September 2010

African porcupines crossing the road at night.

In his book White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris, author and big-game hunter Brian Herne notes that, up until WWII, it wasn’t at all unusual for a safari to last three, five, or even nine months. It all depended on how serious you were about getting a proper trophy of the Big Five: elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard. The thing is, you weren’t going after the animals willy-nilly; you went after elephant depending on where your guide thought you might have the best chance, and when you bagged one, the entire safari troupe–which could easily be made up of 20 or 30 men, including cooks, porters, gunbearers, trackers, and even a taxidermist—moved on to the next site, miles away, in search of lion or buffalo or whatever.

This is all made quite clear in Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (Hem’s was a relatively short two-month safari) when he writes about running out of time hunting in a certain part of the country and the need to make a choice before the rains come whether to stay for one or two more days and get his bull or move on and hunt for something else.

“I knew there were only two days more to hunt before we must leave. M’Cola knew it too, and we were hunting together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a shortness of time…”

Big game hunting has been banned in Kenya for over 30 years, but even now everyone comes to Africa wanting to shoot the Big Five, at least with their camera.

But a few years ago, someone suggested going on safari to shoot the “Small Five”—aardvark, serval, mongoose, hyrax, and the African porcupine. I have to say, I’ve never seen any of the Small Five in the wilderness—until last night.

We were just bumbling along through the bush in the darkness, going very slow both because it was difficult to see more than ten feet down the road because of the head-high commiphora thickets and because we weren’t at all sure where we were going. So we were all doing that thing you do at night when you’re a little bit lost on an unfamiliar road—leaning forwards and staring very intensely at the darkness directly in front of you. Suddenly there were several large black lumps moving across the road ten or twenty feet in front of us.

“Jesus!” Fletch said, startled. “What the hell is that?”

Calvin immediately stopped the Land Cruiser. And we all stared. At a family of African porcupines, a couple of them at least a couple of feet long, rambling across the rutted road.

“There aren’t porcupines in Africa, are there?” Fletch asked.

Well, yes, there are. You just never see them because, of course, they’re nocturnal. And who is out in the bush at night? Just people like us who are lost and hours behind schedule.

Crested porcupine, according to my wildlife guide, are the largest rodents in East Africa. “Their mainly nocturnal habits make them rare to see.” Well, good for us then.

The guide also said the belief that the quills can be shot by the animal is a myth. Evidently what they do, if threatened, is stamp their feet, click their teeth, and hiss at you (hmmm…sounds like an editor I know). If that doesn’t work, “the porcupine runs backward until it rams its attacker. The reverse charge is most effective because the hindquarters are the most heavily armed and the quills are directed to the rear.”

Brilliant.

So now I’ve bagged one of the Small Five. Next up (I hope): maybe an aardvark?

Weaver nests on an acacia silhouetted against the Mathews Range. Photos by David Lansing.

It’s late and we’re lost. Not that I’m overly concerned about it. It just means we’re going to have to find Sarara Camp in the dark.

We bumped our way along the Great North Road from Archer’s Post for an hour or so and then headed west on a single-track dirt road into the hills towards Womba. Calvin had been told there would be a small wooden sign pointing towards Sarara, but there wasn’t. Probably because of the floods that washed through here in March. It’s hard to believe looking at this dry, dusty topography that, at times, it can get destructive amounts of rain. In fact, several camps along the nearby Ewaso Ngiro River, including Elephant Watch Camp, where Pete is friends with Oria Iain Douglas-Hamilton (he of Save the Elephants fame), were completely swept away by the flood waters.

Anyway, we’re lost. Calvin and Keith have been chattering on the 2-way radio for half an hour trying to determine whether they missed the turnoff to Sarara and should turn around or just keep going. Finally, Calvin makes an executive decision: Let’s turn around.

An elegant looking gerenuk. Photo by David Lansing.

It’s beautiful out here: acacia trees, leleshwa (that blue-leafed bush with fragrant leaves smelling of camphor), thickets of commiphora. Already the sun has set behind the irregular peaks of the Mathews Range that stand in purple silhouette up against a cloudy skyline. Driving slowly down this rutted road we’ve come across huge troops of baboons, crossing from one side of the road to the other while vigilant elders wait on either side, like school crossing-guards, hurrying everyone along. And bright powdered-blue flocks of guinea fowl, dik-dik (always in pairs), and the lovely, dancer-like gerenuks with their most-elegant long necks, standing up on their hind legs to delicately nibble on a branch or two. I would be happy to concede that we’re not going to make Sarara tonight and just camp in this wilderness, but Calvin seems anxious. This is his expedition, after all, and he probably doesn’t feel good about the fact that he has gotten us lost.

When we stop to get our bearings, I climb out of the Land Cruiser and take a photo of an acacia tree with tidy weaver nests hanging like Christmas ornaments on its branches.

“Do you see how all the nests are built on one side of the tree?” Calvin says. “They’re facing west. Away from the wind, which always blows from the east. So no matter how lost you are out here, all you have to do is look at the weaver’s nests to figure out what direction you should go.”

And with that, we climb back into the vehicles and head due north—if the weaver nests are to be believed.

Elephant dung in a sand river near Archer's Post. Photo by David Lansing.

After crossing the muddy Ewaso Ngiro river at Archer’s Post, we stopped in a lugga, or sand river, to take a piss. Fresh elephant dung stretched across the sand river towards the trees on the far bank. I did my business wondering if the ellies were hiding in the trees, watching us.

We still had a long drive ahead of us to make Sarara Camp in the Namunyak (meaning Place of Peace) Conversancy, located in the southern end of the Mathews Range. At first Calvin had said we’d reach Sarara by two or three in the afternoon but the road had been even rougher than we’d imagined and we were way behind schedule. Now we were all silently hoping just to make it before darkness. You don’t want to drive the corrugated roads of Kenya’s Lost Land at night, and you particularly don’t want to be looking for obscure dusty tracks in the thick commiphora bush country that we’d entered.

When we’d stopped, Pete, who was traveling with Calvin, had wobbled out of the Land Cruiser looking dazed. “You need to ride with him,” he said. “You need to talk.”

About what? I asked him. Everything, he said. “The whole Osa and Martin Johnson thing and his great uncle Bud and what happened.”

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Just ride with him,” Pete said. He climbed into the other vehicle, the one driven by Keith, where Hardy and Fletch were sitting in the back dozing.

I told Calvin I’d ride with him to Sarara, if that was all right by him. We started back up the red dusty road. The way to drive this corrugated stuff, Calvin said, was to go fast. Sort of riding the crests of the corrugation like a speedboat over waves. But we couldn’t do that because of the trailer we were hauling. On some stretches of the road, where sand had filled in some of the corrugation, we could make 30 or 35 mph, but for the most part we settled around 20 or 25. Keith’s vehicle, tired of riding in our dust, soon passed us and disappeared over the horizon. I braced myself by putting a hand up against the ceiling of the Land Cruiser and cinching up my seat belt to keep from banging around the cab. Maps and sunglasses skid across the top of the dashboard; a pile of equipment—binoculars, 2-way radio charger, torch, water bottles—bounced around at my feet. I shoved my camera underneath my shirt to protect it from the cloud of rest dust swirling around us.

“So Pedro says you guys had a good chat on the drive up,” I said, trying to initiate conversation.

“Yup,” said Calvin.

“About Bud and the Johnsons?”

Calvin shrugged.

“I guess this is where the trouble started,” I said.

“Probably,” Calvin replied.

“On the second expedition. The one in 1924.”

“Yup.”

Maybe Calvin had been chatty with Pedro but he certainly wasn’t in the mood for conversation now. Maybe it was me or maybe he was just tired. God knows I was. I decided to just wait him out. It would be hours before we got to Sarara. When Calvin felt like talking, he would. Until then, I’d just hang on and take in the scenery, looking for the odd dik-dik or gerenuk that seemed rather common out here, hoping to spot a Grevy’s zebra which were supposed to be in abundance though we’d yet to come across one.

It wasn’t just coincidental that we were traveling into the Mathews Range. Something had happened around here between the Johnsons and Bud Cottar. According to Osa Johnson, early in March, 1924, the expedition, led by Bud Cottar, arrived at the Ewaso Ngiro at Archer’s Post with their “vehicles, wagons, camels, and seventy men,” where they waited for their friend Blayney Percival to catch up to them from Nairobi.

The Percival family was famous in Kenya at this point. Philip Percival was one of the great white hunters on Teddy Roosevelt’s safari in 1909. His older brother, Blayney, started out as a white hunter as well but ended up as Kenya’s first chief game warden (he was also the charming hunter called “Pops” in Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa).

By the time the Johnsons met Blayney Percival he was in his late 40s and nearing retirement. Bud Cottar, on the other hand, having just turned 23, was just getting his feet wet in the safari business. Still, it was Bud that the Johnsons had turned to organize their expedition to Lake Paradise as he had three years earlier. This time, however, he never made it past Archer’s Post. A day or two after Blayney Percival caught up with the group, plans changed. Blayney Percival took over the expedition. Bud Cottar headed back to Nairobi alone. And never worked for the Johnsons again.

What happened? This was the story I was waiting for Calvin to tell me. But obviously he was going to do it on his own time.

A Samburu warrior crossing a lugga, or dry riverbed. Photo by David Lansing.

Isiolo is a dusty frontier town inhabited by an odd mix of nomadic Somalis, tough Samburu, and exotic Boran as well as feisty Rindelle. Some people refer to Isiolo as the “gateway to lost Kenya,” the beginning of a forbidding stretch of country that has long been beyond the ability of any government, whether the Brits during the colonial days or the Kenyans today, to control. In fact, locals often refer to this border area as “Kenya Mbili”—Swahili for the two Kenyas.

If you ask someone from Isiolo who is headed for Nairobi where they are going, Calvin tells me, they will say, “I am going to Kenya.” That’s how acute the difference is between where we have been and where we are going.

Back in 1921 when Bud Cottar led Osa and Martin Johnson through here on their expedition to find Lake Paradise, Isiolo was the end of the road and a dangerous place. “Ethiopian raiders from across the border regularly poached elephant, stole livestock, and even abducted people,” writes Pascal Imperato in his account of the trek. “This, combined with highly independent and at times warlike nomadic populations who scorned colonial rule, made the area a dangerous and insecure one.”

The dusty frontier town of Isiolo.

Not much has changed. The area is still troubled by shiftas—Somali bandits that steal cattle, hijack vehicles, and, every once in awhile, murder travelers in transit. But, frankly, most of the tribes who have managed to exist in this desolate area have a bit of a war-like tradition. From the Joshua Project, a Christian organization seeking to “highlight the ethnic people groups (sic) of the world with the least followers of Jesus Christ: “Boran boys are taught to use a spear and begin training at an early age to become warriors. The killing of a man was customarily a part of becoming a full-fledged adult, as well as part of certain festivals. In fact, traditionally, a man ready to marry was expected to present part of a man who he had killed to his bride.”

Not to worry. The article notes that these days wild animals are now used instead of humans. For the most part.

As for the Samburu, it has little to say other than there are almost no Christian adherents in the region and that we should pray for them for continuing “to resist the good news of Jesus.”

Well, good for the Samburu, I say.

Actually, there are two very noticeable things about Isiolo. One is that it’s the first town where we’ve seen quite a few mosques (its large Somali population is Muslim). The other is that the town is even dustier than usual at the moment as construction continues on what is sometimes called The Great North Road of Africa, a 330-mile tortuous track from here to Moyale on the Ethiopian border that someday (Next year? The year after that?) will be transformed into a proper tarmac and fill in the last great gap in the Cape-to-Cairo highway.

Is this a good thing, building a highway from Ethiopia to Isiolo? Well, it will undoubtedly make things more difficult for the Somali bandits as the road brings tourism and economic development to the area. But what will happen to the Samburu tribes in this area who, at the moment, still measure their wealth by the number of cattle they own and believe in a god that lives in the mountain peaks? Or the Rendille who, around here, still wear colorful shukas, like the Masai, and will offer up a lamb to the gods in times of drought?

Can’t be good. But the road is coming. The Chinese are here in Isiolo to build it.

So we travel on.

This is where we’re headed–from the verdant highlands that straddle the equator near Mt. Kenya to the scorching badlands of the Kaisut Desert.