Chapter 26

Of Man and Beast:

A Story of Kenya

 

"In the vast savannahs of Africa there is a dimension of space and time that is an echo of our own beginnings and which reminds us that we were not born initially to live in the concrete jungle."

 

William Holden

Journey Through Kenya

 

Jomo Kenyatta Airport seemed small for an international airport, but it was beautiful and modern.   According to the London-based business magazine Africa Economic Digest, it was rated the best airport in Africa.   But it was clearly not ready for Melawend.  

The disembarkation area was surprisingly quiet and un-busy.  Travellers passed through Customs quickly.  A Customs officer simply peeked into the plastic bag I was carrying (it contained only the two Ethiopian coffee pots, some stationery and my journal), and only glanced at the saddlebags, backpack, duffel bag and other gear – nothing was opened.  I was asked how much money I had.  My VISA card was sufficient.  I thought: This is a breeze!   And what about an onward ticket?   (I had no onward ticket.   I did not know how I was going to get out of Africa. But you did not have to have an onward ticket if you said that you were going to leave a country overland.)  I showed him a news article about my journey and explained that I was going on to Tanzania by motorscooter.

"That is interesting," he said.  "Where is your scooter?"

After the bizarre way I had taken Melawend to the aircraft in Khartoum, I had been wondering where they would offload Melawend here in Nairobi, assuming she was here.  I saw a Sudan Airways official who was standing near the baggage conveyor where now all baggage had been apparently picked up.

"I brought a motorscooter with me on the flight," I said to him.  "Do you know where it might have been taken?"

I had my back to the hole in the wall where heavy spit fabric spread apart above the conveyor to allow your baggage to pass out from the handling area.  He was about to say something when he simply pointed to this hole.  I turned around and could not believe what I was seeing!  It was Melawend, on her side, coming through!  The front wheel…the faring with her big Cycloptic headlamp...  Then she hit the side of the hole.  She twisted and jammed in the hole.  The conveyor was shut down.  Someone had taken her classification as "excess baggage" literally!

This caused quite a stir among the people who were still around, including some white people.  A middle-age man came over and helped me pull Melawend out of the hole and onto the floor. There were smiles and curious stares as I walked Melawend toward the now vacant Customs queue.  An official was summoned to take care of the carnet processing and we were away. 

Well, almost.  There was still the need for gas and there were lots of taxi drivers who were eager to take me to a gas station a few miles away.  When I returned with a container of gas, a security guard requested a tip for watching over Melawend and the gear – though he was standing near a sign by the front entrance: "No Tipping Allowed".  Fine, but this was above and beyond the call of his duty.   And this was Melawend we were talking about!

With waves from the taxi drivers and airport attendants, who were fascinated in watching me load up Melawend, we were away.  I missed an exit as I rode around a roundabout (as a legacy of Kenya's years as a British colony, you drove on the left), but twenty outstretched arms pointed the way to Nairobi, which was eight miles (13 km) away. 

 

It was hot and, for once, humid as we rolled along Mombasa Road straight from the airport.  The countryside was brown but grassy and there were trees!   It got greener as we got closer to the city.   I had not seen so much greenery since Melawend and I left Greece.  We rolled through the Western Suburbs and into the city via the continuation now known as Uhuru Highway (uhuru is Swahili for "freedom").  Entering Nairobi was wonderful!  Grass, trees, flowers, and modern buildings.  And, there was no dust!  It lived up to its catch phrase: "Green City in the Sun".

(Kenya is a land of immigrant tribes, and so is the vegetation of Nairobi.  Most of the trees are transplants – the fast-growing blue gums, grevilleas and wattles are from Australia, and the lilac-like jacaranda and the bougainvillea were brought here from the Americas.)

Nairobi was clean, green and modern and it had some architectural flare in its buildings.  It was hard to imagine that just one hundred years earlier, the Masai grazed their cattle here.  At the turn of the century, it was just a bald area with the tents of a railway camp on the British-built Mombasa-to-Uganda railroad.  Many of the Indian coolies who helped build the railroad went on to become successful merchants who helped establish Nairobi's economic pre-eminence over Mombasa.  Nor could I image that this was the wild town of wealthy white hunters, as in Hemingway's day.  Now over a million people lived here in one of Africa's most cosmopolitan cities.

It was a peaceful city.  Most Nairobians were Kikuyu.  Others groups included Somalis, Arabs, Goans, Comoros islanders, Nubians, Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese, Europeans and North American nationals – and they all lived fairly easily together.  And Nairobi was the first world headquarters of the United Nations in a developing country.

But the city's rapid growth belied one of the biggest problems in Kenya – at 4 percent, Kenya had the world's highest birth rate.  While the city's population was expected to explode to between 3 and 4 million by the year 2000, the country's population – half of which was under 15 years old – was expected to double to 40 million by 2000 and double again early in the 21^st century. 

(However, a 1998 report by the United Nations Population Fund – UNDP – shows the population at 29 million and an average annual rate of growth down to 2.2 percent through 2000, but still high relative to developed countries.)

 

On this first ride in Kenya I was concerned about Melawend because she was sluggish and was beginning to overheat.

I found the YWCA – what I thought was a YMCA – but I was told I could stay here, in the Men's House.   My room (P3) was in a backwoods-style cottage with tongue-and-grove siding, a corrugated roof and painted furniture, which all reminded me of being at summer camp in my youth.

I called the High Commission.

"You're Tom Smith, the cyclist?" said a girl who had a soothing voice.  "We've been expecting you."

Great!

I rode right over and met a beautiful girl.  Her name was Al (Alison) Winter.  She had thick straight blond hair, pale blue eyes, a great figure and no rings on her fingers. 

"We can start to arrange things for you tomorrow," she said.

To top it off, there was a stack of mail for me at the embassy: letters from Dad, Mom, Melanie and Wendy, Tom and Jean Fox (met in Rome), Marianne (Brussels), Lin (Bath), and a few from other people from home.  To someone alone on distant roads, getting mail felt a bit like being home and being connected with people in your life.

I returned to my room and caught up with my journals.  For the first time since Europe, I went to sleep the sound of rain as it beat down on the roof.

At the embassy the next day, Alison was busy but she introduced me to her boss, Andras Vamos-Goldman.  He was a tall slim guy with glasses who brought to mind Tim Jones, the son of my former employer, lawyer Tom Jones. 

"You would be best to leave your letters for the Nairobi government with us," he said.

He explained that the entire city government had been ousted because of mass corruption.  A military commission had been installed until a new government could be formed. 

So much for my diplomatic mission to Nairobi.

I also had the problem of limited funds.

"Do you think I can earn some money here," I said.

"I wouldn't stay too long in Nairobi," Andras said.  "There's no work.  Anyway, it's nearly impossible to get a work permit."

We talked for a few minutes about my adventures in the Sudan.  I told him of Rob and how he had hitchhiked north through southern Sudan and would likely be doing the same to return to Nairobi.

"You tell him to get in here when he arrives," he said.  "He needs his ass kicked!"

I returned to the YWCA and worked on Melawend.  Not being mechanically inclined, I didn't really know what the hell to look for.  And Honda did not have a corporate office in Kenya.  So it seemed I did have to think about moving on as quickly as possible.  I thought I might as well get my visa for India.  Fortunately it was cool and this would help in the ride over to the Indian Embassy.  Rain came down torrentially when I got there.  I was about an hour and a half late – the embassy visa section had closed at noon.

Despite the brief cooling downpour, Melawend overheated on the way back to the Y and she ran poorly.   I changed and went to a lot of pains to take Melawend's faring off.  There was a little sealed electric fan that did not seem to be working.  It was behind the radiator and it seemed that it would have been a major operation to remove the rad to get at it.  Anyway, I thought, if it's shot, it will have to be replaced.

My poor finances, the coming of the rainy season, Melawend's problems and the lack of any benefactor here made it easy for me to slide into a depression.  Receiving the letters had been great, but I felt lonelier than ever, even a bit homesick.   The guy in the next room had a tape player that was on and he was playing a Phil Collins song too loudly. 

I also found that the "$300 Omega" watch that I had bought in Spain from the guy who worked on a merchant "sheep", was crap.  It was beginning to color my wrist green.

The next day, I went to the High Commission just to see Alison.  (I found it difficult to call her Al.)  With some persistence, I coaxed her into a date for lunch the following day.

When I was on my way to the High Commission, I had been so preoccupied as I walked toward it that I almost bumped into someone I knew. 

"Cameron!" I said.

He had flown to Juba on a cargo plane that the company apparently leased from the Sudanese army.  He had flown with troops and sat on mortar shells during the flight.  After the unloading in Juba, he continued on with the flight to Nairobi.  Now he was staying at the Iqbal Hotel, which was in a crowded, noisy part of the city.  After seeing Alison, I went to the Iqbal with him to see about sharing a room, but there was no secure place for Melawend. 

I rode to a rather quiet, posh place called the Fairview Hotel and met the manager, a short, thin woman who wore too much makeup.    She was snooty.  I told her of my odyssey and asked about a sponsored stay.

"I hate these things," she said immediately.

I admired her candor, but I think I might have looked shocked.

"I'm sure the owner will grant you a lunch and a dinner in return for a photograph – but certainly not four free nights!"

Melawend and I left and rolled up Valley Road.  At an intersection, I saw a girl who was wearing a backpack and was walking like she knew where she was going.   Her name was Cindy and she was from Vancouver, Canada.  She recommended that I try the Nairobi Youth Hostel, where she was headed.  She hopped on Melawend for the ride over.

It was nice – the hostel – it had a spacious Common Room with books, lots of chairs, a round table and a TV.  There was a good size kitchen, a separate dining room and a small yard that was sheltered by trees.  Vines that were almost leafless climbed the walls of the small white house-like men's dormitory in the back yard.  (The women's dorm was behind it.)  The larger rooms had seven bunk beds in them.  There were a lot of people with tans and red faces here and there.  One in particular stood out.

"Rob!" I said.

He had just come in from the Sudan and he seemed almost as surprised to see me.  But this was not the Rob I new.  This Rob was clean-shaven – the beard was gone and he had had a haircut.  He wore casual clothes like you could wear to an office in the tropics.  And he was chastened.   Gone, it seemed, was the daring that had led him on his adventures.  The last gamble had almost cost him his life.

After he arrived in Juba, he said, he caught a ride on a Somalian truck to a place called Wei and from there he hid aboard a Ugandan truck for the run across the border into Uganda to a town where he had heard Sudanese rebels were staying.  They had traveled by night and arrived in this small town.  He was walking and he saw a motorcyclist pull up in front of a house. The rider left his motorcycle running and went into the house.  Then there was gunfire.  Rob leapt onto the motorcycle and took off.  He was shot at and a bullet grazed his leg (he lifted his shorts to show me the small raw wound on his thigh).  He said that he rode for eight solid hours to Kampala and then two more until he neared the Kenyan border.   He ditched the bike.  He tried to walk across the border but when asked by Kenyan Customs asked how much money he had, he said 50 dollars.  He was turned back.  He walked far around the crossing, made his way to Nairobi, got money wired to him and then got his passport stamped at the airport. 

His fiancée showed up at the hostel a few minutes later.  They embraced and there was much affection between them.  I sensed that Rob had realized just how much his exploits could have cost him, and those close to him.  There was no need to tell Andras that Rob was here.

Around this time, Paul Theroux was nearing the end of his "Chinese trip", which he would tell about in his book, Riding The Iron Rooster.  Early in this particular odyssey by trains, Paul had been in an apartment in Moscow with three women where the atmosphere had "the smell of bedclothes, and bodies and feety aromas."  This also described the atmosphere of the dorm room I was in.

As part of your stay at a member facility of the International Youth Hostel Federation, you were expected to do a chore in the morning before leaving for the day.  The next morning, David Mwaniky, a good-humoured and officious Kenyan who was the senior warden for the hostel, assigned me to straighten the chairs in the Common Room.  Other guests organized bookshelves, cleaned the kitchen, picked up litter in the yard, and so on.  It helped the staff and it gave a feeling of home and family amid the freedoms, hassles and the loneliness of long-term travel.

I went to the High Commission to keep my lunch date with Alison but she had to decline at the last moment.   A Canadian had died of altitude sickness from climbing Mount Kenya and there was a lot of follow-up work to be done, in addition to her already hectic schedule.  She was apologetic but she just didn't have time to get together.  She asked me for my address and if I would send her a copy of the book when came out.   Andras came out of his office to see Alison and they left hurriedly together, wishing me well on my journey.  The end, I thought. 

Damn it!

I went to the post office to send a parcel to Ridgeway.  It contained odyssey artifacts from Egypt and the Sudan, including the two coffeepots Tzehai had given to me. 

(A letter sent to my mother arrived on Vancouver Island from Nairobi in just six days.  Amazing then, as this was in the days before e-mail.)

Melawend and I rolled out to Jomo Kenyatta Airport where I found a representative of Kenya Airways.  I told him of my project and the need for passage to Kenya.   He got on Melawend and we rode over to Kenya Airways' headquarters, which was at another part of the airport.  The Advertising Manager was doubtful – the government had put a stop to free plane rides for journalists.  But he suggested I could talk with the General Manager.  The GM's secretary was evasive about a meeting.

"Maybe you can call back next week," she said.

I stopped at the Chinese Embassy to see about routing my journey from Hong Kong to Beijing.  I talked with a pretty, petite girl named Ke Hong.  She was from Canton.  She was friendly but seemed a bit impatient with my explanation of my project.

"I understand.   I understand," she kept saying.

She did not think it was possible for me to bring Melawend into China, but I could call back tomorrow, which I did.  She said it might be possible but it would take time to process and would be "quite restricted" as to where I could go.  I could likely ride only in certain cities, not between them.  And I would need to have a Chinese official to travel with me.  I decided to try to secure permission via a closer place, perhaps in Hong Kong itself.

In the Common Room that evening, many guests were writing in journals or on stationery or they were reading novels, most of which were thick ones.  A few of us were watching TV.  A commercial that had music with a good beat in the background caught my attention.  It was three still pictures of a crudely drawn of a man who was at first drinking, then driving, and then he was a skeleton.  The message was blunt: "You Drink.  You Drive.  You Die."

Staying at a youth hostel was like being at an international airport – the days were filled with arrivals and departures.  There were about thirty guests now, some of whom had been here when I arrived.  As I swept the Common Room the next morning, I saw a small frail-looking woman who had been one of them.  (In hostels, "youth" was a measure of spirit, not age.)   She looked to be 70 years young.  She was reading Lonely Planet's Africa on a Shoestring.

I hung around afterwards looking for a companion, hopefully a girl, to go with me to Nairobi National Park, a 117-square-kilometer game preserve that abutted the city limits.  But most guests had left early.  Melawend and I rolled along the road to Magadi (Nairobi West).  On the way, I saw Wilson Aerodrome (small aircraft) and a prison where inmates were actually busting piled up rocks with sledgehammers.  I knew I would not be allowed to ride Melawend within the park because humans were the creatures that had to be confined – to the safety of their enclosed vehicles, as the animals roamed freely. 

 

It was bizarre to think of big game animals roaming at will within sight of a city skyline, but it also seemed an imperative, particularly here in the foremost city of East Africa.  The story of the park really began in 1889 when the Uganda Railway's Lunatic Express rumbled into the African hinterland from Mombasa.  In the years to come, the rail-line brought in waves of mostly British, European and Scandinavian farmers, traders and big-game hunters.  During the next four decades, the frenzy to grab up land and take home "trophies" wreaked havoc on the wildlife.  The 1930's and 1940's, was the era of the big game hunter – animals were the subjects of the hunt, not conservation.  Kills were the topic of conversations in Nairobi's hotels and bars. 

In 1933, Ernest Hemingway came to colonial Nairobi on the first of his two African safaris, one that would last 72 days.   He and his hunting party shot lions, rhinos, Grant and Roberts gazelles, kongoni, impala, eland, roan and sable antelopes, bushbuck, waterbuck, leopards, hyenas ("mongrel-dog-smart in the face"), greater and lesser kudu, buffalo, zebras and oryx (for their handsome black horns).  Always there was an almost obsessive competition over the size of the beast, particularly regarding the size of horns.

In the same year, a Royal Commission that dealt with the use of land supported the idea that the Nairobi Commanage – an area of forests, rivers and rolling gamelands that adjoined the boundary of Nairobi – be turned into a national park.  But the British vacillated and nothing more was said about it.  However, there were a few conservation-minded people who began to see Kenya devoid of wildlife in the onslaught of hunting and land grabbing. 

They were led by Mervyn Cowie who envisioned a network of Kenyan parks to preserve the country's diminishing wildlife.   Out of desperation, he wrote an article for the East African Standard under the pen name "Old Settler" – advocating the complete destruction of Kenya's wildlife!  It spurred public outrage, including suggestions that "Old Settler" should shoot himself!  Cowie sneaked meat out to a large pride of lions at their Lone Tree den to get them use to the presence of vehicles.  Then he brought people out to the area in vehicles to show them the wildlife, lions in particular, and convince them that lions in their natural state could give joy to and spark interest in visitors from around the world.  Plans were drawn up for the boundaries of the park, but World War II intervened.   Finally, on Christmas Eve, 1946, Nairobi National Park was officially proclaimed, becoming the first national park in East Africa.

(Kenya, which is about the size of France, has 40 national parks in total bigger than Switzerland.)

 

 Barred from riding Melawend through the park because of the danger from wildlife, my objective was the animal orphanage, which was near the park's main gate.

I wished I had been there with Her.  I paid the 10 Kenya shillings entrance fee and walked around.  There were few people here.  Chimpanzees, ostriches and gazelles were in concrete-walled enclosures.  Post and wire and chain-link fence pens were homes to such animals as monkeys, baboons, cheetahs, lions and hyenas.  There were signs telling you not to put your fingers through the wire fences.

As I knelt beside the fence of the hyena's compound, an adult male (that I would later learn was named Kabwe) approached me.  He leaned heavily against the fence and looked at me with his right eye.  His thick neck and undersides of his lower jaw looked like solid muscle under his course fur.  I succumbed to curiosity and poked my fingers thorough the fence and began to scratch his hard neck.   Just like a cat, he stuck his head straight up to expose more of his neck.  He loved this!   On another visit, after the neck scratching, he would stay with me, just leaning against the fence.  I brought my fingers close to his nose.  He opened his mouth and I saw his sharp teeth as he began to bear down on my fingers.  He brought his teeth down to my flesh but he did not bite.  I felt the quiver of restrained power – his jaws could have crushed the hipbone of an elephant.

(This had not only been officially forbidden, it was careless and risky on my part.  I would not recommend trying to touch such an animal without authority and supervision.) 

I also learned that a film crew from the TV series Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom had been inside with the hyenas some years earlier.  A female member of the crew had been wearing shorts and was sitting on the ground.  One of the hyenas came over to her and bit down on her ankle in the way Kabwe had done with my fingers.  But one of the stars of the show thought she was in trouble so he pulled back on the girl.  The hyena bit down harder.  The man pulled harder.  The hyena bit harder still, breaking the girl's flesh.  One of the orphanage staff saw what was happening and told the man to let go of the girl.  The hyena released its bite on her.

Kabwe's pen was to the right of a lion's pen (these pens were about 60 feet wide by 40 feet deep).  It was a strange but also hopeful thing to see mortal enemies living beside each other in relative peace.  Though separated by a fence, there was tolerance of each other's presence.  I reasoned that this was so simply because the need to compete for food had been eliminated and also that they had become use to being together.  Minus the fences, I wondered if such a system could be useful for humans, but done globally in an all-out, all-inclusive way. 

I moved about ten feet over and sat beside the fence of the lion's pen.  I did not know it but I was about to experience something truly remarkable.  I had seen a lion sitting in the corner of this large treed pen, looking rather tired and sad.  I sat close to the fence and he walked slowly toward me.  It was a large cat and from a distance I thought it was a lioness.  When it was closer, I saw the beginnings of the majestic mane.   He sat down close to the fence and looked at me, as if to say, I'm bored.  What would you like to do? 

I got out my camera and mounted it on the tripod.  The lion's expression brightened and he titled his head in curiosity.  I brought my face up to the fence and he brought his to within ten inches of mine.  I blew into his face.   He brought his face to mine and pressed his nose hard against my nose.  I sensed a child's intense inquisitiveness in his big unmoving walnut-brown eyes as he stared into mine.   I felt the tickle of his whiskers and the bristly white hairs of his chin.  He breathed heavily through his cool nostrils.  Then the lion kissed me! (licked my face)  He reached up to the fence with his right paw.  I put my hand against his paw.   He pushed the thick pads of his toes through the wire.  We did these things several times.  As we did so, I reached over and tripped the timer on the camera.  For a few shots, I simply held the camera at arm's length and took wide-angle images.

This attracted a few smiling Kenyans.  They laughed when I brought my blue daypack near the fence and the lion got excited and began to paw the fence in effort to get at it.  A young Kenyan girl came and sat near me.  The lion went over to her and responded eagerly to her touch. 

"Be careful," I said.

She smiled at me but just kept touching him.  He responded in ways that suggested she was familiar to him.

The crowd of people drifted away.  As I began to pack up, I saw a 40ish dark-skinned man come to the fence.  The lion seemed to know him too.  I was shocked to see the man go around the back of the pen and go inside.  The lion ran up to greet him, running at him and around him in a playful way.  The girl and a woman who appeared to be the girl's mother went around and stood at the gate in the back.   I went around to join them.  As I got there, the man was coming out.

"Are you with the Park," I asked.

"Yes," he said.  "I'm Dr. Ian Chawdhry.  This is my wife and daughter, and this is Sheru.  He is one and a half years old.  We raised him since he was a cub."

I told him who I was and asked how they got Sheru.

 "See the lioness in that cage over there?" he said.

She was laying on her back "tits-up" beside a huge lion on a raised wooden platform in a pen to the left of Sheru's pen.  Seeing the lioness reminded of a story that Ernest Hemingway had written for the April 1934 issue of Esquire magazine: "A.D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter".  (It was included in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway and I had read it a few times on the journey.)  Hem and his group had been hunting lions near and on the Serengeti Plain.   They shot four of the 84 lions and lionesses they had seen in the past two weeks and three days: three black-mane lions (now rare) and a lioness.

"She wanted to charge and it was impossible to go after the lion without killing her first.  I broke her neck with a .220 grain .30-06 solid at thirty yards," Hemingway wrote.

I admired Hemingway's lean prose but I detested the macho descriptions of the killing of animals.  With all due respect to the great author, I felt it was pompous of him to say "I broke her neck…" 

Did you really.  That was done by the impact of the bullet. 

Maybe it was just the way hunters talked.  Besides, Hem lived in another age that had different values.  I sometimes thought of Hemingway the writer as being immortal; I thought of Hemingway the great white hunter as a dinosaur.

"After giving birth to three cubs, she killed one them," Dr. Chawdhry said.  "We saved Sheru, took him home and raised him."

"May I take some photos of you with Sheru?" I said.

"It's up to you," he said.  "But you'd better climb up there.  He's not use to strangers."

He pointed to a transport cage that was sitting on the ground inside Sheru's pen.  Sheru became excited when we entered.  He was pacing back and forth.

"You'd better watch your pack too," he said.  "Like all lions, he likes to mark his territory." 

I thought he meant that Sheru might piss on my blue daypack.

"Your pack probably reminds him of the pillow he use to play with as a cub."

Dr. Chawdhry teased Sheru with a long stick as I made with all haste the top of he cage to get my photos.   Afterwards I told Dr. Chawdhry about my project and that I would like to do a story about the Park.  He seemed pleased.

"Come back on Monday," he said.

 

 

The next day at the youth hostel I relaxed and wrote in my journals.  This was when I met Brunie.  She was the short frail-looking old woman I mentioned earlier.  She had ashen-red hair that was streaked with white.  She was a little hunched when she walked and when she spoke it was with a German accent.

"My name is really Brunehilda," she said.

We talked by the world map in the dorm hallway.  She was born in Germany but grew up in Brazil, where her father was from.  She had been travelling most of her life, "three months here, ten months there…"  She had taken the train from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum.  She'd taken a paddlewheeler between Kosti and Juba.  Two years ago, she had gone by convoy between Juba and Nimule.  She had been to China (Shanghai and Peking).  She had been to Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Okinawa and all over South America.  She had been to India three times.

"You should really go to Madras," she said. 

She was on her way to Cairo tomorrow to stay with some rich friends before going on to Alexandria and the Siwa Oasis.  Brunie, the little old lady from just about anywhere seemed to have friends everywhere she went.  She had been around the world "Oh, several times," she said. 

Later, as I was sitting under the awning on the narrow patio outside the Common room, writing in my journal, Brunie came up to me and laughed.

"You will never read it," she said. "I've got diaries back home that I haven't read.   I don't have the time."

Brunie was fascinating and I'm sure had a wealth of adventures to share.  But I did not care to pursue such a rootless life.  Still, here I was in one of the world's premier safari countries.  But I was poor and imagined that I would not get to go on a scheduled safari.  As if to drive the point home, one day, the warden at the hostel told me of an extra seat that was available on safari to Lake Magadi – to be given away for free.  I flew to the phone to grab the opportunity but it was already taken. I told myself: I'll come back and safari when I'm rich.  But then I realized I had already had the experience of Kabwe and Sheru.

Things became suddenly crowded.  Ten or more new people checked in and eight more had returned from a two-day safari to Garrissa, which, I was told, was desolate, like the area north of Khartoum.  This group included Rob and his fiancée.

I didn't really talk much with anyone here.  For the most part, I sat around observing people and making notes.  They didn't know that I was writing about them.  I took a kind of obscene pleasure in this snooping and eavesdropping, but it was mainly to get a more vivid record of my time here and to help keep myself company with word images of other people.

I envied the comings and goings of these shoestring travelers: a two-day safari here, a week-long safari there, experiencing wildlife, the wilderness, native peoples – the reasons you came to Kenya.  And if you bought the safari package here in Nairobi, it was much cheaper than if you bought it back home.  But it was also great just to be here and think of the Nairobi Youth Hostel as being an important part of Cycle for Life.   These people were doing the best they could to see as much of the real world as they could, and to take memories back to share with others.  I felt that most of what they had to tell would have been positive and that was a good thing for everyone, in the long run.

So instead of going on that safari, I went to Hoggers.  This was a restaurant downtown near the High Commission.  I pigged out on a hamburger, fat french fries, coleslaw and pineapple juice. But this little jaunt revealed that Melawend was really in trouble.  She was even more sluggish. A bad drive belt?  Worn-out bearings?  I didn't have a clue.

Because I had been told that Kenya Airways was not giving any more free flights to journalists, I approached an official at the office of Air-India.

"You should have approached on of our offices in Canada," he said.  "Why don't you try Kenya Airways?"

So I tried Kenya Airways again the next day.  I called the General Manager as his secretary had suggested previously.  I spoke with her again and she was just as impatient and evasive.  She said that he was not in.  "Call back later."  I rode Melawend out to their offices and talked again with the Advertising Manager.

"You see, there has been a directive issued," he said.  "The Ministry of Transportation owns the airline and they have said there will be no more complimentary or promotional passes."

He had said as much before.  So I wondered why he had suggested I go and see the General Manager. 

I went over and saw Ben Itugi, the manger of Express Kenya, an affiliate of Peace Bridge Brokerage.  I had been expecting a new tent to be shipped here.  By now it had occurred to me that I would have to leave Nairobi to find some other way to India.  He sent a telegram to PBB for me, requesting that the tent be re-routed to Kuala Lumpur.

I knew that I had been pushing Melawend.  Her sluggishness and overheating continued.  On the ride back into Nairobi, I pulled over near a busy intersection and looked her over.  I squeezed her back tire – and suddenly felt incredibly stupid!  It was low on air.   You could not tell if you were just to look at it.  So I sat on her and looked down at the tire.  It was soft.  Melawend had been labouring to carry me around like this!  I took her to an auto service centre, and filled the tire with air.  She was her old fast responsive self again! 

Dopey me!

The following day, I gave Rob a ride into downtown Nairobi.  As in London, and Khartoum, Melawend and I split-laned to get to the head of traffic lines.   Poor Rob.

"This is the Khartoum syndrome again!" he said.  He kept his knees tucked in as best he could.

I went back to the animal orphanage two days later and talked with Dr. Chawdhry.  It was a pleasure to talk with a down-to-earth man who had been deeply involved with the welfare of African wildlife.  He was currently working on new plans for the orphanage: to triple its size, complete with new research, veterinary and visitors facilities and new larger areas for the animals.  For example, there were plans for seven acres to be set over for leopards that would be given live antelope for the killing – trying to create a more natural environment for them.  He had recently dealt with architects and engineers and the plans had already been made into blueprints.

Dr. Chawdhry had worked with animals for over 17 years.  He had contacts with the San Diego Zoo, one of the best-known zoos in the world. 

(I had visited that wonderful zoo on my North American photo-safari three years earlier).

He used to trap animals and he was full of fantastic stories of these exploits.  One was of a French millionaire who had bought a 50,000-acre ranch and wanted to stock it with water buffalo.  Dr. Chawdhry's unit was hired.  They caught some but some of those died in transport.  One of his workers, an old native, noticed that water buffalo drank water in the morning.   Water buffalo caught late in the day were fine during transport.  The morning-caught buffaloes died.  The old man also noticed that water buffalo spread their front legs to drink causing the stomach to shift up to the sternum at the base of the rib cage.  The problem (death) arose when they rolled the captured animal onto a skid.  Water would come out the mouth and nostrils.  It would back up into the air passages and in effect drown the animal.  It would die quickly.   They stopped rolling them onto the skids – no further water buffalo died.  They captured and took 45 buffalo to the ranch over the next six months.

"It is something I would not do again," he said.  "I want to help animals."

For the past three years, he had been Nairobi-bound.

"It is soft work," he said.  He grabbed his belly.   "I have gained weight.  I see my wife every day now."

He'd had enough of the government's inattention to his unit's needs.  A flood had once marooned them.  It was three days before help was sent.  It finally came in the form a large grader.  But the driver of the grader was afraid to cross the crocodile-infested water and of possibly ruining an expensive machine in the process.  Dr. Chawdhry 's men managed to heave a rope across the 80 feet (25 meters) of water to the driver and told him to tie the end to a tree.  Then some of his men started to cross the water, going hand-over-hand along the rope.  They made it, got on the grader and drove it across the water to the unit. Dr. Chawdhry's vehicles and the rest of the unit were towed to safety.

As we sat in his small office at the orphanage, I soaked up his great stories.  He was born and raised in Kenya but his father's roots went back to Saudi Arabia where his great grandfather was an Arab who dealt in gold and diamonds.   Dr. Chawdhry was also a Muslim, "but not a very devout one," he said.  Still he was pleased to tell me more about Islam.

"Despite all the conflicts, there are many similarities between Islam and Christianity," he said. "Allah in Arabic means "God".  We believe Jesus was a messenger of God, a prophet.  God had no parents, and no children – He just always was.  We believe in the resurrection of the prophets – for example, Moses and Ezekiel.  The Koran is much the same as the Old Testament of the Bible.  Mohammed was an ordinary man, a successful business man through whom God chose to speak."

He then told me of something that would change the course of my journey in Africa and deepen my respect for all wildlife.  Dr. Chawdhry had worked with Don Hunt of the Mount Kenya Safari Ranch.  Don Hunt was the partner of the late American actor, William Holden.

"You should go and talk to Don," he said.

Dr. Chawdhry and I had spent the entire afternoon talking.  I said goodbye and went over to the pens to also say goodbye to Kabwe and Sheru.  A zebra sauntered by in the open. 

Being here made me think about the confinements of zoos and how some people in marriages tended to think of themselves as captive spirits.  As to why she never married, feminist Gloria Steinem said: "I can't mate in captivity."

I went over to a paddock where an adult rhino was feeding.  It paid no mind as I stroked its bark-like hide – not comprehending that my species had reduced his number in Kenya from 20,000 in 1970 to about 500 now.  And for what?   That horn on its snout?  The horn was a mass of agglutinated keratin, a fibrous protein found in hair.  White rhino horns were worth about $65,000 each, for use as dagger handles in North Yemen or in the Orient as a medicine to reduce fever (not as an aphrodisiac as claimed in the West).

I wondered, was it necessary to kill animals for their body parts?  Proponents could effectively argue that the massive slaughter of cattle and other livestock for food was no different.  Would that suggest that animals such as this rhino should be bred and slaughtered for their horns?    Maybe they could be bred like cattle, and "removable" parts such as tusk or horns could be surgically taken and replaced by more durable synthetic ones.  Wild animal farms? – Good God!

Or was the killing of animals for body parts only part of a vicious international game of lust, greed, adventure, risk and high profits?  I didn't know, but it seemed that strict laws and stiff penalties only raised the stakes and made the game that much more exciting and lucrative for the players.  And the customers, the ones who bought into the game because of their selfish desires – could they really be encouraged to boycott the sellers?  I doubted it.  What if there could be worldwide competitions to synthesize the products for which animals were slaughtered? 

While I was in Kenya, it was reported in Newsweek that a group that included seven Saudi Arabian sheiks and two Saudi princes had been poaching. (What a euphemistic term for murder!  "Poaching" made it seem that they were cooking breakfast!)  This had occurred in the Masai Mara Game Reserve in southwest Kenya.  Though involvement in the group by any Saudi nationals was denied by the Saudi Embassy in Nairobi, 200 animals were killed in a weeklong shooting-spree – including buffaloes, eland, zebras and gazelles. A rare black-maned lion and a cheetah, listed as an endangered species, might also have been killed.  The report said that senior government officials secretly okayed the shoot – and may even have instructed police to issue rifle permits to the group.   Kenya's director of wildlife conservation had launched an investigation.  Hunting game had been outlawed in Kenya since 1977.

While I was lamenting the shooting of animals, it was also at this time talks were going on about disarmament against people.  Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, had put forth his plan: If Washington would remove all of its medium-range missiles from Europe, Moscow would do the same.  This would happen over a five-year period..  Reagan in turn presented his Administration's own plan for a missile-fee Europe. 

It was the old game of tit for tat.   The Soviets were replacing their SS-4 missiles with advanced SS-20s, against the US's pending deployment of Perishing IIs and cruise missiles, which were intended to match the SS-20s.  Not up for bargaining was Reagan's treasured Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars).

 

(Sorry for diverging, dear reader.  It's just that the odyssey instilled in me a greater respect for all life, along with more awareness of the myriad of inter-connected environmental and social crises we all face.  And these things were going on while I was travelling.  Now, back to the story…)

 

I went over to another pen to see the fastest quadrupeds on earth – cheetahs.  There was a cheetah lying in a hollow in the grass about 15 yards away.  It was watching me.   Cheetah's could reach 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) and sprint for about six hundred yards.  It would trip its quarry, usually a gazelle, and bite down on its neck.  In this way, it would rapidly drain its prey of any reserves it would have for a fight or more flight.  At the cheetahs' pen, I sat down and leaned against the fence and called over to one in the way you would summon a housecat.

"Here cheetah, cheetah, cheetah," I said. 

(I did not know any other way.  How else do you summon a cat?)

When I called to it, it became poised in that crouched-low, front-paw-padding-the-earth, fierce-concentration-in-the-eyes way of a cat.  In a blur, it suddenly shot forward, streaked along the fence in a few long strides, turned and abruptly fell against the fence beside me.  It was upon me so quickly that I fell backwards.  But its swift and graceful movement was a wonder to behold!   Now it was leaning against the fence with its head cocked toward me, looking at me eye to eye, in much the same way as Kabwe.  I reached my fingers through the fence and began to stoke its neck and ears.  It rolled its head with pleasure and it purred loudly, like the engine of a motorscooter.

When I returned to Melawend in the parking lot, there was a note attached to her faring.  It was signed by "Geoff and Irene of Northern Ireland" and it read,  "Dolores and Andy are in Nairobi and are looking out for you.  We are meeting them at the Thorn Tree Cafe tonight at 6:20 p.m. …"   Melawend and I flew back to Nairobi.

This café was in the New Stanley Hotel, the same place where Ernest Hemingway recuperated from his bout with amoebic dysentery through a course of emetine injections.  (He wrote a humorous and typically macho account of his experience in "A.D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter" – Esquire, April, 1934.  Of course I had no way of knowing this now, but I would go dysenteric rounds with Hem when I reached Kathmandu.)  Andy and Dolores both had short haircuts, though Andy retained his beard.  Dolores looked great with her hair styled, a bit of makeup and earrings.  They had met Geoff and Irene, friends from Northern Ireland who had ridden two Suzuki 500's here via Morocco and Algeria.  We had dinner with two young guys and a girl, students, who were drunk and noisy.  No matter.  The reunion with Andy and Dolores was a happy time.

"I hope we meet you again in Malindi on Tuesday," Dolores said.

In the morning, I did my usual shopping for groceries at a small neigbourhood mall near the hospital.   I would buy local goods including bread, Kenya Orchards' Cape gooseberry jam, Mua Hills' mulberry jam, Zesta's peanut butter and Kenylon's canned soups and spaghetti.

I had hoped to see the Bomas of Kenya with Alison but she had flown out of Nairobi the night before to visit family and friends.  So I went alone.   It was a cultural center on an 82-acre site in the Langata Forest on the quiet outskirts of Nairobi.  It had a 3,500-seat circular theatre, which was the biggest structure of its kind in Africa.  In this cavernous echoing shell, the Bomas Harmabee Dancers performed to the beat of coast drums and other traditional instruments.  Members of the group were from many of Kenya's tribes: Kikuyu, Meru, Luhya, Lua, Boran, Embu and Giriama and including high-leaping Samburu warriors.  There was also an outdoor theatre for the dances. 

This was midweek and the crowd of visitors was small.  I could have gone with a guide, but I wandered alone around the various "bomas" (a boma meant "an African homestead").  It was designed as an experience of rural Kenyan life.  Outside one boma, which looked like a huge hollowed out mound of groomed grey-brown grass, a woman was breast-feeding a baby.  Outside another, a woman was selling hand-carved wooden drums, animals, statues of warriors, and tribal masks.  These lay neatly displayed over a thick sheet that had been laid on the brown earth.  The vendor was an attractive African girl who wore a red patterned bandanna, a clingy blue blouse and a gold and burgundy patterned native skirt.  She had lovely skin and her movements were graceful.  She cradled a dark wooden mask.  She spoke in soft voice.

"You like this one?" she asked.

I wanted to talk with her on a personal level but other tourists were coming over.  I picked up a beautifully carved mask that featured an elongated face with a headdress and drooping ear-hangings. 

"That is a Masai mask," she said.  "It is hand-made from mahogany."

We dickered easily.   (I am looking at the mask on the wall as I type this.)  With a little persuasion, she threw in a hand-carved letter opener that featured a carved elephant on top.  She was kind and comely and I did not want to leave without taking a memory of her with me.  The tourists were moving in, looking over her goods.  I had to work quickly.

"May I take your picture?" I said.

She cradled my newly acquired mask by her display with the boma in the background.  I gave have her my notebook and she wrote her name – Jane Mwende Ndemwa.  And I left, warmed by this brief encounter.

I lost her to the attentions paid to the tourists.  As I took one last look at her goods, I heard music coming from behind.  A young African guy in a black windbreaker was playing nice tunes on a simple burn-etched flute, hand-made from bamboo.  He wanted only about $1.50 for it.  I bought three.   He tried to show me how to play it, he really tried, but I recorded him so I would not forget. 

(I kept one for myself.  To this day I still cannot play a sustained note on the damned thing!  But I have the recording.)

This was all very nice, but I was not getting anywhere.  I had to make a name for myself, get my odyssey known.  I called for a reporter at The Standard, a national newspaper, and was asked to come to the Standard Street office.  While I waited for a reporter to come, a writer for the paper filled me in on the situation in Nairobi.

"You have come in changing times," he said.  "Nothing progressive has been done in the city for several years.  In fact, things have deteriorated.  We had huge municipal budgets but these were dipped into by greedy hands.  Many projects were poorly planned and they were outdated before they could be implemented.  The country also has been burdened by a birthrate of four percent, one of the highest in the world.  The city government was finally disbanded and a Commission set up in its place.  Now roads are being repaired and garbage is being cleaned up." 

(I had noticed that there was a huge pile of uncollected garbage in front of the hostel, hidden from the road by hedge.)

Finally a young reporter named Roy Gachuhi arrived. He was proficient and he seemed genuinely interested in the purpose of my odyssey.  A photographer took a shot of Melawend and me in an enclosed parking area.

"This should be in all three editions (city, coastal and national) next week," he said.

(The story came out ten days later under the title "Spreading peace on a bike".  It began "The Mayor of his home town calls him an ambassador of peace and goodwill.  He is.  Traveling around the world…"  Well, it was Girve Fretz, our Member of Parliament who had called me an "ambassador", but no matter.   I was pleased that Roy had not sensationalized my story.)

 

Roy's professionalism during the interview had made me happy to talk about Cycle for Life.  Now it was time to add to it, so that afternoon I rode out to "a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills."  The 6,000-acre farm was at 6,000 feet elevation, 1000 feet higher than Nairobi, which was 12 miles away.   The world had come to know this farm and about Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) through her book and the movie, Out of Africa.  Being here in 1987, I saw no apparent celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the publication of her wonderful book, which, together with the movie, was helping to bring more tourists to Kenya.  

Readers knew that Karen had bought the title “Baroness” by marrying Baron Bror Blixen, her lover's brother.  She had moved to a farm that he bought in Africa.  Bror lost her fortune and gave her syphilis.  They knew that Karen nurtured her coffee plantation, became close with the Kikuyu tribe that lived on her land and fell in love with Africa.  They knew that Karen, dispirited by the recent tragic death of her friend and lover, Denys Finch Hatton, had lost her farm to debt because of her failed coffee-growing business (the farm was at too high an elevation to grow coffee successfully).  Everyone knew of the concealed pain that the forced selling of her furnishings and the auction of her farm and its contents brought to her. 

What they might not have known is that farm was bought at auction by Remy Martin, a young real estate developer, who set out to create a smart Nairobi suburb of expensive houses with a large golf and country club.  He named both "Karen" in her honour. The Danish government eventually bought the house and much of what was left of the original farm and presented it to the Kenyan government in 1963.   The house was now known as the Karen Blixen Museum. 

Melawend and I rode up the red stone circular drive and I parked her in the shade of a large tree.  Inside and out, the house still looked like a home, as if Karen was out for the moment, perhaps talking a last walk around her farm.

 

(Dear Reader: This house became the place of my pilgrimage when the time for me came to leave Kenya.  From there I would pack up my memories to take them with me, out of Africa.  At that time, I will bring you back here for a much closer look.   Trust me.)

 

For now, I wanted to take Melawend up into those blue Ngong Hills, via the "Ngong Circular Tour".  Maybe I got onto the wrong road.  We came upon a road that headed up, about five miles up – a dirt road that grew increasingly steep, deep-rutted, narrow and rocky.  Rain had washed the red soil out of the ruts on the steeper sections so that the rough higher centre of the road would have ripped the bottom out of a conventional car.  Upward we went to the summit, or at least to a shallow narrow valley between two hilltops.  She made it!  Melawend – she had the little engine that could, and did take on the Ngong Hills in Africa.

I drove Melawend over flat high grass to where the land dropped steeply away.  What a magnificent image of Africa began to appear!  It was like a scene out of a David Lean movie as the background becomes larger and fills up the screen.  As the land began to dip down and the hills receded beside me, the sky grew immense over the flatness of the Great Rift Valley far below.  Like an immense flat desert, it seemed to go on and on until it dissolved into the distant haze.

(The Great Rift Valley is a crack in the African tectonic plate that is more than 5,400 miles (8,700 km) long.)

"…towards the West, deep down, lies the dry, moonlike landscape of the African lowlands.  The brown desert is irregularly dotted with the little marks of the thorn bushes, the winding river-beds are drawn up with crooked dark-green trails; those are the woods of the might, wide-branching Mimosa trees, with thorns like spikes; the cactus grows here, and here is the home of the Giraffe and the Rhino."  So wrote Karen in Out of Africa.

Karen's beloved Denys Finch-Hatton was buried up here somewhere.  Karen had taken white painted stones from her driveway to mark the grave.  She told us that a lion and lioness use to come at sunrise and had "stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time."

If you see the movie again, look to the part where Karen (Meryl Streep) and Denys (Robert Redford) are having a picnic up here, and look to the view behind them – that is the awesome beauty I was now relishing.  I took it in until I heard some whoops and shouts.  Three big male youths were running down the hill to my right and it seemed they were coming toward me.  Where did they come from?  There was only grassland and some trees and rocks up here; there was nothing man-made.  I got nervous for Melawend and started back down the rough road to Karen.

 

(The day I gazed upon the majesty of the Great Rift Valley was the same day Jim Bakker, a Pentecostal preacher and TV evangelist, resigned from his $129 million-a-year PTL (Praise the Lord or People That Love) ministry after admitting adultery  with Jessica Hahn.  (She would go on to have breast implants and pose for Playboy magazine).  He was forced to give up his reign over Heritage USA – the most popular theme park in the US, after the two Disney operations.   The heart of the operation was the PTL cable network, which reached 13.5 million households via 171 stations, and featured the chatty Jim and Tammy Show.  Jim continually preached, and sometimes Tammy wept through enormous fly-whisk eyelashes, for funds to support new projects.

 Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, his rival, admitted passing on rumors of Bakker's illicit behavior to the officials of the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostals to which both were clergy.  He had also called Bakker's theme park a "Christian Disneyland".  But it would be revealed that Swaggart paid prostitutes to commit "pornographic acts".

Reverend Oral Roberts had broadcast that God would "call Oral Roberts home" unless by March 31 believers came up with $4.5 million for missionary work.   So he fasted in his 200-ft.-tall Tulsa Prayer Tower, a glass-and-steel tower on the campus of Oral Roberts University.  He also had claimed in 1980 that he had a bedside visitation by a 900-foot-tall Jesus who said he would speak to Robert's partners and through them he would build his medical center – funds immediately started pouring in.

The only honest and moral one of the lot seemed be the Reverend Billy Graham.)

 

I returned to Nairobi and called the High Commission.  I was told that my tent had arrived and was at the airport Customs.  It was good that I had called because the folks at the High Commission had thought I had left Nairobi for good.  Ben Itugi of Express Kenya, who was taking care of the shipment, was about to reroute it to Malaysia for me, as requested.  It was settled that I would come in the next Monday to go through the bureaucratic hassle to get it out of Customs.  For now, I prepared to go the Mount Kenya Game Ranch and try to meet Don Hunt.  I noted in my journal that this "should be interesting."

(What a gross understatement!   I would discover just some of the wonderful work with wildlife and Kenyan children that was being done by a few dedicated people for the benefit of so many – really anyone who cared about wildlife and conservation.   But I would come to believe that not that many people really knew much about them or their work, not at all like what was going on back in the United States.)

Nairobi stood at the southern approaches of the blunt Aberdare Mountains.  The highest point in the Aberdares, and the second highest in Africa (Mt. Kilimanjaro being the highest), was an extinct volcano – Mount Kenya (17,058 feet / 5199 meters high) – "Old Kirinyaga", the sacred mountain of the Kikuyu.  Moist easterly winds off the Indian Ocean were wrung out over the high land, helping to give the eastern highlands some of the world's richest agricultural lands.  This was the countryside I saw on the way to Mount Kenya.  It reminded me of parts of Ontario – rolling green farmlands and forests.  There were cluttered villages of small simple buildings and the more open green areas.  Around Nyeri, the land rose higher and was particularly beautiful with high hills and forests.

These temperate, fertile highlands were at the epicenter of the violent eruption of Kenya's civil war.  The rich land was coveted and claimed by white settlers.  Blood was shed to win it back.  Just 23 years before I rode through here, the Bantus had their land again.   The Bantu group was comprised of the Kikuyu (about 3.5 million) and the Kamba (about 2 million) and the Meru (about 1 million) and many other subgroups.  They all lived on these rich farmlands in the area Mount Kenya.   Now these highland Bantu were producing most of Kenya's food (big truckloads would be continually rumbling into Nairobi laden with foodstuffs).  And they produced export cash crops, notably coffee and tea.

The road I was looking for was on the northwest side of Mount Kenya.  To get there, Melawend and I crossed the Equator (the Equator cut across the mountain’s southern flanks).  The term "equator" conjured up images of "the hottest place on earth".   It was not the case.  Most of the world's deserts were between 15 degrees and 40 degrees latitude where a high-pressure zone separates each temperate region from the tropics.  So there came a bizarre feeling when I saw traces of snow on the Mount Kenya’s summit.