Our matutu (shared-with-way-too-many-people-taxi) left Nairobi heading towards Naivasha, the closest town to our destination, Fisherman’s Camp, where we intended to camp on the shore of Lake Naivasha for a couple o
f nights. We were sharing our matatu with as many souls and their gear as it was humanly possible to pack into the van. It was hot, air conditioning was a joke, I was holding my 45 pound backpack in my lap, and giving thanks I didn’t have a stranger in my lap as some of the locals did. This fun was going to last a couple of hours, since the van stopped to pick up anybody standing by the road giving the Kenyan hitchhiking thumb: a palms down up and down gesture. Sorta like in Hotel California, people got on, but nobody got off.
Let’s call my traveling partner, oh, let me see, how about Bwana, to protect the guilty.
Naivasha? My readings had assured me it’s a tourist town of medium size, there were tourist amenities. Hey, this was my first trip to the African continent and I was traveling with somebody with a deep and abiding love of anything Africa. My information, in other words, was skewed by, well, The Bwana. Africa had been suffering from a drought for too many years and Naivasha is on the leeward side of the Rift Valley.
The matatu deposited us in the middle of a dry, hot, dusty little corner of Walk and Don’t Walk on the outskirts of town. No little store to buy a cold beer or cold anything or even a place to sit to meditate on our next move. No signs directing us anywhere. Hello, Naivasha. Bwana, are you REAL sure this is where we want to be? Yep, he said as he looked around us at nothing, and even I, Ms Naïve, knew he was clueless. He was taking a notorious malaria prophylaxis, which I won’t name for fear of libel, and man, he got cranky on that stuff! Since one of the listed side effects is “psychotic episodes”, I should’ve been forewarned. Okay, maybe he didn’t go psychotic but cranky was an understatement for much of this entire trip. But I digress.
The Naivasha locals were decidedly not interested in sharing their regional knowledge--they pretty much ignored these two big msungus (non-Africans) who had landed in their midst. As Paul Thereaux correctly stated in his book, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, “ . . . and the more you questioned, the vaguer the people became”. After some amount of the old Don’t Know Don’t Care salute, we secured the services of Edward, taxi driver extraordinaire to transport us to Fisherman’s Camp. In retrospect we should've throttled good old Edward on the spot and put him out of our misery. Later in the trip, our developing matatu experience revealed that matatus go everywhere, including to Fisherman's Camp, and we would've saved a bunch of shillings we gave Edward that he most likely drank up, and a ton of frustration. But that’s another story.
We finally arrived at Fisherman’s Camp and found it to be a lush stretch of green and shade on the shores of the lake in a thorntree and broadleaf grove. After the noise and grime and hullabaloo and pollution of Nairobi and My First Matatu Experience, this was Eden. There at the reception shack was the best gift the gods could bestow: icy Tusker beer. I learned during that trip and subsequent Africa trips that “cold” there is relative. “Cold” could mean the can is sitting in an inch of water in the shade vs full sun. Yea! I'm for an icy beer and a cushy spot on this luxuriant grass to chill out before I do anything about making a tent go up. At that point, I'd have given my first born son for a cold beer. Luckily I didn’t have to. Forty shillings worked just fine (about 60 cents). The Bwana was itchy to get camp set up. It was early. “Go find us a campsite, if you must, Bwana, I’m relaxing”. He billed himself as the authority on sub-tropical Africa so I was pretty sure he wouldn’t take any input from me on what constitutes an acceptable African campsite anyhow. OK, we’ve now set the pace for the Bwana relationship and ego. Another story. Many stories.
Before long I had yet another cold Tusker in my hand, there were multitudes of brilliant blue birds that I couldn't identify, herons, cormorants, fish eagles, spoonbills, egrets, ibis, and black and white water birds hanging around the lake. My Africa travel book swore that over 300 varieties of birds reside here. The lake is surrounded by volcanic mountains, and is only one of two Rift Valley freshwater lakes. This is probably because Lake Nakuru and the other soda lakes don't have outlets, whereas Lakes Naivasha and Baringo have massive underground seepage which amounts to the same thing as rivers draining from them. Thus soda doesn't accumulate. And, thus, there aren’t any flamingos.
When he proudly escorted me to el primo campsite, lo and behold, the Bwana had ensconced us not more than 30 feet from the lake, which, by the way, is marshy along the edges.
But, Bwana, won't there be zillions of mosquitoes this close to the lake and marsh? “There, there, little lady, I'm the great African explorer. I know what I’m doing”, he protested. The hitch was he truly thought he was qualified to make this statement and this campsite decision. Bless his heart, he did have the courage of his convictions! More to come on this, you betcha. As we wandered around the papyrus-fringed lakeside, the Bwana proudly pointing out his magnificent campsite area I noticed, with some disquiet, indentations the size of small islands
in the black mud of the marsh. We could hear the hippos in the lake and there were signs at the piers warning fisherman and boaters to beware the hippos. I may not have been an intrepid African explorer, but it didn’t take one to figure this out. Hippo footprints.
I’d done my pre-trip reading. Hippos exit water at night to graze on land, so it seemed logical and obvious that we had made camp right there in their exit path. A no-no in African camping. Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other land animal—not to eat, because they’re vegetarians, but because they're ill-tempered and territorial hummers. Generally unfriendly neighbors. And they may look like huge, clumsy houses with tusks, but they’re fast. Thirty mph fast. If one (or many) decided to come out and play that night, our tent wouldn't be in their way at all. They’d shrink-wrap us in tent nylon and never even slow down. Or they’d slow down long enough to chomp, toss us in the air, and have a cigarette in the afterglow. The Bwana chose this moment to regale me with an article he'd read in the Nairobi newspaper about a hippo chasing some guy across a field and killing him. Recently. Charming thought. Honestly, I think sometimes he enjoyed my fears!
"Nah, they won't come out here. There are much bigger exit areas than this one up the lake shore." “OK, great hippo expert, just for grins, what does one do if one finds oneself facing a hippo? You know, just in case they didn’t get the memo." "Put a tree between you.” Made sense. I marked my thorntree. Low branch. Thorns only 3 inches long. Thorns smaller than hippo tusks. Better a few thorns stuck IN me than a 4-ton hippo stuck ON me.
As we sat around and enjoyed the cool evening air, the silence, the tranquility--water birds flying
around, no mosquitoes, clean air, we wondered what else a couple of intrepid travelers in
Africa could desire. We had oranges, pineapple, bananas, and those wonderful fried peanuts we’d bought at the market in Naivasha. We’d heat up a gourmet freeze-dried meal, and enjoy our first night camping in Africa. We had each other. We even had some local visitors.
There was the sound of a train in the distance, making its way across Kenya. How romantic..But one thing the awesome Bwana really knew: there’s no train in this part of Kenya. Holy crap, it’s a swarm, no, an out-and-out herd of mosquitos crossing the lake in our direction. Darkening the horizon. One mosquito, no doubt laden with malaria, landed on my arm. Then swarms converged. We dove for the tent, zipping as we dove. The angry, ravenous monster bugs slapped at the tent sides like mini-kamikaze bombers, holding us prisoner for several hours. No dinner, for them or us. Worse, yet, no beer. We’d abandoned everything in our frenzied lunge for the tent.
What if the hippos attacked? What about my escape thorntree? Please don't make me choose between contracting malaria and being hippo cud!
We dozed off. But I only closed one eye. I, you see, knew that the hippos were going to stroll right out of that water and onto us. Footprints don't lie. If I heard even a hint of something outside, I flew to the flap, unzipping a portion smaller than a mosquito, peering out. About 2:00, I woke to the sound of grass being ripped out of the ground. Close. "Bwana, do hippos make a lot of noise leaving the water?" "Well, no, actually they're quite graceful for their size." “ What do they sound like on land?” “Well, my dear, generally you’ll hear them ripping grass out of the ground.” "THEN THERE'S A HIPPO OUT THERE!!!" He vaulted to the door of the tent, unzipped it, looked out, and calmly said, "He's here." "Who's here? The guard? Santa Claus?" "No, the hippo. Get out of the tent. Now." I didn't need a second invitation.
Now, it all goes into slow motion. With me in fast motion. After about three years, my hero got out of my way so I could follow him out the tent. (Whatever happened to women and children first?) When I did get out, the Bwana was out of sight and I found myself staring at a hippo who was halfway between the water and us. A huge hippo the size of a Volkswagen. And moving in our direction. In spite of the fact that my knees were shaking so bad I literally could bearly stand, I moved (NOT in slow motion) towards my tree. It just so happened that my tree was in the direction of the beast.
But, wait, what’s happening? He was no longer charging me—we were now headed in the same direction. The huge beast had literally come off his front legs, pulled a 180 degree turn, and lurched off down the path away from me. How can this be? Who’s chasing whom? Well, that was a relief. That thorntree was going to hurt. As a bonus, I had all my body parts. Later, as we reconstructed events, all we could figure was that from the hippo’s point of view , he saw this wild-haired redhead apparition flapping out of a rock (get it, the brown dome tent -- ) at top speed. The fearsome sight so startled this formidable beast, he could only think of escape. As fast as his big butt could waddle. And the other hippos were in the same panic mode. The Crocodile Hunter would’ve been proud, may he rest in peace.
I knew, however, in my extensive knowledge of hippos (yeah, right!), that where there are a few hippos, there are others--mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins. All enormous. So I stood watch from the my teeny peephole in the flap of the tent, resolved to save at least my own life. Bwana was soon snoring away. I'd wake him up in two hours for watch. I fell asleep in about 10 minutes, oblivious of danger until we were awakened in the early morning by the sound of hippos playing or fighting or making love or whatever--the sound's the same, snorting, thrashing, splashing. They were in the water and they were on the bank. Who knows how many, if any, came around our tent during the night? Maybe the one we startled went back into the water and warned the others that some wild thing in blue pajamas would attack any poor defenseless beast who came out there. When I awoke the next time, our tormentors were back in the lake. And the mosquitoes were still buzzing everytime we touched the side of the tent.
Nature’s call out-trumped fears of malaria. We crawled out and—no mosquitoes? Neither of us had noticed that we hadn’t been plagued by mosquito bites during our crazed flight from hippos—after all, what was a sting compared to a tusk through a kidney? But, what, you may ask, happened to the mosquitos that had tormented us until the hippos grabbed our attention? Let’s just say that if you only hear the little buggers buzz after you smack the side of your tent, give it a check. Turns out a lot of the more unfortunate ones were stuck between the tent’s fly and the tent and our movements startled them into frantic commotion. We had been held prisoner by prisoners. Without food or toity. While our beer got warm. Couldn’t blame this one on the Bwana. At least not totally.
You gotta love adventure travel!