Samburu

Our last group photo at Elephant Watch Camp; me, Hardy, Fletcher, and Pedro, left to right.

Well, this is a bit embarrassing. When we landed at the Samburu airstrip there was nobody there to pick us up so the pilot checked his phone and saw that he had a text message from Tropic Air saying we were to land at the other Samburu airstrip. The only problem was that they’d sent the text message about 20 minutes after we took off from Marsabit so he hadn’t gotten it. No biggie. We just piled back in the little Cessna and rolled down the bumpy dirt runway, got in the air for all of about five minutes, and then landed again at the correct field.

On the flight from Marsabit Hardy talked the pilot into hanging out at Elephant Watch Camp for a couple of hours instead of flying straight on to Nairobi, so all four of us as well as the pilot jumped in to the safari vehicle that was waiting for us and being driven by a couple of Samburu, one with braided hair colored with ochre mud. Along the way we had to stop for a few minutes as a cow and her calf were pulling limbs off some trees while standing in the road and obviously didn’t want to be interrupted. Eventually they moved on and so did we.

The camp itself, located on the sand banks of the Ewaso Nyiro River, is quite beautiful in a rustic sort of way, being built out of wood scavenged from fallen trees and mud walls and thatched roofs. It’s hard to believe that pretty much the entire camp was washed away in floods earlier this year and has been completely rebuilt by Oria and her staff.

A Samburu moran serves us tea at Elephant Watch Camp. Photo by David Lansing.

Iain and Oria weren’t here when we arrived but we were told they’d be here soon and we’d all have lunch together, and perhaps while we waited we’d like to have tea. We sat in a sort of outdoor living room area down by the river. There were woven mats on the sandy ground and a comfortable couch and tables made from driftwood beneath lacy acacia trees filled with vervet monkeys. The black-faced vervet is certainly more genial than the baboons we’d been used to at Lake Paradise, although like the baboon he can be rather dastardly and you have to watch out they don’t pee on you or worse.

We ordered tea which was brought out to us by a Samburu moran dressed up in a flamingo pink shuka and tons of beaded jewelry. He poured us a cup and we sat there in a languid state listening to the starlings and the monkeys in the trees and the gentle sound of the river floating by. We kept hoping that Oria and Iain would show up so we could have lunch and Hardy and Fletch could meet them before they had to get back to the airstrip, but it wasn’t to be. So we gathered ourselves up and sat on the couch for a final group shot and then Hardy and Fletch and the pilot got back in the safari rig and we all said our goodbyes and even though Pete and I will be staying on here at the Elephant Watch Camp, it felt like our expedition to Lake Paradise and our journey was truly over. And not wanting it to end just yet, Pete and I decided to go back to the airstrip with Hardy and Fletch and watch them fly away. Which, sadly, we did.

An aerial view of the new road leading to the Mathews Range in the distance. Photo by David Lansing.

It was an odd feeling to leave Lake Paradise. I had been thinking about it and reading about it for so long and then to simply get in the plane at Marsabit and fly over it and head south to Samburu—well, I felt like I was leaving something important behind me.

On the other hand, it was interesting to fly over the Kaisut Desert and see the Chinese road we’d driven up. It looked like a muddy river flowing through the flat landscape below. The road seemed to stretch all the way down to the Mathews Range and not once did we see a car or a truck on its still unfinished surface. Still, you can’t help but wonder what is going to happen to this still rather pristine section of Kenya once the road is completed and there is a highway connecting Nairobi to Ethiopia. Certainly it will bring more commerce to the Northern Frontier District, but it will also bring more people and more pressure on this rather fragile ecological area. I can’t help but think that it will not be a good thing for the animals either.

As we neared Samburu, we flew over Ol Doinyo Sabachi, the odd flat-topped kopje whose name means “the mountain where the child got lost.” Our pilot told us that years ago Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who runs the Save the Elephant organization and, along with his wife Oria, the camp where we are headed, Elephant Watch, climbed to the top of the rock and cleared a landing space so he could fly his plane there. It seems like an incredibly foolish thing to do because you either had to stop your plane very, very quickly or it would just go over the edge at the end of the runway. But then again, Iain, who just turned 68 in August, has always had a reputation as a bit of a mad man.

In The Tree Where Man Was Born, the great novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen writes of several reckless encounters Iain has miraculously survived over the years  including several small plane crashes.

Iain’s plane is twenty years old, and looks it, but it “came with all sorts of spare parts—ailerons and wings and things. I shan’t be able to use them, I suppose, unless I crump it.” We took off from Voi at a very steep angle—a stalling angle, I was told later by Hugh Lamprey, a veteran flyer who once landed his plane on the stony saddle, fifteen thousand feet up, between the peaks of Kilimanjaro. Despite thunderheads and heavy rain, Iain chose a strange route through the Teita Hills, and I sat filled with gloom as the black rain smacked his windshield. There are bad air currents in the Teita Hills; it was at Voi that Karen Blixen’s friend, Denys Finch-Hatton, crashed and died.

We crossed the Ardai Plain beyond Arusha and the smooth Losiminguri Hills, flying westward toward the dark cliffs of the Rift. But Iain would not suffer the flight to pass without incident, for just as we reached the cliff…he wigwagged the tourists taking tea on the lawn of the Manyara Lodge, on the rim of the escarpment, and no doubt caused a click of cups by banking in a violent arc over the void and plunging in a power dive at the ground-water forest, a thousand feet below.

A year later, when I got back to Ndala, I found Iain in a state of some chagrin. A month after my departure in the spring before, he had walked away from the wreck of his new airplane, which was far beyond the help of his spare parts. And it had scarcely been repaired when he nosed it over in soft sand while attempting to land on the sea beach at Kilifi, on the coast of Kenya. At present he was unable to accompany me on a planned climb of Ol Doinyo Lengai, having been warned by his sponsors and superiors that his reputation was outstripping his accomplishment.

He was silent for a while, then said abruptly that he expected to die violently, as his father had, and doubted very much that he would live to see his fortieth year. Should he maintain his present habits, this romantic prediction will doubtless be borne out. Yet people like Iain who hurl themselves at life with such generous spirit seem to rush untouched through danger after danger, as if the embrace of death as part of life made them immortal.

Well, obviously Iain has made if far past his fortieth birthday. But I wondered, as we began to descend towards the Elephant Watch Camp airstrip, if he was still the same rather maniacal egotist Matthiessen had written about back in 1972. We would soon find out.