Monday, July 30, 2012

KENYA: Of Masais and the Mara

Rainclouds greeted us as our aircraft began its descent to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital situated 1700 metres above sea level. May is a cruel month for the country’s poor living in the city’s slums, when seasonal rains spell floods and misery. But for the millions of wildebeests, zebras and gazelles who troop from Serengeti in Tanzania to the plains of the Mara, rain smells of food and water across man-made borders. And for tourists from across the world, it is the beginning of a grand spectacle – the Great Migration and the drama on the savannah when predator meets prey.
A trip to the Amboseli National Park at the foot of the famed Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, seemed out of the question on account of the rain-ravaged roads. Cracks had developed in some arterial roads and had to be closed to traffic. The obvious choice was the Maasai Mara Reserve, the ultimate safari destination in Kenya and probably Africa.

Dirt tracks in the Mara reserve and a safari van
Maasai Mara, 270 kilometres from Nairobi, is a five-hour drive along the Rift Valley escarpment and down the sleepy town of Naroku in the plains. The well-maintained tarred road makes way for a gravel road as one enters the reserve area. The gravel path is to aid the free movement of hoofed animals, which find it difficult to walk on tarred roads. So one had to be prepared for a bumpy ride on mud paths that have deteriorated after the rains.
We pass many a Maasai cattle herd with a lone Maasai herdsman in his brightly hued – most often red –  cotton-wool blanket strung across his torso. The nomadic Maasais have pastoral rights in the Maasai Mara, which is why it is a reserve and not a national park. The sturdy tribe that had resisted the British valiantly for several years during the colonisation of the country in the late 19th century, failed to get a fair deal when the country won independence in 1964.  Today, they live in the periphery of mainstream Kenyan society and continue to be under-represented. The MP in charge of their affairs belonged to another tribe until recently.  We come across a handful of schools on the route, probably schools for the younger generation of Maasais. With access to education, Maasai men are slowly getting introduced to a better life, but the condition of their women is still pathetic.
For a Masai, communal rights to property – including of his wife – prevailed. A Masai had to kill a lion to be eligible for marriage not so long ago. And a Masai can be recognised by the absence of one or two lower teeth – extracted without anaesthesia for cultural reasons.
Each herd of cattle, sheep or goats we come across is about 50-100 heads. Luckily for the wildlife, the Masais do not eat any meat other than that of their livestock. The Maasais roam the grasslands, green and sparkling in the equatorial sun, without fear unlike us gazing out from the safety of our cars.

Elephants on the way
The savannah has turned from a golden yellow to an emerald green in a month’s time inviting the game to the stage. The unending expanse of land meeting the blue sky with its silvery white cumulus clouds on either side is a sight to behold. Never in my life had I seen endless tracts of land untouched by humanity. Here was nature at its virgin best – all for earth’s lesser beings.
 We come across the first of the migrant herds soon enough – zebras, wildebeests and gazelles. Some run farther inside at the sight of the vehicle but others stare curiously and dip their heads back into the ground for generous bites of green grass. After the initial excitement of sighting a wildebeest – until then a legendary creature sighted only in television channels – we settle down to the routine of gazing at these early migrants and some Thomson’s gazelles, hartebeests and impalas. A wildebeest raises its comical head and looks straight at the camera.
Soon the road bifurcates into more and more rugged territory. Our driver pokes his head out of the car and asks a Masai herdsman in Swahili the way to our destination. I get a close glimpse of his three weapons – a long-pointed spear, a staff and a short blunt wooden weapon with a rounded top. He gives his nod for a photograph, and accept the tip without emotion. The Masais traverse the land without fear of the big cats; even the lions are believed to be in awe of them.
The first elephant herd at a distance sends the adrenaline pumping. They are bigger than their Indian cousins but the tusks look smaller. We are not prepared for the elephant crossings down the road and brake respectfully.  A baby elephant flanked by two adult elephants shakes his trunk at us as we capture it on screen. The adults keep a wary eye on the car as they tug grass by the wayside. Elephants can be dangerous customers if they are provoked/take a dislike to you. (Our Masai guide at Mara was surprised to hear that elephants are tamed in India and used at temple festivals and for timber logging.) 
Not so the lions, the so-called King of beasts. As long as you don’t put your head or limbs out of the car window, you are safe. To a lion, a car or a tent is as insurmountable as a mountain, I am told. We sight a pride of lions in a bush taking their afternoon siesta. We strain our necks but manage to sight only a majestic head, a swishing tail or a golden brown torso.

Lioness resting.

A secretary bird stood on the roadside preening, with its crest of long-quilled feathers around the head standing up like a tiara. It fixed it eagle-like eyes on us, tilting its head this way and that, and wanting us to move on.
Masai villages with rudimentary fences and cattlesheds became visible closer to the Reserve entrance as were tented camps for budget tourists.
As we reached the gates of the Mara reserve at well past noon, shaven-headed Masai women flock around our car and thrust Maasai artefacts and beaded jewellery on my lap. If I had any hopes of buying them cheap from poor and gullible tribals, I was wrong. They seemed to know all the tricks of the trade and quoted exorbitant prices. And when they realised I was not to be persuaded, two of them requested a photograph. I obliged happily and they checked their faces on the digital camera before demanding a hundred shillings (1$ is 82 shillings). “Two people, 50 shillings each.” Irritated, I delete the image much to their disappointment. The Maasais are unwittingly parading themselves or being paraded as showpieces, much like the exotic animals that satisfy the tourists’ voyeuristic pleasure.
Once inside the oldest lodge in the Mara reserve, we were advised to watch out for hippos after dark – hippos can be dangerous customers if you come face to face with them, either walk behind or by their side to escape their gaze and certain death. Hippo encounters result in the maximum number of deaths in a year in Africa.
Our chalet was the farthest away from the entrance and closer to a stream where hippos lay submerged in water the whole day. A narrow wooden bridge led to a hippo bar on stilts; those who wanted to view the beasts in water could do so sipping beer or merely inhaling the fresh air.  
But before that, there was more important sighting to do. The big cats and white and black rhinos before the sun set on the Mara. Taking the services of a Maasai hotel guide, in his traditional finery including the sheathed knife on the hip, we traversed the beaten path, and occasionally on paths freshly created by impatient and ambitious safari van drivers. The occasional African acacia stood like an umbrella in the sun.
 
African buffaloes at twilight

 And soon enough, against the setting sun, we saw a near traffic jam in the grassland caused by safari vans transporting Indian, Chinese and some Western tourists. A male lion lay in the tall grass unperturbed by the excited shrieks, eager eyes and flickering lenses. The black tip of the tail was visible every now and then, until His Royal Highness decided to give the gaping tourists a better view and walked around before settling down in his grass bed.  The ones who saw gave the thumbs-up sign and moved on.
The rhino quest seemed elusive in rhino country. Instead, herds of African buffaloes soon materialised in the fields on either side of our path. Orange-beaked oxpeckers piggy-backed the animals as they grazed. Their placid gaze fixed us as the orange-indigo sky turned darker and darker.
We set an early morning safari date with Patrick our guide and go to watch hippos against the dusk. Dinner at the inhouse restaurant offer a pleasant surprise – a Maasai dance by a dozen Maasai men with Patrick blowing the horn. 


Patrick the Maasai guide with my kids. Mira sat on his lap during the safari. Ash who was the first to be invited for the
 lap ride - but declined out of fear - later confided that the Masai blanket he wore would make his skin itch.
 We fell asleep to the sound of hippos snorting in the darkness around the chalet. The Anopheles mosquito, against which we had armed ourselves with a course of anti-malarial tablets, did not trouble us in the safety of our mosquito nets. Even on the lawns at night, their numbers were nowhere near what we are used to in India.
By 6 a.m., most tourists were out on safari expeditions – including the balloon safari - braving the early morning chill. At an altitude of 1500 m, Maasai Mara has quite a pleasant and gentle weather throughout the year.
Patience is the key as one can drive around for miles without sighting any of the big cats. As Patrick informed us, leopards and cheetahs are shy and keep away. Moreover, the influx of tourists has made them change their hunting habits to say late afternoon when it is hot, say some reports.
We drove around for a while looking for some movement in the tall grass. A few male ostriches – dark as opposed to the brownish and smaller built females – cocked their head from the distant grazing grounds. Ostrich kicks can kill even a potential predator like the lion.
Rothschild giraffe at the Giraffe Centre in Nairobi
Three Maasai giraffes – with darker patches than the endangered Rothschild giraffes we had come across earlier at the Giraffe Centre in Nairobi – held their heads high and nibbled from thorny acacias. Until it smelled danger and began running. For there in the grass sat a lioness, a symbol of majesty and sobriety in the savannah grass. It got up and walked into the grass, twitching its ears for the sound of an easier prey. As the primary hunter, the females cannot take it easy like the male of the species, who comes in only for the last kill.
Lions are not great eaters, and leave the rest of the carcass to the hyenas, Patrick tells us. The well-mannered, English-speaking Masai, with a missing lower tooth, had accompanied his uncle and killed a lion when he was 12. “A young male lion is a loner and has to fight its way into a pride, often defeating the lion that had sired them. The ousted and aging lion dies of hunger as he becomes too old to hunt (which is when it turns to human and domesticated animals). Or else, he meets his death at the hands of hyenas,” Patrick tells us. 
Lioness of Pride Rock
A circle of life indeed.
And quite like on the Pride Rock of Lion King fame, we soon across another pride. A lioness sat basking in the early morning sun while a lion sat half-hidden on another rocky ledge, giving an almost benevolent smile at the humans excitedly pointing at them and peering through binoculars. Another lion grimaced from the cover of a bush. Our mission accomplished – of sighting the African lion in his natural habitat – we are soon ready to bid farewell to Masai Mara.
The Mara river is overflowing, and we have to skip a visit to the famous crossing site of a ten-million wildebeests annually. Unlike the ungulate visitors who risk drowning and crocodile attacks when they take to the waters, the lions are smarter – they take the bridge over the Mara river.
As our vehicle navigates out of the reserve, a chartered plane ferrying tourists from Nairobi’s Wilson airport makes a landing at the air strip outside the lodge. I take back with me a microcosm of that African ecosystem, having established some deep primeval bond with the grazing animals that look up to see us go.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

KENYA: Lake Naivasha


 A zebra crossing and a giraffe crossing later, we are once again on the road to Narok. Huge cactus trees dot the landscape. We take a detour to Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake in a string of saltwater lakes in the Great Rift Valley. It is also the highest located of the Rift Valley lakes. Floriculture thrives in the vicinity of the lake, depleting as well as polluting the lake water. Flowers exported from the farms – owned by British, Dutch, Israeli and Indian investors - reach Europe’s markets early morning by flight.
As I prepare for the photoshoot, my young models are already posing.
Stopping for the night at a resort on the edge of the lake, a Ramsar site that is the habitat of many mammals, birds and fish, we come across hippos, water bucks, the arboreal colobus monkey and many a winged visitor in the evening sky. A superb starling fearlessly walks around our table hoping to grab some crumbs. Like the Ruppel’s starling we sighted in the Mara the previous day, this little bird has the same iridescent blue coat but with an orange chest and belly. The mandatory warning to stay clear of grazing hippos at night keep us warily inside.
In the morning, there is a surprise visitor in the lawns – a wildebeest. The Hell’s Gate National Park is close by, and so is the Crater Lake Game Sanctuary – Kenya strikes you more as a continuous expanse of national parks than a country. Conservation is a mission in Kenya, and no wonder it has numerous national parks and national reserves. Vehicles halt in respect – and probably fear - as wild animals cross the road. A fatally injured animal, in the wild or in a farm, can be put to sleep only at the instance of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).
The purpose of our stopover is a boat ride to see flamingos and hippos at close quarters, but we are advised to go to the nearby Crater Lake or Lake Oloiden for a better flamingo experience. Lake Nakuru, the other Ramsar site, which is a haven for flamingos does not permit boating.
Thirty kilometres away, we stop at Lake Oloidien, an alkaline lake that has been cut off from Lake Naivasha by a small reserve forest that is home to giraffes, zebras, leopards and spotted hyenas. Lake Oloidien, which was connected to Lake Naivasha earlier, became a separate lake in 1979 when its water levels fell and it steadily went saline.
Uncle and niece at L. Oloidien
A flamboyance of lesser flamingos stand like a pink gateway to the waters. On the left is a small flock of greater flamingos, whiter in shade, and feeding on worms and other insects. The lesser flamingos feed on the blue-green algae in the greenish lake; in fact, the algae is responsible for turning the flamingoes’ coats pink. Steve, our boat driver, informs us that the birds shift to the centre of the lake at night to feed, to escape predators like the hyenas. The flock here is only the young, as the adults (over 10 years) have gone to Lake Bogoria in the northern Rift Valley to breed. The life expectancy of a flamingo is 25 years, Steve tells us.
We see a couple of hippo families frolicking in the water. The lake has about 225 hippos; there are 5-25 members in each family.
Masai giraffes on the Naivasha route.
“The gestation period of a female hippo is 8 months. If the baby is a male, the mother leaves it on land as the adult bull in the family will kill it. The mother checks on the baby and feeds it. When it attains adulthood, the young bull will return to the water to fight the reigning bull in a hippo family and take over,” Steve explains as he points to a lone bull on the land.
A pair of blacksmith plovers chirped shrilly as they flew low over the water and then settled on the shore. Sun martins and African pied wagtails flitted in and out of water searching for spiders and others insects on the water surface. Egyptian geese and red-knobbed coots swam around while white-breasted cormorants and cape teals assembled on a small sand bank below the woods. Masai giraffes and zebras graze in the thick vegetation around the lake. A zebra’s stripes are as unique as the human fingerprint, I learn.
The lesser flamingos form three groups around the lake, flying away in panic in a line to join the other group as the boat sped past.
A Masai walked his 100-strong sheep as we return to the shore an hour later. The Masai belief is that all the land in the world and all the cattle in the world is theirs. The Maasais owned a vast territory from Kilimanjaro to Baringo, before the colonial settlers came. Even the thriving capital of Nairobi, meaning “place of cool waters” in the Maasai language, was a swampy water hole that the Maasais did not attach much importance to – until the British decided to establish a depot there for the Uganda railway in the early 20th century.
On the way back, we stop at Happy Valley in the Naivasha area, where produce from Lord Delamere’s 100,000-acre farm is available fresh and relatively cheap. The influential and eccentric British settler’s family had taken Kenyan citizenship and retained its landholding after the country’s independence in 1963. In fact, the main avenue in Nairobi was known as Delamere Avenue until it was renamed Kenyatta Avenue
after Kenya’s founding father and first President. The colonist’s heir and present owner of the farm had run into trouble with Kenyan law for shooting to death a Maasai intruder and a suspected poacher in his estate in 2005 and 2006, but escaped with a light sentence.
The dormant Mt Longonot greet us again as we cross the Rift Valley and return to Nairobi’s evening rain and traffic jams. The big money from tourism has not helped improve existing infrastructure or the living standards of ordinary Kenyans. (Tourism is one of Kenya's major foreign earners alongside tea and horticulture and raked in 98 billion shillings last year, shy of its 100 billion shilling target, and up from 74 billion shillings posted in 2010. Revenues soared 32 percent in 2011 as high-spending arrivals from the United Arab Emirates, China and India made up for a fall in visitors from its traditional European markets.
According to Sibabrata TripathiIndia's High Commissioner to Kenya, the East African country currently receives about 20,000 tourists from India.) Cost of living is high, industrial production minimal, and government spending on health care and education abysmal. Public transport is non-existent, with matatus (private vans and mini buses) charging exorbitant fares that shoot up further on a rainy day. The vestiges of the colonial rail line remain underutilised.
There is a thriving Indian/Gujarati expatriate community whose businesses aid the local economy. Not surprisingly, there is a shopping mall selling Indian goods, clothing and food, and temples for the Indian communities. The land for the Asian market selling wholesale vegetables is a gift from the Indian community for poor Kenyan entrepreneurs.

Mira with Maasai dancers at Mamba village, an amusement park.
 The poor in Kenya deserve a better deal. The stoicism with which the poor in Nairobi – many of whom have migrated from drought-prone areas in the north of the country - go about their day-to-day affairs will seem strange to someone coming from a country where doles, subsidies and welfare measures rule the roost, however skewed they are in practice. A warm and friendly people, Kenyans do not seem to have half the luck of the wildlife that they protect and love.

**The original draft of an article I wrote for publication in Frontline magazine**

On the penultimate day of reporting duty at the photography festival, the boss of the English writing dept, came and told me: When we both a...