climbed into a tree as a princess and climbed down next day as a queen.” 

Nothing as momentous happened to us, of course, but the day’s events forged a bond between the kids and Fleck and Sammy Lengila, also 22. A stranger looking into the Land Cruiser at Rohan and Rhea in peals of laughter as they tried to outdo Lengila’s incomprehensible riddles—“How do you put an elephant in the fridge in three steps?” was the kids’ silliest—would have mistaken them for Fleck or Lengila’s nephew and niece rather than mine. I was befuddled by the riddles but enjoyed the hilarity, and couldn’t help wishing, as parents often must, that the kids stay this age forever. The riddles followed us all the way from the exit gate of the Aberdares to the lodge, about forty-five minutes later.

From the Solio Reserve, Mount Kenya is mostly obscured by mist or fog. One morning, I draw back the curtains of the extraordinary glass wall that fronts our room and there it is, looking like a tsunami rising out of lush green scenery. The bathroom has its own glass wall, a fireplace and a bathtub big enough to swim in. The kids take turns dawdling in it till we are late for just about everything in our first twenty-four hours there. 

Ava Paton had loaned me Rafa, in which Toni Nadal, Nadal’s uncle and long-time coach, argues that the current generation of parents have made children too much “the centre of attention” and put them on a pedestal. This tennis biography proves a convenient rationalisation for being the laissez-faire, distracted uncle I am. Every so often I put Rohan in charge of ensuring he and Rhea are out for drives at the appointed time and he proves up to the challenge. After the game drives, I leave them to entertain themselves and they do so admirably by reading, playing board games or chasing after the hotel pup at our second hotel. This leaves me free to go running in the Samburu desert one evening, an experience I would not have wanted to miss. On a couple of occasions, I read to them from Out of Africa.

It is sweetness and light nearly all of the trip because it is such a delight being in Kenya with bright and curious children. At Sasaab camp in the Samburu desert in northern Kenya, I go off to interview a thirty-something Kenyan-Indian naturalist named Shivani Bhalla who has courageously lived in a tent for a decade as she tracks the movements of lions and their prey in the area. The kids crowd around her computer with convoluted questions about hyenas and lions when we return. 

The following morning, the managers, Doug and Tanya Rundgren, have thoughtfully laid on a separate vehicle for us while all the other older adult guests travel in a separate vehicle. Just in case the kids get tired, Doug says, as we clamber into the car with our naturalist, Gabriel, and Samburu guide, Jacob.

Not a chance of that even though we leave our palatial Mughal-Moroccan family tents before 6.30am and it is 1.30pm before we return. We have been in pursuit of a leopard for much of the morning. Just as the soft-spoken Gabriel appears to be despairing that we will not see what he calls a “master of camouflage,” the leopard walks across the dry riverbed where we are parked. It is the biggest I have ever seen. One of the special talents of Tamimi’s naturalists is that they almost always manage to get away from the other vehicles so you can view wildlife in silence as if you were just another primate in the jungle. Our pursuit of the leopard means that for the first time during the trip, we are part of a convoy of vehicles following the beast to an escarpment where he hides among the rocks. Rohan, armed with binoculars, keeps up a running commentary.

The rest of the day goes by like a dream. Sasaab is surrounded by desert with sheer rock walls rising out of the red sand as if an absent-minded tribal chief were intent on building a fortress. Sightings of gerenuk that look like a failed experiment to create a hybrid of a deer and a giraffe, and reticulated giraffe, its coat a Cubist rendition of giraffe markings, become commonplace. Then, we chance upon a lioness with her young cubs. Gabriel has once again expertly manoeuvered us into a position between the lioness grumpily attending to her young charges and the remains of a giraffe carcass. Sure enough, the lioness is soon leading them right past our car. We take a sharp intake of breath as the lioness bumps against our fender. (“What if I had coughed?” Rhea whispers as the magnificent beast walks away.) “If you move suddenly, you will make them restless,” says Gabriel. “You want to make them as comfortable as possible.” In other words, we are guests in their environment.

This Kenyan approach is perhaps prompted by the abundance of wildlife they possess, but I am uncomfortably reminded of the contrast when I visited Bandhavgarh a few years ago and two tiger cubs were sighted near a river. The reckless charge of vehicles to the scene was nightmarish.

Minutes later, we are heart-stoppingly close to an African elephant matriarch gamely putting up with her four-and-a-half-year-old clumsily trying to breastfeed. Gabriel, who has worked his way up from a bartender in the Mara to a naturalist, has turned off the engine and we savour this odd scene together.

On the last night of the trip in Nairobi, the kids leave dinner at a lovely formal dining table at Giraffe Manor so they can watch a DVD of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. If you are fresh off a trip in national parks, even Hollywood’s Technicolor doesn’t quite do Kenya justice. There is staff for hot chocolate if we want it mid-movie at midnight, the gracious assistant manager tells us; the property has sixty-three obliging staff for just ten rooms. Rhea and I sleepily head to bed long before the film is over.

It is a good idea to go to bed early at Giraffe Manor because it is the only hotel in the world where giraffes come to breakfast with the guests, usually by about 7am. Rohan enjoys it so much he puts a pellet of giraffe treats on his tongue for Helen to extend her twenty-inch tongue and take it off him. Close up, these are the Miss Universes of the animal kingdom, with Elizabeth Taylor’s eyelashes. Long after Rhea has given up calling after Lynn, the gentlest of the four who came to breakfast that morning, and the gracious staff at the hotel has cleared away the plates, I am out in a light drizzle marvelling at the sight of five giraffes grazing on the lawns. It happens every day at Giraffe Manor; the giraffes are following well-rehearsed cues from the elegant waiters, but to me it seems a fantasy.

I had never seen such happy tourists and we were no exception. “My nephew kissed a giraffe!” I saw it—as I used to earnestly tell my parents and longed to tell them once more—with my own eyes. It is an absurd example of how close to nature one gets in Kenya. And it is a reminder of how, on a perfect game drive in a Land Cruiser when you turn away from the country’s bitterly divisive politics and myriad problems, Kenya really does seem like the Garden of Eden. The views are impossibly wide, to quote Karen Blixen, and everything seems to have an unequalled nobility

---

The Information

Yellow fever vaccine

Yellow fever injections are mandatory and malaria is a factor in some parts of Kenya. The vaccines are in short supply and are provided only in batches of ten, so you have to ensure that you are part of a group of ten. In Bengaluru, there is only one location, the Public Health Institute (10am–noon, Wed; 080-22210248) offering the yellow fever injection. In Delhi, Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital (11am–1pm, Wed and Sat; 011-23365988) and the T1 building, Airport Authority of India quarters (2–4pm, Tues and Thurs; 25652129) are among the very few places that stock the vaccine. In Mumbai, too, it’s available only in one place—the Health Office at the airport (3–4pm, Mon–Fri; 022-26828991).

The safari collection

Part of the charm of staying at Tamimi’s properties—the hotels are marketed under the name The Safari Collection—is that they are all small and intimate with about six to ten rooms in total.

• Solio Lodge is just a couple of years old and it has taken the idea of ranch-style accommodation and repackaged it for the twenty-first century. Rooms come with large wooden decks to sit out on and view the wildlife. We had an enormous room with glass walls along the front for easy viewing of wildlife that wandered by. The room had two fireplaces—one for the bathroom. Nights can be chilly. All sorts of activities can be arranged, from mountain biking to horse riding to trout fishing. Even my request for a tennis game was slotted into our hectic schedule—till Wimbledon-style, rain stopped play. From $545, on twin-sharing and full-board basis. Includes all taxes, return transfers from Nanyuki/Solio airstrip, guided walks within the sanctuary, game drives, horseback riding, all house beverages, laundry and wi-fi.
• Sasaab could not be more different. The rooms are part-thatched-roof and part-tent, but if this makes them sound rustic, do not be fooled. I felt like a general in a Mughal-era expedition into the deserts of Rajasthan who had camped for the night by a flowing river, but would take a new kingdom the next day. In addition to stunning game drives, the hotel offers visits to the Samburu villages nearby. The service was wonderful but the food was unremarkable, perhaps because it is hard getting provisions out to this northern frontier of Kenya where the terrain is so inhospitable. From $545, on twin-sharing and full-board basis. Includes all taxes, return transfers from Sasaab/Samburu airstrip, guided bush walks, camel rides, game drives, all house beverages and laundry.
• Being on the outskirts of Nairobi, Giraffe Manor might be expected to be a city-style hotel, but it feels like a country house. Its service doesn’t miss a trick. My shoes that were covered with dust from the game drives of the past few days were returned looking like new to my room almost instantly. That meant I could look presentable for dinner at a long table by a fire with a few other guests. The kids loved the food—lunch featured a superb cold
  asparagus soup, chicken with pesto sauce and a salad that they liked so much, they asked for seconds. At breakfast, the waiters kept seamlessly slipping in to take photos of the kids feeding the giraffes when the kids forgot their camera in the excitement. From $485, on twin-sharing and full-board basis, excluding taxes. Includes airport transfers, city-hotel transfers, transfers/excursions to areas within Karen/Langata, entrance to the AFEW Giraffe Centre, all house drinks, laundry and a donation to AFEW. 
• Sala’s Camp is very memorable because of the sheer excess of wildlife around you. You are apt to hear a lion roar while you are going to bed in your tent. The camp offers tented accommodation, so is not as luxurious as the others, but the food was exceptional. I still recall a raspberry soufflé that was so good that I went to the kitchen to discuss how it was made with the cook the day after. From $490, per night on twin sharing and full-board. Includes all taxes, transfers to airstrip, game drives, all house beverages, laundry and wi-fi.