Ian Henderson takes the kids to count crocodiles – and brings them all back again.
Like many urban children, ours tend towards a slightly unrealistic view of animals. Of course they know lions have big teeth and elephant poo is smelly. But if most of your experience is confined to Walt Disney, Discovery Channel and the occasional trip to the zoo you’re bound to think all God’s creatures are essentially charming and lovable. Clearly a more balanced view would be a good thing – one reason we decided to take our teenager and two nine year olds to migration season in Kenya.
At first, standing on top of a Land Rover in the middle of the bush waiting for something to happen may seem less attractive than lying in front of the telly with a packet of Pringles. But Spongebob Squarepants is nothing compared to what lay across the fast-flowing waters of the Mara river. Tens of thousands of wildebeest stood lowing and nudging each other on the far bank (“No, no, after you”). After hesitating long enough to test the patience of an adult, let alone a nine year old, one bold beast leaps in and the rest follow, plunging wild-eyed across the muddy waters with epic, pointless courage while implacable crocodiles sink the slow and the young like torpedoes with teeth.
We’d expected the kids to get bored and maybe a bit weepy; but instead we got an earnest argument for saving an orphaned wildebeest and taking it home to Wandsworth Common. It looked like Kenya was weaving the same spell in the childrens’ minds as it had in ours years ago - we used to have family there, and have fond memories of the country during our child-free days. Setting up camp on the rolling grasslands of Amboseli in the velvet blackness of the night, endless savannah miles away from our city lives. We didn’t mention the one or two memories we didn’t much want to share with them, like the odd robbery, the agonising couple of days a friend spent nursing a scorpion sting or elephants using our campsite as a shortcut to the waterhole in the night.
Rather than the ramshackle, DIY safaris we did back then, we looked at how we might make it easier and rather safer. If you’re being sensible, there’s no avoiding vaccinations for example – but our local GP made it almost painless, including telling us where to buy anti-malaria pills cheap online. We found the very civilized-looking Intrepids tented camps and the Safari Link air service that makes visiting different areas in Kenya doable, even in a week. (In fact, a whole week in one camp may be too much with children – they do get ‘safari fatigue’ and lose interest after a few days of getting up before dawn.) And unlike many other far-flung destinations, Kenya has only two hours time difference from the UK, so the children were still perky when we transferred from Kenya Airways out of London to Captain Tim’s agreeably basic, single-propeller Cessna Caravan.
Taking off from an overcast Nairobi, we headed north to Samburu as the skies cleared and the landscape turned into semi-desert through which the Ewaso Ngiro river twisted like a bright green snake. The Intrepids camp is right on the river, and water means animals - from our luxurious tent, well looked after by the welcoming staff, we could sit and watch monkeys, exotic birds and the odd hippo wandering by. Though Samburu wildlife isn’t on the scale of the reserves in the wetter south of Kenya, it’s a fascinating story of survival in a tough environment. Our Samburu warrior guide Steve shared his astonishing knowledge of the country with us, and in his village showed the children how to shoot an arrow into a goat’s jugular to get blood for a woman who had given birth in the night. No more Disneyfied sentimentalism here; Luke, the youngest, not only wanted to shoot a goat himself but demanded to live in a mud-roofed hut like Steve’s for ever.
Before he did run off to become a warrior, we flew south and watched the landscape turn to the rich farms and forests in the Aberdare highlands marking the southern limit of the sub-Sahara. By the time you’ve got as far as Masai Mara on Kenya’s southern border the plains are greener and even from the air the herds of animals are clearly on a different scale, tens of thousands strong. Of course, there’s a good reason the plains are green – the rain was sometimes torrential, but short-lived. Fortunately the even more well-appointed tents at the Mara Intrepids camp are entirely watertight as well as luxurious and it’s hard to beat the snug feeling being tucked up in a four-poster bed under a mosquito net listening to the downpour drumming on the canvas above.
That comfort did present a problem, though. Getting the children up for school can be tricky, but getting them roused, dressed and ready for a day’s big game watching before six is something else (“but I’m on HOLIDAY!”). Our attentive tent steward seemed to anticipate this, and his pre-dawn delivery of hot chocolate and cookies (which we had to quickly bring inside before the monkeys stole them) was often the only thing that got them out of bed.
The protests soon calmed as we headed off in the Land Rover with our experienced guide and driver, Chris. He’d be careful to find something to get their interest early – a family of spotted hyenas on their way home from a long night’s gluttony, the hippo who lives in the well-named Stinking River or, one spectacular morning, a cheetah with a new kill. Panting and red-mouthed, the cheetah lay beside the very dead antelope as if we were invisible. The children, completely silent, stared in awe - their attention span something a children’s TV scheduler would die for. Occasionally the cheetah would reward their concentration by ripping off another chunk of flesh or growling with agreeable menace. But mostly it just sat and panted, and they just sat and watched.
The wildebeest migration we’d come to see is the focus of the game-watching season from July through to October, and we spent a long time by the river among these ancient-looking beasts with their attendant zebra herds and the lurking predators. There were times when attention wandered – children much younger than nine or ten might not get the most out of the experience. But a word to Chris and he’d simply fire up the Land Rover and head through the bush to show us more of the Masai Mara’s wonders. We simply saw too many amazing sights to list – the children’s book of Kenya wildlife ended up with a tick on nearly every page, from aardvark to, er, zebra.
Seeing these animals for real, even when they’re tearing each other apart, feels like something precious and extraordinary. Of course camping in Kenya isn’t risk-free - there are big animals, bugs (easily avoided) and those vaccinations, and as we found in the past Kenya has always been a proper adventure. Some reports might make you think Kenya’s no place to take the kids but everyone we met – in Nairobi and the villages as well as in the camps – treated us as welcome guests. And without tourist dollars the wildlife stops being crucial to the country’s economy so it becomes at far more risk from farmers and poachers.
Of course you have to be careful where you go and what you do, just like you shouldn’t put your hand in that cuddly leopard cub’s mouth. But the tents were terrific. The food was great. None of the children got stung, bitten or eaten. And they did find out there’s wildlife beyond the Discovery Channel and Walt Disney.
This article first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph.
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