Sarara

Fletcher, Hardy and our Samburu guide looking for birds at Sarara. Photos by David Lansing.

Being so close to the equator, we get 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness at Sarara. Actually, that’s not perfectly true. Last night the sun set at 6:36 and this morning it came up at 6:28. So night is eight minutes longer this time of year.

Mornings are the best here. I am awake even before I hear the soft shuffle of the mess tent waiter bringing us our tea. I lie in bed, watching the “hills where the child got lost” slowly brighten, listening to the bundu come alive, the unseen dudus chirping, clicking, humming, and always the soft, sad coo of the mourning dove.

There are so many different birds living in these mountains. Calvin says probably 500 species or so. This morning when we went out game watching, ostensibly in search of some Grevy’s zebras, which I’ve yet to spot, we ended up spending most of our time staring at birds. In fact, I think Fletcher is turning into an ornithologist. He and our Samburu guide, Phillip, sat on top of the Land Cruiser studying an African bird book and giving out tidbits of information as we came across tawny eagles and pygmy falcons, starlings and weavers.

“Wacha!” Phillip would yell to Reuben, our driver, and everyone would be thrown forward in their seat as the four-wheel-drive came to an abrupt halt because he’d spotted an ndege in a dead tree or scurrying through the bush or circling in the thermals.

An African spoonbill hunting for breakfast. Photo by David Lansing.

Then Fletch would read to us from his well-worn guide: “African spoonbill. A bird with pure white plumage. The most obvious identification feature is the large spoon-like pink and grey bill which is used in a sweeping motion when feeding.”

And then we’d sit there for hours—okay, not quite hours but for a long time—watching our spoonbill sweep the muddy waterhole with his pink and grey bill, just like the guidebook said it would.

Eventually we’d move on. Until Phillip yelled “Tai!” again and pointed at a dead tree where a pair of goshawks were perched.

“Eastern pale chanting goshawk,” Fletcher read. “Often seen in the early morning hunting from favored perches.”

We all looked up at the goshawks sitting on a favored perch, just like the guidebook said. It was uncanny.

“They feed on lizards, insects, small mammals and birds ranging from small passerines to francolins.”

A pair of goshawks. Photo by David Lansing.

We all searched the ground beneath the dead tree looking for lizards, insects, or small mammals. I would have looked for a passerine but I didn’t know what that was and I was afraid to ask Fletcher for fear we’d be here for another twenty minutes.

“Wow,” said Fletcher. He and the Samburu guide studied the book together, looking at the photo of the goshawk in the book, then at the bird in the dead tree, back to the book. This went on for quite awhile.

We saw a bateleur eagle and augur buzzards, sandgrouse and guinea fowl (both helmeted and vulturine) by the dozens, a harrier hawk, and lots of go-away birds. But no Grevy’s zebra. We just didn’t have time.

“Maybe this afternoon,” said Phillip as we headed back to camp.

Maybe. If we don’t have to stop to look at all of the birds.

Ian Craig, the godfather of community conservancies in Northern Kenya. Photo by David Lansing.

I’m sitting in the mess tent at Sarara looking at a Cottar family scrapbook, put together by Pat, Calvin’s mother, when Tim casually says, “Here comes Ian.”

He means Ian Craig, the godfather of Kenyan community wildlife conservancies, who is flying in—from Nairobi? Or Lewa? I’m not quite sure—to have lunch with us today. Evidently the deal is that when a guest flies in, they buzz the camp to let them know they’re here and then a safari vehicle is sent to pick them up at the nearby airstrip.

So we’ve just been buzzed.

According to Tim, Piers (who runs Saraha and who I still haven’t met) will pick Ian up. So we busy ourselves by getting out our cameras and recording equipments and making sure everything works and is fully charged. And then Ian and Piers sweep in like Lawrence of Arabia and his boy entering the officer’s bar in Cairo after taking Aqaba from the Turks.

“I’d…like…a…lemonade,” Ian says.

I shuffle over to where Piers is standing, introduce myself, and tell him how much we’re enjoying our stay at Sarara and how very, very sorry I am that we didn’t get here in time to join him for lunch the other day.

Piers nods, says nothing, and moves away.

Well. I think that went particularly well.

At lunch, I sit at the one end of the table, Piers at the other—like mom and dad. Between us is about ten feet and ten other people. Was it Piers idea to sit as far away from me as possible? Hard to say. Anyway, Ian Craig has decided to sit on my right so we can have a nice little conversation over the pasta salad and fresh fruit. Just to get things going, I mention to him, as I’m passing him the pasta bowl, that I understand that one of the reasons he started Sarara was because he’d seen a couple of elephants being slaughtered by shifta.

“Ten, actually,” he says.

“Ten shifta?”

“No…” Dramatic pause. “Ten elephants.”

Ah. Can you imagine? He’s camping not far from here and in the middle of the night shifta with AK47s mow down ten elephants, hack up their heads to get at the tusks, and flee leaving tons of bloodied elephant corpses behind them. That must have been nasty.

Then he asks me a few questions about this expedition we’re on to follow in the footsteps of Osa and Martin Johnson. “My mum supplied them with ox wagons and supplies out of Larisoro (near Archer’s Post),” he says. “I remember her talking about them. She thought the woman, in particular, was quite remarkable.”

He tells me that the Northern Rangelands Trust, which is the NGO that facilitates the development of community-led conservation initiatives in Northern Kenya, like Lewa and Sarara, would like to get something going up by Lake Paradise but haven’t been able to make anything work. He’s wondering if perhaps Calvin, after he takes us up there, might be interested in doing something similar to his camp in the Mara. Wouldn’t that be great?

“Every time I go to Marsabit it’s just a massive surprise—in a good way,” says Ian. “There’s still this great paradise in the middle of the desert. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. The trees, the forest—it’s all the same as when Martin and Osa were there. I think you’ll be quite amazed.”

And then he excuses himself from the table, has a word or two with Calvin, and leaves hurriedly with Piers. Like T. E. Lawrence headed for Damascus, off to conquer more enemies in the desert.

A Samburu in front of Sarara Camp.

I’m still trying to understand the various ways in which wildlife is protected in Kenya. It’s very confusing, even to those who live here. There are Kenya game parks and Kenya game reserves, and then there are wildlife ranches and wildlife conservancies. Masai Mara is a national game reserve; Mt. Kenya is a national park; Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp is in the Esoit Maasai Ranch while Sarara Camp is in the Namunyak Conservancy. But they all manage and preserve wildlife. Got all that?

I’m probably going to make a mess of this, but let me try and muddle my way through it. The main difference between a national park in Kenya and a national reserve is this: In a park, human habitation is excluded. To quote from the National Park Trustee’s report of 1951, five years after Kenya established their first national park, Nairobi National Park: a national reserve denotes a preservation area “where the reasonable needs of the human inhabitants living within the area must take preference.”

So, in a reserve, it’s people over animals.

The Masai Mara became a national reserve in 1974. The reason it was not made a park is because there were thousands of Maasai living here with tens of thousands of their goats and cattle. There was no way in hell you could displace them. And there never will be. In fact, each year it gets a little (or a lot) worse in the Mara because pressure from the Maasai and their livestock continues to squeeze out the animals. Everyone is competing for the same resources: land, grazing grass, and water.

Okay, now what about ranches and conservancies? Let me try and explain it by telling this story: After WWI, Britain tried to increase the number of British settlers in Kenya by setting up a “Soldier Settler” entitlement program that gave land to Brits who built a residence and lived on their property in Kenya. One of those old soldiers was named Alec Douglas and he established a cattle ranch north of Mt. Kenya in an area called Lewa Downs. After he died, his daughter, Delia, inherited the property and with her husband, David Craig, ran the farm for 26 years before handing it over to their eldest son, Ian (who we are supposedly having lunch with today).

A black rhino at Lewa. Photo by Daryl & Sharna Balfour.

So Ian Craig, just like his father, ran a cattle ranch. Until Kenya passed a law in the late 70s outlawing hunting (which turned out to be a disastrous move—but more on that later) and the country’s wildlife population was decimated by poachers. When I say decimated, I’m not kidding. After the hunting ban, the number of black rhinos in Kenya dropped from an estimated 20,000 to fewer than 300 in about five years.

In an effort to save what few rhinos were left, in 1983 the Craigs set aside 5,000 acres of their cattle ranch as a rhino sanctuary. Now here’s the tricky part: all the wildlife living on their ranch, including the rhinos, belonged to the Kenyan government. But the land, which was private, was the Craigs. So far so good?

This project was so successful that in 1995, the whole of the Craigs’ old Lewa Downs ranch, as well as the state owned Ngare Ndare Forest Reserve, was enclosed with 100 miles of electric fence, both to keep animals in and poachers out, and officially became the non-profit Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, which is now home to more than 300 people and encompasses over 62,000 acres where some 70 different mammals, including 65 black rhinos, and over 400 species of birds live.

So while the impetus for converting Lewa Downs from a cattle ranch into a conservancy was a private initiative to save black rhinos, what it has developed into is a community conservation area that gives jobs to the local tribes, protects their livestock, and funds schools, health clinics, and the like.

This is all very complicated but also very important because the bottom line is that the real heavy lifting in wildlife conservation in Kenya is really being done not in the National Parks but in the community conservancies.

It’s all about Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” pyramid theory: Before people can care about animals or even other people, first they must have the basics—food, water, shelter, health, and security. The rest will follow. That’s what the community conservancies (as opposed to the national parks and reserves) are doing. And both Lewa and Sarara, as well as Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp, are shining lights in this regard.

What does this mean to you? It means that should you ever want to visit Kenya to see wildlife, it is massively important where you decide to stay: In a lodge where the money is going to end up back in the pockets of some multi-national conglomerate and the minions of the Kenyan government or in a camp owned and operated by a community conservancy where the cash goes back into their pockets so they have more of a reason to preserve wildlife rather than shoot it?

Consider this: the Maasai in the Mara receive nothing from your visit (and, in fact, even the game wardens there have a hard time getting paid) while Sarara is owned by some 7,000 Samburu and the camp generates over $150,000 annually to those who live there. So they have a reason not to shoot the elephants. Because they are a valuable resource.

Now where would you rather stay?

A Samburu staff member at Sarara Camp. Photo by David Lansing.

Everyone who works at Sarara, except the administrators, is Samburu, a somewhat mysterious tribe thought to be an offshoot of the Maasai (like the Maasai, they shave the women’s heads, adopt a one-legged stance while herding, and speak a Maa dialect which is similar but not identical to the Maasai).

This morning when I had my coffee in the mess tent, I tried talking to the young Samburu waiter but it wasn’t easy. He told me his English wasn’t very good but I think that’s just a polite way of avoiding conversation. I think many Africans find the questions asked of them by mzungus like me to be perplexing at best. Like they must think to themselves, Why would anyone want to know this thing?

For instance, I asked the waiter, whose name was Jarso, how old he was. From the look in his eyes, I could see that his head was about to explode. He had no idea how to answer this, partially because few Samburu have birth records but also because they just don’t record time the way we do. Time is like the stars in the sky; there are many and they go on forever so why would anyone want to count them?

Then I asked him where he was from. This was better. He could name this. He told me with a smile that he came from Sero-olipi.

And where is Sero-olipi, I asked him. Ahh. This was a problem. A mzungu would say, “It’s 35 miles northeast of here.” Jaro said, “I walk in seven hours.”

Now, do you have any idea where Sero-olipi is in relation to Sarara? Because I don’t. That’s another thing that’s so different; they don’t think of distance in terms of miles or even feet. If a Samburu guide (or a Maasai guide, for that matter) tells you that he has seen an elephant and you ask him where, he most likely will point vaguely over his shoulder and say, “Over there.” Pursue that by asking him how far and he is likely to reply, “Very close.” Or, “Not far.” But he will never say a hundred yards or a mile away. Because they do not think spatially the way we do. It makes no difference if the elephant is a mile away or five miles away; it only matters if you can walk there before it gets dark. So “very close” means, Yes, we can walk there in the daylight. But nothing else.

Peter Matthiessen, in his book The Tree Where Man Was Born, talks wonderfully about this disconnect between Western and African thinking: “I would have liked to talk to the Africans, but I spoke no Kamba and very poor Swahili, and even if my Swahili had been excellent, there was no reason to talk that they would understand: I was full of good will but had nothing at all to say. Feeling above all impolite, I sat down by the fire with a drink, and listened to crickets and soft African voices and the hum of the kerosene lamp…”

There it is, you see: I was full of good will but had nothing at all to say. That’s the feeling you have so often with the Africans. And certainly the way I felt with Jaro. So I took my coffee and went off to sit on the rocks, alone, letting Jaro get back to his work.

Hardy at Sarara's natural rock pool. Photos by David Lansing.

The water for the tent showers at Sarara are solar heated and they take a bit of adjusting. At first the water is just tepid and you convince yourself that’s as hot as it’s going to get and start to soap up and then the scald comes. The whole process takes about three and a half minutes. I could tell because I timed it from when Hardy first turned on the shower next door to our tent cabin to when I heard him scream. Just about exactly three and a half minutes.

It was quiet down in the dining pavilion. Pete and Fletcher weren’t up yet. Neither was the family whose dinner we’d interrupted when we first came in. The dining pavilion was open on three sides. The back was a smooth mud wall above mortared rocks and the whole thing was covered by a thatched roof in a cone shape, almost like a Mexican palapa. There was a comfortable sitting area with several large couches and some old black and white photos on the wall, including one of Osa and Martin Johnson from when they passed through this area in 1924.

A Samburu wearing a green and blue plaid kikoi around his waist, like a skirt, and bright necklaces, bracelets, and anklets, brought me a cup of coffee. The wooden floor extended out onto a large deck with wide steps that led down to a natural pool built into the rocks. The water was turquoise and reflected the dark gray clouds in the sky. I thought about going back up to my tent and putting on a swim suit but I knew the plan was to have a quick breakfast and then go out game viewing so unless Pete and Fletcher failed to get up soon, there wouldn’t be time for a swim.

Hardy was sitting on an outcropping just beyond the pool, looking through some binoculars. I asked him what he was looking at.

“A family of elephants just came out of the bush to this water hole,” he said.

I thought he was kidding but I took my tea down to the outcropping where he was huddled and sure enough, not forty feet away were two cows and a calf squirting water over themselves as they took their morning bath.

Hardy and I sat there, drinking our tea and watching the elephants, not talking, just looking at these huge gray beasts, so close we could smell them, and the green valley spreading out behind them and the peaks, like chinamen hats, of the Lengiyu Hills poking through the clouds.

A young girl and her dad at the elephant water hole. Photo by David Lansing.

After awhile a young girl, about ten, came out. Hardy told her there was a family of elephants at the water hole taking a bath. She said, very blasé, “I know. We’ve seen them before.”

I asked her how long her family had been at Sarara and she said two days and they were leaving tomorrow. “We’ve already seen everything,” she said.

I asked her if she’d seen any African porcupines, thinking that might impress her.

“Several,” she said. “There’s one that lives under this deck. I found one of his quills yesterday and my dad said I could take it home with me.”

Then her father came down for breakfast and she ran over to him and before the Samburu could even pour him a cup of coffee, she’d dragged him over to the pool. “Look, dad, more elephants!” she said excitedly. “I love elephants.”

Obviously her worldliness was reserved for complete strangers and not her father.

The dad acted appropriately impressed at the sight of the elephants and told the little girl to hurry and go get her camera. Meanwhile, Hardy and I got up from our prime viewing spot and headed back up the rocks to the dining pavilion.

“Isn’t this amazing,” said the dad as he passed us, his daughter skipping down the rocks swinging an instant camera around in her hand.

“Absolutely the best,” said Hardy. “Particularly when your daughter gets to see it with you.”

And then we went up and had our breakfast while the father and daughter sat on the rocks looking at the elephants.