With Kilimanjaro as a backdrop and wildebeest casting shadows on his tent, Peter Cunninghamstays in two bush camps in Kenya, fed and watered by a pair of elephant experts
It can get cold after dark in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. At two in the morning I am curled around a hot water bottle, asleep in a small tent set down in the bush in this breathtakingly beautiful part of southern Kenya, 10km (six miles) from the border with Tanzania. The loo is out through one zip and, two paces away, in through another. Does wonders for bladder control.
I sit up suddenly, wide awake. Inches away, projected on to the side of the tent by a lantern outside, is an enormous animal. In the yellow light it looks like a prehistoric drawing of a lion: the shoulders are hunched, the legs tapering. Yet this is no cave drawing, because it is speaking to me in grunts. Taking a very deep breath, grabbing a torch and letting out shouts, I jump outside. Scuffling to its feet, the creature flees into the night. A light approaches. Joseph, the Masai warrior on night watch, ambles up, spear in hand, grinning from ear to ear. We exchange greetings: the sound of a friendly voice is extraordinarily comforting. A wildebeest has given birth near the camp, Joseph explains. But she was pursued by hyenas and ran off, leaving her baby. The baby had seen my lantern and made straight for it. Now the baby, too, had run off. A tiny wildebeest calf was my prehistoric lion.
We flew from London to Nairobi, where we were met and driven to a comfortable small hotel in Karen, an affluent suburb of Nairobi. For many, Kenya brings to mind the White Mischief Happy Valley scandal of the 1930s, when champagne and morphine, adultery and murder were all fashionable among Kenyan-based British aristos in these hills. But is this country, thought of by many as "old" Africa, pronounced "Keen-ya" or "Kenya"? "Kenya," advised a member of the white community who makes his living guiding up-market tourists. "Before [ Jomo] Kenyatta [ the country's leader from 1963 to 1978] came to power, we all said Keenya. Few say it now."
Next morning we were collected from Karen and driven to Nairobi's domestic airport, where a small plane flew us into the bush.
At 5,895m (19,340ft), Mount Kilimanjaro is the world's largest free-standing mountain. Known to all as Kili, it commands a breathtaking position just inside the Tanzanian border with southern Kenya. In the 19th century, Kili was in the then British territory of East Africa, and Tanzania was called Tanganyika, under German rule. The kaiser is said to have complained to his cousin Queen Victoria of England that while she had two fine mountains - Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro - he had none. A dog's-leg adjustment to the frontier brought Kilimanjaro into today's Tanzania and created, in the process, a favourite question for quiz-show hosts.
First climbed by westerners in 1869, the snow-capped mountain offers not so much a climb as a very steep, week-long walk through successive ecosystems. The main risk is not a plunge into a crevice but altitude sickness. Local guides are essential. The sense of euphoria when you reach the summit is unequalled, they say, although that is something I will have to take on faith.
The name of our camp, Ol Kanjau, means place of the elephants. Four tents have been put down in a clearing under Kili - an arrangement about as permanent as a travelling circus. Mike and Judy Rainy, from the west coast of the US, run Ol Kanjau. Thirty-seven years ago they came to Kenya on honeymoon and, well, stayed.
"I do elephants," says Mike with a toothy grin.
A number of television documentaries have been made featuring the Rainys and the elephants they have devoted their lives to. Mike and Judy bring clients in and out of the adjacent Amboseli nature reserve, a 780sq km (300sq m) wildlife haven. But Amboseli draws tourists from game lodges, and Mike counts a good day as one when he doesn't see another vehicle. He prefers to be the closest base to the great mountain and peg down among elephant and wildebeest, zebra and gazelle.
This truly is camping out. Shower water is heated in drums over blazing fires and hoisted in hide bags by rope and pulley over the branch of a handy tree behind the tent. Food cooked in wood ovens is particularly tasty. Sitting under a zillion stars around Mike and Judy's campfire, chatting about their lives and the local environment, makes me marvel at their courage and determination to follow their souls.
It has been two weeks since the last rains; the bush has dried up and is beginning to roll out carpets of grass and wildflowers. This is good news for the Masai tribesmen who graze these plains with their herds of cattle, and for the extraordinary profusion of wildlife. Mike, who has co-rented his concession of nearly 1,000sq km (385sq m) from local tribes, logs the movement of every elephant that passes through.
We're in his jeep, with a clear shot of Kilimanjaro in the background, when, like grey ghosts, half a dozen bull elephants appear. Mike kills the engine and we freeze. "You're looking at the largest surviving mammal on the planet," he whispers as, a few feet away, the stately passage goes by.
The moment is spiritual. These enormous beasts could walk on eggs and not break them. Their eyesight is poor, so their probing trunks and flapping ears are their means of sorting out what is going on around them. Each beast is different, logged in Mike's records according to ear shape, trunk description and any deformity. Minutes later, the jeep stops again and Mike points: a lone cheetah, a female, is slinking by. "She's running on empty," Mike says, nodding. Some animal - cut off, or sick, or maybe newly born like my little friend from last night - will surely cross this hungry predator's path before dusk.
A couple of days later Mike drives us across the Amboseli and up into a range of mountains known as the Chyulu Hills. The Chyulus lie to the northeast of Mount Kilimanjaro, above the plains of the Serengeti. Directly below them the plain of El Mau, home to cattle herds of the Masai, stretches to the horizon. From the vantage point of the Chyulu Hills the plain laps like a tide up to the line of trees and bush. Lava flowed down these hills in the last volcanic eruptions. The trees and bush mark where the lava stopped.
Mike drops us at Ol Donyo Wuas, a camp in the foothills as different to the Rainys' set-up as a lion is to an elephant. Run by Richard and Tara Bonham, Ol Donyo Wuas is a series of permanent and very elaborate thatched cabins set into a hillside with a view back over El Mau to Kili. The bedrooms are vast, the bathrooms enormous. Below the cabins, at a man-made waterhole, a permanent herd of elephants trumpet geysers of water into the air. There is something of the country-house weekend about Ol Donyo Wuas: discreet service, leisurely breakfasts, enormous lunches and drinks at a warm fire before even more enormous dinners around a single table. Like the Rainys, the Bonhams are charming hosts with an extensive knowledge of the wildlife and local customs.
At eight in the morning I am in the saddle, cantering across the plain of El Mau. Zebra stream to my left, wildebeest to the right, heels kicking in their ever melodramatic way. The sun has not quite burned through yet, and my horse is enjoying this exercise, stretching out, ears pricked. Ahead, Kili is bared and majestic. The bright-red cloak of a Masai warrior moves in the distance, like a beam of light. This is what I dreamed it would be like: open spaces without boundaries, pure air, peace. Thirty minutes later, sitting at a portable table set down on the plain under an acacia tree, tucking into bacon, eggs and coffee, it is extremely difficult to think of something to be stressed about.
The Masai are a nomadic people. Once renowned for their ferocity but today tenders of flocks, they occupy the enormous area of savannahs in central Kenya that is divided in two by the Great Rift Valley. In this area of little water and scarce grazing, the encroachment of ever growing numbers of cattle leads to worries about long-term sustainability, but, to the Masai, cattle mean wealth. The Masai's origins are unclear, but they hold agricultural tools in contempt, forbid the eating of milk and meat together and never count their cattle. A number of moral taboos and customs are still in force among them: a woman may not give birth before she is circumcised; a warrior may not eat meat if a married woman saw the animal being slaughtered; and the names of the dead may not be mentioned. Yet, since 50 years ago, when the Masai went about naked, a slowly changing way of life has brought modern self-consciousness and dress and, one hopes, a gradual change in some of their more ferocious customs.
Kane (pronounced Kaa-ny) is small, wiry and about 50. He was once an ivory poacher, but he switched sides when the going got hot. At 8.30 in the morning he's walking ahead of us down a winding track in the Chyulu Hills. Kane is carrying a bolt-action 12-bore shotgun, and it's loaded. His right eye is almost completely covered by a cataract. Suddenly he stops and pivots. "Kamu," he says, and points. On the flank of a mountain half a mile away I catch a glimpse of two white-shirted figures as they disappear into the bush. Poachers from the territory beyond the Chyulus, they come up here to kill giraffe, elephant, rhino or anything edible or saleable they can get a spear into, Kane says.
Kane may be half-blind and look as if he's 100, but it's all I can do to keep up with him. The landscape is so vast, so lush and empty, and the climate so benign, that it's easy to understand how the Garden of Eden is said to have been somewhere not far from here. After two hours, a jeep from Ol Donyo Wuas appears, and we sit down for a picnic.
The sense of being in another world is overwhelming. Two boys suddenly appear on the hillside above us in red Masai blankets. Cautiously they make their way nearer. They are 14 and 15. One has been initiated as a warrior - his hair is plaited, his cheeks bear initiation scars and he carries a long-bladed spear; the other boy's turn will soon come. They live out in these hills, tending cattle, ever on the move. They own no tent, no possessions and no provisions. As they endlessly migrate, they live entirely off the land, sleeping in the open and subsisting on a diet of cows' milk mixed with blood drawn from the animals' veins. Only their bad and crooked teeth show the effects of poor nutrition; otherwise, their skin gleams and their eyes are bright. They tell us they have been doing this job with older brothers for as long as they can remember. No school for them, no life awaiting in which they will look for a house and mortgage, open a bank account and shop in a supermarket. They have never seen a digital camera. They will continue in this job until, eventually, younger men come along, when they will return to their camps and be waited on by their wives. Life expectancy among the Masai is hard to establish, but among Kenyans as a whole it is 47 years for men, 49 for women.
We visited Kenya safe in the hands of experienced professionals yet felt that we had penetrated deeper into Africa than we had during any other visit. The air trip is shorter than that to Cape Town - eight hours versus 12 - and the prices on the ground are much cheaper. And yet it is the people in Africa, of Africa, that we met, in Kenya and elsewhere, that make us want to go back.
Peter Cunningham travelled from Dublin to London on Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus.com). The rest of his journey was organised by Aardvark Safaris. A similar itinerary over 10 nights at Ol Kanjau, Ol Donyo Wuas and a tented camp in the Masai Mara costs from about €5,000 per person sharing. This includes flights from London, internal flights and transfers, accommodation, safari activities, park fees, meals and local drinks. Details from 00-44-1980-849160 or www.aardvarksafaris.com