In and Out of Africa

Last week when I was on safari in Africa—okay, I know it sounds pretentious and name-droppy, but come on! How often does one get to begin a journal entry with, “Last week when I was on safari in Africa…” hmmmmmm?

So, as I was saying, last week when I was on safari in Africa, I saw a bunch of animals.
In fact, when I returned last Saturday, I called my father to let him know that his treasured son had returned from the African jungle, he asked me, “So was it worth it?” And I replied, “Well it was the most expensive trip to the zoo I have ever had.”

Of course it was more than that.

I got to go to a new continent, get to know colleagues in new ways, see lush vegetation, and remind myself that camping is for suckers.

The heart of any safari is, naturally, the exposure and proximity to wild animals. I will get out of the way, right off the bat, the list of animals I saw within 25 feet of my person: giraffes, lions, zebras, cheetahs, buffalo, wildebeests, baboons, monkeys, elephants, and hippos. Some of you real animal experts may spot the absent animal in the list: we never saw a rhinoceros. We looked. They must have been busy last week.

But any trip is more than the sum of the animals one observes. It is about a new place, a new airline, a new dish, new words, new experiences ranging from the climatological to the sociological. So really any trip, and every trip, is then “worth it.”

The seven of us left on a shuttle bus to the airport last week Thursday bound for Dubai where we would spend the night before jetting across the Indian Ocean to Nairobi, Kenya. I had never heard of Emirates Airline before last week (strange, since according to their in-flight magazine they fly to 120 countries around the world) but after that first flight with them—I am in love with an airline. First, I announced to my 7 KA travel buddies, “I would actually pay for this entrée if I were going out to eat! This Thai Chicken Curry is great!” How often does that happen?! Next, like many upscale airlines, each passenger has his/her own TV screen…the better to keep potentially annoying passengers lulled and complacent. Thirdly, the seats were comfortable and made your back feel good! And lastly, the female flight attendants on Emirates Airlines have a dishy accessory to their traditional outfits: attached to their Jackie Kennedy-like pillbox hats is a veil which they have elegantly tossed over the opposite shoulder—what a cool, 1001 Arabian Nights homage they have going for this Dubai-based airline.

So we land in Dubai—a city I will admit I did not even really know about until a few years ago. In case Dubai is unfamiliar to you, I would imagine it will not stay unfamiliar for long. This uber-up-and-coming city is a wonder to behold. It is hard to describe the building boom one sees in this city. Dubai is oil-money rich, in a country (The United Arab Emirates) that is more a collection of city-states, and it is simply the most jaw-dropping site I have seen since Diane and Anne visited Las Vegas in 2004. There are gated communities, skyscrapers, and gleaming silver metal everywhere. I was trying to think what it reminds me of, because it is more than just Las Vegas. So I decided that Dubai is like Miami Beach meets Dallas meets Beverly Hills swirling in Las Vegas sauce. Everyone we talked to (in our oh-so-short overnight stay) mentioned a statistic that went something like this: Did you know that 75% of the world’s cranes are in Dubai for all the building projects? Now the statistic ranged from a much more modest 20% to the incredulous 75%, but you know, the exact figure doesn’t really matter. Many, many of the cranes in the world used to build skyscrapers are in Dubai. Just last week (in honor of our visit, no doubt!) the Dubai Tower was declared the world’s tallest free-standing structure, when it reached 1,822 feet, topping Toronto’s CN tower, which had held the record since 1976. The Dubai Tower will loom over the earth at 2,684 feet when it is completed next year. The developer of the tallest-building-on-earth has said, “This architectural and construction masterpiece is truly an inspirational human achievement that celebrates the can-do mindset of Dubai.” Let us remember that if the Freedom Tower ever is built on the Ground Zero site in New York, it will rise 1,776 feet into the air. Can-do indeed…

Oh, what happened to the animals? Oh, yes, I do love an intriguing city. I digress.

The following morning we boarded our plane for Nairobi. The desk clerk in Dubai was so excited for us—she comes from Nairobi, and she said we would love everything about Kenya. What I certainly loved on this trip already was a new friend, the school counselor named Zeina. Zeina and I hit it off immediately on this trip. On the second day of the trip I recorded in my journal, “Traveling in a group is always revealing. Whom do you like more than you thought you would? Whom do you discover can you barely stomach, and about whom do you remain neutral??” Zeina and I had fun from the first time the Veiled Attendants came down the aisle offering us a hot towel—as you said thank you to them, they practically purred, “pleasure.” We started giggling and that was the beginning of the fun.

As the plane shot in the air, Zeina got out her I-Pod, shared her earplugs, and she played two songs she had downloaded especially for the trip: the 1980s Toto song, “Africa,” and the so-unbelievably-catchy “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” During this five-hour flight to Kenya Zeina and I made up a whole dance for the song about the Mighty Jungle. Cute, huh? Surprisingly, the other 5 on the trip were uninterested in joining rehearsals for the lip-synch number.

When we landed we were surprised not to feel the pressure of humidity. In fact, the weather in Kenya was wonderfully temperate, ranging from a high of maybe 82 to a low in the evening of 60. I have been to San Diego twice, and what seemed like perfect weather there seemed also a godsend in Kenya.

We also were surprised to see that Nairobi had excruciating rush hour traffic. What might have been a 30 minute drive to our hotel on the outskirts of town, became a 2 hour madhouse. Ahhh…but the slow crawl gave us time to admire the lush vegetation around us. Maybe to those of you not in Jordan you wouldn’t notice the greenery as much, but I come from the desert now, and they had hedges in Kenya. I saw lawns again, and trees, and all the things we typically put in our yards…ahhhh…after a shower in a country that is not water-deprived we dined, wrapped ourselves in our mosquito netting in the hotel room and slept fast until morning. In the morning we would depart on the safari part of the adventure.

The next morning we met our drivers, John and Daniel, who taught us some Swahili and readied us for the long drive out to the bush, to the wildlife park areas in Kenya. “Jambo” is Swahili for “welcome,” and that was such an easy word to learn and use with reckless abandon.

Kenya is about the size of Texas, with roughly 32 million people, and we set out from Nairobi to the southwest part of the country, to the Masai Maara, the famed wildlife park. The drive offered us a chance to see some of the physical geography of Kenya—quite unusual and often spectacular: snowcapped mountains right on the equator, herds of wildlife roaming across the horizon of the savanna grasslands, and lush, tropical rainforests near coral beaches. Moreover, Kenya may well be the “cradle of humanity,” since some of the earliest evidence of human existence has been discovered in the Great Rift Valley.

Most of us are aware of the San Andreas geological fault in California—but that is only 780 miles, and kind of minor when compared to East Africa’s 4,000 mile long “Great Rift Valley.” It is the longest and most spectacular such feature on the earth’s surface (actually, here is something really cool to me: The GRV begins just about 10 miles away from me right here in Jordan, and continues for those 4,000 miles through Africa to Mozambique. It is like a huge scar across the earth’s surface, and is marked by volcanoes and lakes along the rift.) We ate lunch along the way.

Lunch marked the end of the calm part of the trip. After lunch, the rest of the driving was seriously on the WORST roads I have ever experienced. And these were highways. In the van we were trying to describe what it felt like in our car—someone said, “I know what a martini feels like now!” And another offered, “No, it is like popcorn kernels at the heat of passion,” and another rejoinder, “I am a human ragdoll.” These roads were simply unbelievably rough—a cratered madness hard to imagine.

But in time, well, like six hours later, we arrived at the camp.

Now, you have to know that my expectations of our trip were formed from two sources: my family has been to Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World, and my dear friends Caroline and Chuck spent part of their honeymoon at a resort and wildlife preserve in Mozambique—I think it is Mozambqiue. Anyway, I saw pictures of their wonderful accommodations. Splendor. And as I said, my own firsthand imaginings of darkest Africa were formed from our 20-minute safari at Animal Kingdom. If you get too hot there, or find the animals tedious, you can always board that bus that takes you right back to the plush Polynesian resort, complete with electricity and running water, no less! All courtesy of the benevolent Mickey Mouse.

So, try and conceive the picture I harbored in my head as I paid out my $240 a day for room and board on the safari trip to Africa. A combination of Chuck and Caroline’s suite and the Polynesian Hotel luxury? That is what Zeina and I had in our heads when we alighted the van at Olperr-Elongo camp. Oh well. You see, I knew traveling with Anne Siviglia would ruin me for life. (As a funny aside, on our first trip together outside the US, to Spain in 2002, Anne surveyed my hotel choice in Cordoba, and she sweetly said to me, “Well, this must have been one of your bargains you told me about!”)

In fairness to this camp, one of our travel companions, science teacher and former Boy Scout Arthur announced, “This is ballroom camping everybody! Someone cooks the food for you!” Oh, yes, ballroom indeed, complete with outdoor latrines, showers, kerosene lanterns, and monkeys in the trees above us.

I told you I would get to the animals!

Monkeys in the trees above us! That is exciting.

Just after we unpacked the van, John and Daniel took us on our first hike. We hiked maybe an hour away from the camp to this bluff overlooking this valley where our camp was nestled into the landscape, and saw our first real animals in Africa. We counted 9 zebras. Hey, there were nine of us too, including John and Daniel! We saw 3 elephants, and a family of baboons.

That night we had our first meal from the camp cook. It was okay. I mean, you know. Certainly a step above edible. I asked the cook what kind of meat it was, and he said, “Roasted.” As companion Tristan pointedly said to me, “John, there is ample food.” I know, it’s just that the price-tag was hard to get out of my head. Once a Leistler…always a Leistler…

Our group of 7 was joined by two British people, an older man and his niece, Eddie and Jennifer, and they would prove excellent company during our stay in the camp. Eddie could tell you a story about anything—he had been a school administrator, racecar driver, and now a philanthropist working in Kenya, but was most notably to me, a marvelous raconteur. His niece worked in radio broadcasting, although Eddie did most of the broadcasting in the camp. During the next week, if anyone said anything particularly interesting or amazing, someone would say, “How do you know that?” And the answer would invariably be, “Oh, Eddie told me…” He was one of those Brits who could mock the colonialist stereotype, but also relished all the British jargon, world views and faded world-conquering status.

We jumped on the van around 6:30 a.m. to go out for the safari. We would be gone each day from the camp for about 8-10 hours, driving scores of miles through the wildlife preserve in search of intriguing animal exploits. We saw predators and scavengers, we saw migrating, feeding, copulating, preening, killing, lazing, and stampeding. We saw what must have been elephant families, we saw the wildebeests returning from Tanzania, heading north in packs by the hundreds, going back to their summer homes in Uganda.

I had imagined most of the animals would be far off, on the horizon, but we saw the animals just…like… there. The zebras had such elegance, the giraffes seemed almost dainty, the cheetahs reminded me of lacrosse players and their bravado, the monkeys rambunctious, the elephants wonderfully dowdy and the wildebeests looked uncommonly ugly.

As I said, we spent the day on the cratered madness they call roads, looking for the moments of “real life” for the animals. Sadly, our guides weren’t really good guides. They were great drivers, they protected us, they got us to where we were going, they navigated the rutted roads, but I really wished for a guide to enrich my understanding of the animals, the plants, the birds, and that was sadly lacking. Hey, how much do you expect for $240 a day??

I need to get back to dorm duty now, but I will leave you with a funny story from a couple days before we left on the trip. I went to the nurse to get my typhoid shot, and after the shot, I commented that it wasn’t that bad a shot. The nurse said, “One of your travel mates, and I won’t say which one, almost cried over the shot!” I offered, “Well, I guess I have some extra skin to pad me.” She looked very matter-of-fact, and said stonily, “Yes, you are obese. Well then, have a good time on the picnic!”

Always interesting being in a different land.

I have since learned that another word for “picnic” in Arabic is journey. Oh, now it makes more sense. Except that obese part.

There are more stories to tell about the picnic, and I will write some more tomorrow.

I missed writing for the blog, last week when I was on safari in Africa—writing the entries for the blog makes me feel wonderfully close to my family and friends, and while it is invigorating to discover new expanses in the world, nothing beats the warm feel of my network of friends and family. I will tell some more tales at the morrow.

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight..."