John Lee goes in search of the Lion King
There is a pecking order in Kenya, a big five which all tourists want to see, but for John Lee there is only one king, the lion
Some psychologists will tell you we are at our happiest on open grassland, our eyes following a moving object. It’s something to do with our longing for the hunt, and it explains our love for chasing balls around fields. I didn’t really believe this psychobabble, but often cited it, quite often when explaining to my wife my frequent absences on the golf course.
Then I found myself on the Maasai Mara, gazing into the eyes of a noble, maned lion. That one evening, during my visit to Kenya, on the back of a parked Jeep, the silence broken only by the twittering of the bouncing male Widow birds, I understood there might be some truth to it.
For many, Kenya involves a frantic effort to view the big five – elephant, buffalo, rhino, lion and the elusive leopard. And we, thanks to our amazing guides, did see them and so much more. But I recall thinking that I was happy to just sit there, on this island remnant of the vast grassland that once covered much of Africa. The Maasai Mara is a mystical place.
In this wild, alien land you’ll feel strangely at home. Throw in the other stops on our Kenya journey and I believe there are few more spectacular holiday destinations.
I landed at Nairobi at 5am and after the first of what was to be many exciting jaunts in small turbo props, I was at Samburu’s Buffalo Springs Game Reserve in central Kenya by 11am.
This was the Africa I was familiar with – dry scrubland. My job as a reporter brought me to Africa before, either reporting on State visits of taoisigh or covering natural disasters. Only once had I come in contact with African nature’s unpredictably. While reporting on the 2000 famine in Ethiopia, my four-wheel drive broke down and was attacked by a troupe of baboons. Otherwise, I’d driven across hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of African land without seeing any interesting wildlife.
So, nothing could prepare me for the experience of seeing herds of elephant and buffalo, antelope and wildebeest as soon as we swung through the gates of Samburu National Reserve (which is adjacent to the Buffalo Springs Reserve). I knew these were protected from hunting, poaching and the encroachment of civilisation. I was one of the suburban kids who spent many hours watching programmes about wild Africa, but I didn’t think real life could be like the TV. The shock is that on these reserves the wildlife is so abundant, and you are right amongst it.
I was overjoyed, I felt like the Sam Neill character in Jurassic Park, when he first sees the dinosaurs.
I was almost as happy when
I saw our accommodation. The Ashnil Samburu is a luxury tented camp on the banks of the Ewaso Nyiro River in the adjacent Buffalo Springs National Park.
Samburu was surrounded by electric fence. I was reassured until one of the local tribesmen told me that a leopard had easily traversed the fence via trees the previous night to attack and eat a porcupine. Lacking in protective quills, I felt vulnerable.
There was a swimming pool there, too. Having had a close-up look at the enormous bull elephant which would come to the fence seeking fruit each morning I decided not to go thrill-seeking more than was necessary. Some of our group went on a nature walk outside the camp with a tribesman and a guard armed with a Heckler and Koch machine gun. The guard was forced to fire a warning shot into the air when an enormous female elephant charged them. She was pregnant and dangerous.
I was reading a book by the pool. Luxury in isolation from civilisation is splendid, and I normally would have frowned on the intrusion of mobile phones in such pristine wilderness.
Yet in central Africa the mobile phone has replaced the bush wire.
We’d enjoyed a wonderful day on safari in Sambruru, enjoying close encounters with many elephants and large herbivores.
But it’s the charismatic killers, the big cats, that most of us really want to see.
As dusk was falling, our driver, an expert tracker and guide, got a call on his mobile.
There ensued a hair-raising, backside-bruising dash across the open sub-desert in our open top Land Rover. A half-hour later we arrived at an innocuous-looking bush-covered corner of the reserve. And there stalked two leopards, a mother and adolescent cub. Looking hungry, they were on an early nocturnal hunt. Then, tipped off again by phonetoting rangers, the next day we saw another far bigger and more menacing adult male leopard resting languorously high in a tree.
We flew on to the Maasai Mara. The Maasai Mara is the great savannah that stretches across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania (where it becomes the Serengeti). Veteran nature documentary viewers know it well as the venue of the great migrations of zebra, wildebeest and antelope that cross the Mara River to seek seasonal grazing.
Again, the proximity of the wild gave me a jolt. We’d left our plane just a half an hour when we found ourselves parked beside a pride of lions, the kings of the natural world. On the Maasai Mara, over the following days, we followed cheetah as they hunted, came across a pregnant rhino and delighted in the enormous herds of elephant.
It’s an almost spiritual experience for those who love nature. Yet it is tinged with sadness as you learn of continuing poaching and shrinking habitat. The Maasai Mara was once part of a vast Central African savannah that teemed with wildlife and plants for thousands of square miles. Even the traditional life of the indigenous people, the Maasai, is disappearing. You can still visit a traditional village to see their ancient way of life.
Istayed at the famous Little Governors’ Camp, a luxury safari camp located on the edge of the Maasai Mara National Reserve. It has just 17 en-suite tents gathered around a large watering hole. This camp is unfenced. Shotguntoting guards accompany you to your tent at night. Elephants visit the camp at lunchtime and guests can sip their evening drinks while watching huge herds of elephant and hippo bathe while giraffe stoop to drink.
The camp is approached by a boat ride across the Mara River, then a walk through the riverine forest. Vehicles are left on the far river bank.
Sated but road-weary, we flew for the coast. Our Air Kenya pilot took our twin-engined plane in a swoop over the plains to let us say farewell to the Maasai Mara and it was on to Malindi on the Indian Ocean. We stayed at the Turtle Bay Beach Resort. In between voyages to the Watamu Marine Reserve on traditional dhows, we washed away the dust of the trail in the warm Indian Ocean.
This was an action-packed holiday, which required lots of flying in small planes, which some may find stressful.
Our group spent our final night before an early morning flight to London in an 11-room boutique hotel in Nairobi called the House of Waine.
‘There ensued a backside-bruising dash across the open desert’