Turnover at the Iqbal hotel in Nairobi was pretty high, and before long all the Japanese and the South African in our dorm had been replaced by another ubiquitous pair of Dutch guys. One morning I walked to the native market on the outskirts of town for the purpose of buying dope for all of us. Many boys surrounded me when I entered the market area, each wanting to be the interpreter and "guide" for the tourist. It was a decent gig for them, because not only did the guide get a tip from the foreigner, but they got back from the sellers a small cut of everything I spent . I chose the lad who seemed to have the most calm behind his eyes, explained to him that I was uninterested in seeing tourist souvenir junk, and whispered my errand.
After hustling into the market quite a distance, we found ourselves in front of a shoddy stall made of reeds. I was a bit surprised to be offered not a small, compact package of shredded dope leaves, but a big, intact bush, dirty roots and all. I crushed some between my fingers and smelled it, then entered into a short successful negotiation. The stall-keeper happily wrapped up my bush in newspapers and twine, (I had obviously overpaid), and I walked back into town with my bulky package, trying to appear inconspicuous.
Arriving at our room at the Iqbal, Paul and the Dutchmen and I fastened the hook on the door. The cleaning guy at the freak hotel was a glowering, muttering, suspicious-looking person, and we didn’t particularly want him to spot us while we were doing anything surreptitious. We spent a pleasant half-hour cleaning the dope, separating out the stems and seeds, and balancing open magazines in our laps to catch the "good" parts as our fingers shredded them.
Then came a peremptory knock at the door! "Just a minute!" We scurried around stuffing the stems back under the beds, and closing things up to look innocent and casual. I went to the door and unfastened it. As we feared, it was the cleaning man. He came into the room scowling, and I turned around to find one Dutchman repairing his backpack and the other nonchalantly reading a paperback. At that moment, Paul reached over to a stack of magazines, chose one to read, and DUMPED ALL OF THE DUTCHMENS' DOPE out of it across the floor!
We all froze, open-mouthed in amazement at the perfection of Paul’s faux-pas!
Finally the cleaning man broke the spell by crying,
"Yes", I agreed. "Do you want some Bhang?"
"NO!" he hissed, and backed out of the doorway.
Before I had been in Nairobi very long I found a used car rental outfit called "Oddjob’s" and
arranged to rent a six-year old VW bug and a pair of worn-out small tents for two weeks. I had my
California driver’s license certified by the Kenyan Ministry of Transport. Then handmade signs were posted at the Iqbal hotel, the YMCA, and the Youth Hostel soliciting additional bodies to share the car for a photo safari around Kenya and Tanzania. Paul joined up, as well as a Canadian gent named Bill whom I had originally bumped into during a khamseen dust storm in Egypt. The final member of our little safari turned out to be a Brit medical student named Ian, on holiday in Kenya. Great!
Two mornings after the "Bhang" fiasco, the VW was collected and our Safari rendezvoused, as per the plan, in front of the Iqbal. The four stalwarts loaded our gear (there was no luggage rack, so storage was extremely limited) and I drove south for most of the morning to Amboselli game park. Our first day on photo safari was completely amazing! Driving around Amboselli, only 150 miles south of Nairobi, we saw baboons, gazelles, antelopes, guinea hens, hippos, elephants, rhino, zebra, wildebeest, lions, warthogs, and wild water buffalo. WOW! I found that one can really NOT imagine how wonderful the game parks are without actually going there to visit them. Nope, sorry, but Lion Country Safari African Theme Park is not even a patch on the real thing!
The second day we crossed over into Tanzania, and that night we camped in Arusha park, in the foothills around majestic Kilimanjaro. I was awakened in the middle of the night by a crunching and thrashing nearby. I came out of the tent to watch an elephant enthusiastically eating a bush within 60 feet of our tent. It was noisy, and sleeping was out of the question until he sauntered away. I did wonder how the elephants knew not to step on those insignificant little canvas tent-prisms in the dark.
The following morning I was lying half awake, and became aware of a commotion, with the earth shaking just a little. It became louder and stronger, and then the front wall of the tent that the Canadian and I shared leaned inward. The noise was moving farther away as I stuck my head out of the tent. I saw the south end of a big Water Buffalo going north at good speed. He had passed so close that he had kicked out the tent peg which was guying the front of the tent !!
Three evenings later, the "campground" at the edge of Ngorongoro Crater game park was our stopping point. It really was only a field with a few trash cans chained to a post. We were the only visitors when we arrived in early afternoon, and, after looking into and across the amazing crater, about nine miles across and 1500 feet deep, we pitched our little waist-high tents.
To my surprise, a full sized modern bus appeared, and parked not far away. It promptly disgorged 30 Ohio State students, whose parents had paid many thousands of dollars so that their little darlings could be chauffeured around East Africa for most of the summer, and receive college credit for it !! Now that is REALLY a good gig !
While unloading was going on, all eight of the male Ohio State students wandered over to our camp to stand around the campfire and gripe and whine about how they had been camping with ALL those young women for three weeks already, and NONE of the guys had managed to get close to ANY of the gals!
As you can imagine, this information captured our
full and complete attention. All four of us immediately went through identical
logical thought progressions:
- These weenie guys really do seem quite "wet", and ineffectual, therefore I admire the taste of those women.
- Since
- it has been a long time since the ladies have been close to a man, And
- they all believe that they are on an "adventure"
- Ergo, we may have just crossed into the Happy Hunting Ground.
Then the Ohio State girls drifted over to visit in twos and threes, and Glory Be, all of our wildest fantasies became fact. Serious interest was shown in the only four real men available, and the odds were such that several young ladies were openly competing for the attention of each of us. After a few of my stories about solo overland vagabonding, "Open Season" was declared on nubile midwestern American females. Yowee! The critical limitation to our lascivious horizons was the regrettable lack of privacy. We had two 2-man tents for four of us, and the ladies had four 6-person tents for 22 of them. Oh well.
I dare not imagine how crushed the egos of the Ohio State guys must have been by all of this.
After careful consideration, I chose an unusually-friendly dishwater-blond named Jennifer. We chatted into the night around our little campfire. And there we heard, from their professor/guide, the story of this exact campsite on the previous year's trip.
When the bus had arrived in 1974, there had been yet another of the omnipresent duos of overlanding Nederlanders squatting there. These guys intended to sleep out under the stars. I had heard that this was not recommended in Masai tribal areas, such as Ngorongoro. The picturesque Masai, you see, have the rather strange "burial" custom of leaving their fresh dead next to known hyena trails. This has the unintended side effect of training the hyenas to eat anyone they find lying out on the ground at night.
As additional background, Ngorongoro Crater is the place where the definitive studies of hyena behavior were made. These studies proved that hyenas, far from being merely scavengers of other animals kills, actually hunt very effectively in packs, bringing down large game. It was found that more often than not, the local lions, being bigger and more dangerous, actually chase the hyenas away from the hyena kills, thereby reversing the previously accepted roles of hunter/scavenger.
The professor had explained all this to last year's overlanders, and had offered them a place to sleep in the bus. But they, having come all the way from South Africa, figured that they knew everything, and slept out anyway. One of them awoke just in time to get his hands up in front of his face, so that the powerful jaws of the hyena standing over him bit through both of his hands instead of grabbing him by the face to drag him away! His screams woke the camp, and they spent the next day trying to get the injured Dutchman to a place where his mangled hands could be treated !!
That night I was awakened by a snuffling at the outside of the sloping pup tent wall, inches from my face. I slapped the tent, and the snuffler went away, but only temporarily, and soon was again nosing the canvas. I could smell it's breath, and figured it was a hyena. We had previously seen the nasty little striped hyenas, just over knee high, with their hindquarters only a foot off the ground. I wanted to get back to sleep, figured there were a couple of striped hyenas outside, and decided that I would go out and make some noise and chase them away.
So I quietly got out of my sleeping bag, gripped my new Masai war club, and crouched inside while silently unzipping the tent door. Bursting out into the glaring moonlight in my underwear, hollering fiercely and waving my arms over my head, I quickly realized that I had made three serious miscalculations.
- There weren't a couple of hyenas outside, there were more than 15.
- There were no striped hyenas, but instead spotted hyenas, the first I had seen. Each of these critters was the size of a BIG German Shepherd.
- They did NOT run away, but all looked at me with great interest, the moonlight glinting in their eyes !
So I stopped and shut up. Bill, awakened by my noise, was loudly calling out "What's going on ????? Are you all right ?????", but, being a clever gent, he was NOT coming out of the tent to investigate.
At that point I figured it would be awfully ignominious to just slink cravenly back inside the tent, so I shook my war club, yelled again, and moved towards the largest group of the big predators. To my IMMENSE relief, they all loped calmly away, looking curiously back over their shoulders at me.
The next day, my new friend Jennifer was declared "camp guard" while all of the other students went down into the crater to see the animals. Since this campsite had such a dangerous reputation, I declared myself our camp guard while the rest of "Safari Iqbal" drove down into the crater. When we broke camp the following morning, I got an itinerary of the Ohio State East African Zoological Tour from Jennifer, and filed it away for future reference.
Not far from Ngorongoro is Olduvai gorge, which I coerced my companions into visiting. The Leakys had already moved on to greener fossil beds to the north around Lake Rudolph. As my buddies expected, there wasn’t much to see, a circle of stones identified as a very ancient fire circle, and a little one-room shack museum with some bored guards. I was allowed to hold some of the stone tools used by our far far distant ancestors. Really, I think it was more of a pilgrimage for me than a tourist attraction.
We visited many game parks. Our navigating drill went as follows. We find a climbable tree, and I, as the strongest, boost Ian, who had binoculars, up into the lower branches. He climbs to a good spot, and then scouts for animals, relaying the information down to us. Shortly we drive in the indicated direction, all eyes peeled. It worked very well. Whenever we wanted to find the big carnivores, we could just drive to the bottom of the nearest chimney of circling vultures. The lions were very impressive, sitting or walking regally with their bloody muzzles, ignoring the sputtering VW can of humans.
On one occasion as we came up a gentle rise, following a faint vehicle track, I hit the brakes, and all of us gasped with astonishment! There in front of us was a MASSIVE herd of wildebeest, all moving left to right! There must have been 5000 of the beasts, and we drove carefully through the moving herd. The view would have been unchanged a hundred thousand years ago. It was a scene right out of the Pleistocene!
On one occasion I used the VW to chase an ostrich. It was great fun, and the auto is faster than the big bird, but not nearly as maneuverable! Whenever I felt that we were catching up, the ostrich would just go straight right or left in a heartbeat, and it took me a few hundred yards to get turned around again.
When I tried unsuccessfully to get a couple of rhinos to chase us, the rest of the safari summarily voted that Ian, with the only other official driving license, would henceforward be the sole approved driver whenever BIG animals were sighted. Spoilsports! That would have made a really great story.
Soon we fell into a daily rhythm, breaking camp and packing up in the morning, driving around seeing amazing things all through the day, and finding somewhere to camp in the evening. After pitching our two little pup tents, Ian and Paul usually took the car to the nearest Game Lodge for a big fancy expensive dinner, since they seemed to have lots larger traveling budgets than I did. Meanwhile Bill and I would remain at the camp and cook up semolina or beans for dinner, over a little campfire.
One evening, camped out in the open veldt beside a track, we had finished our dinner and Bill and I were standing beside the remains of our fire, chatting quietly until our companions would reappear, usually rather drunk. It was completely overcast, and a very dark night. We couldn’t make out the horizon, and the only things that existed in our black world were the tiny red dots of embers in the fire and the end of Bill’s cigarette. I have seldom before or since been outside in a night so opaquely dark.
Suddenly we were completely surrounded by thundering hooves! Large numbers of BIG fast-moving animals were roaring past us on both sides, many passing between us and the nearby tents! We couldn’t see a thing, and I was spinning around trying to get the little flashlight out of the breast pocket of my denim jacket! When I finally switched it on, all that could be seen were the clouds of dust which clogged our noses, and thousands of hoof-prints! The herd had already passed! This was a really exciting occurrence. We never did get to see which type of animals had stampeded all around within a few feet of us. However, quite fortunately, we also never saw whatever it was that those galloping animals were running away FROM! After that when just the two of us were out in the middle of the savanna, unarmed, with no vehicle, I did feel a little bit more exposed.
Poor Paul seemed to be feeling sicker and sicker. I looked into his eyes on the 10th day of Safari, and realized that the whites were going yellow. Bad sign. After seeing Thompson’s Falls, we broke off the journey a few days early and returned to Nairobi. Sure enough, Paul had hepatitis. As far as I know, none of the rest of us came down with it.
Checked into the Iqbal again, I shopped the local junkyards and managed to find a VW tailpipe to replace the one we had lost during one of my more enthusiastic driving episodes. I jammed it into place and returned the car to Oddjobs. When the four of us settled up our accounts, the entire 11 day trip, including car rental, equipment rental, food, camping fees, petrol, entrance fees, everything, had cost me a total of $121 U.S. Cheap Bill was out of pocket slightly less, and Ian and Paul had spent considerably more. I dare to claim that Safari Iqbal was the very best 11-dollar-per-day safari which ever was organized.
The equatorial coastline, unexpected romance, and sea snakes