My African Safari, Part One: Amboseli and the Maasai People by Howard Norfolk

I grew up watching animal shows on TV, and always wanted to see the animals in real life. But I always seemed to be hearing bad news from Africa, so I kept putting off the trip. Finally I had the courage to go "on safari" to Kenya. I had no problems there, had a wonderful time, and feel privileged to have seen the animals in their natural surroundings.
Note: There aren't many fish here - but I hope that if you like fish you like other animals as well!

This is a "slide show" of my safari. The photos are not elaborately posed, but are snapshots often taken from inside a safari van. They will give you an idea of what anyone might see if they take such a trip.
The photos tell the story. To see an enlargement of a photo, click on it, then go "back." I don't expect you to look at them all!

It was snowing when I left home!

I left my house in Vancouver Canada during our first snowfall of the year, on 15 December 2000. I flew across North America and the Atlantic Ocean, changed planes in Amsterdam Holland, and arrived in Nairobi Kenya the next day.

I was travelling on my own because I was on my way to meet friends in South India. While I was "in the area" I took the opportunity to stop in Africa for a while.

I spent a night at the comfortable Landmark Hotel in Nairobi, then joined up with my tour group of six other people plus a driver/guide. I usually like to travel independently, but to see Africa's game parks one needs a vehicle and a guide, and since I was on my own it was best to go with a group.

Our minibus

We drove south in this minibus to Amboseli National Park, where we found ourselves in the wonderful scenery shown below...

Even though it is on the Equator, Mount Kilimanjaro is snow-capped year round.

Amboseli is south of Nairobi, as shown on this map of our travels.

I'd booked at the last minute for the busy Christmas period, but I was not too disappointed when my travel agent said there was no room at any of the luxurious lodges that most people stay at in the Parks, and so I would have to go on a camping trip.

Our camp was located just outside the Park entrance, and was quite simple. Tents were permanently set up and there was a camp cook who lived there all the time. We had to bring our own sleeping bags and air mattresses. We ate camp food on some rickety tables under a tree, and washed from water stored in plastic barrels. Meals were included in our package, but the cook had bottled water, soft drinks and beer kept in ice for us to buy.

Our camp at dawn My tent

We had none of the comforts a tourist usually expects - but I have always thought of myself as a "traveller" rather than a "tourist," and in fact preferred to sleep on the actual ground of Africa rather than in a bed, and to have nature right outside my tent rather than down a cement path past the swimming pool and outside the guarded gates of a large lodge. It's nicer to be with a few friends around a camp fire rather than with a crowd of tourists in a saloon bar. I felt that I was experiencing Africa closer than the people in the fancy lodges.

When we arrived at the camp some elephants had broken the surrounding fence and were near our campsite, as can be seen in this photo. Our guide was quite concerned and he kept careful watch to make sure they were not coming too close.

We began our safari routine: get up early and have a coffee - go for a two hour drive searching for animals - back to camp for breakfast - go for another two hour drive - back for lunch - go for a drive until dark - back for supper - sit around the camp fire - go to bed early.

A safari is very much a driving holiday. You can't normally get out of your van in the Park because of danger from the wild animals.

It seems strange, but as long as you are in a van or a Jeep you can approach any animal as closely as you want and your vehicle is completely ignored. I think this is because the animals have grown up surrounded by vehicles. They know they are harmless, and so they treat them as if they are moving trees or rocks that are part of the landscape and of no particular interest or danger. A person on foot is different however. I read in a Nairobi newspaper that an American student had left a lodge by himself to photograph elephants and was trampled to death.

Amboseli is famous for its elephants:

We were allowed out of our van to climb this safe hill and look down upon a large herd of elephants.

Later, in the van, we drove very close to the elephants, and they ignored us.

From large to small...The dung beetle collects a ball of elephant dung and rolls it to a place of burial, where it can use it as a food source.

We saw other animals too:

Some black-faced vervet monkeys were waiting at the side of the road for food. But feeding the animals is not allowed in National Parks.

Grevy's zebras

Hyenas I photographed these marsh plants from the window of our van

Baboons Reticulated giraffe

The Maasai

After lunch one day, our driver took us to visit some Maasai people in their nearby homestead, called in the Maa language an "enkang" or "inkankiti." The Maasai are a famous semi-nomadic warrior tribe whose lives centre around herding cattle and who live in a communal system. In the past they have been romantically described as the ideal "noble savages," and even as "the Lost Tribe of Israel." (They originally migrated to Kenya from the North).

These are our Maasai guides, who showed us their homestead.

Since they were near our camp and the Park entrance, the villagers were quite used to visits from tourists and did some traditional dancing for us:

The men ("warriors")

The women

Maasai warriors

Me with the women!

These are Maasai houses. They are made by the women with a framework of branches covered with plaster made from grass, cow dung and urine. The houses are very simple, with no electricity, water supply, or even furniture. Since the Maasai are semi-nomadic the houses are supposed to be only temporary. This group had been here for "eight or ten years."

Here is a small family, and the interior of a house.

By the time the seven of us were ready to walk back to our van, the villagers had set up a "market" to sell us their nice craft souvenirs. I bought this spear and shield.

I didn't see the cattle, but these sheep were being guarded by boys near the village.

We stood around chatting to these warriors, who all spoke English which they learn at school. There are many different tribal languages in Kenya so English is the national language.

I like people as well as animals, so instead of returning to our camp and going on another drive, I thought I would like to meet more of the Maasai people. Near the village (and our camp) was a "pub" - a small wooden building where beer was sold and where some of the villagers liked to spend their day. I offered to buy a couple of warriors a beer and we went to the "pub."

Here we are near the "pub." I still have my beer, but I didn't notice my friends drinking. I thought they must have given theirs away (or sold them).

(I found out later that they would have been in big trouble if they'd drunk the beer I bought them! In the Maasai society young men are not allowed to drink beer until they are 35 years old. At that time, a warrior must give a cow to his father for permission to drink. Young men are fined one or two cattle if caught drinking beer without permission from their elders.... Try that on our teenagers!)

I spent all afternoon until it got dark chatting with my new friends by the roadside. I asked questions about their lives, and they asked me questions about where I live. They liked my binoculars. They also liked my digital camera since it has a preview of the photo taken, so whenever anyone showed up we took photos. I let them use the camera and they took photos of each other. Many of these photos were taken by them. They gave me their addresses, and later I sent them copies.

As you can see, they are all dressed in red. These are their normal everyday clothes, and Maasai dressed in red are seen all over South Kenya. Red is a warning to wild animals that this particular creature is best avoided - he has a spear and a bow and arrow, and is not something to kill and eat.

A young Maasai is traditionally supposed to kill a lion when he becomes a warrior. This is no longer allowed, but one of my friends said that he had killed a lion with his spear in self defence. It had attacked him and his friends when they were walking in trees on a distant hill during their warrior initiation trials.

This is Peter. Peter is his English name - his Maasai name is Ipitek. He is a prosperous young man, with lots of nice beads, a bicycle and three wives. When he first rode up on his bicycle he wanted money for me to take his photograph, but when he was told I was a "friend" and not just a "rich tourist" he forgot about the money and we took lots of photos together.

Yes, Peter told me he had three wives!
Under the traditional Maasai social system young men are initiated as "warriors" at the age of fifteen or sixteen. They live together in a compound with their "age set" (much like an army troop) until they graduate as "elders" up to ten years later, at which time they can start buying wives with cattle, and the number of wives a man can have depends on how many cattle he has (and therefore how many mouths he can feed).

Peter is actually an exception to this rule - the ochre in his hair shows that he is still a warrior, and yet he has three wives. This puzzled me, so in connection with writing this article I contacted a Maasai living in the USA, Kakuta Ole Maimai, who has a web site about the Maasai: http://www.maasai-infoline.org/ Kakuta told me that in the past only some wealthy men were permitted to marry before they had completed their term of warrior-hood, usually because they were the only son in the family. But nowadays Maasai society is changing fast, and many Maasai are finding it easy to marry at what once would have been considered a very young age. So Peter is either very rich or very modern! (Kakuta also told me that another sign of change that he saw in my photos is the riding of bicycles. When he was a warrior, not long ago, bicycles were shunned - Maasai did not use anything that came from beyond their boundaries).

Maasai warriors seem to have a great life nowadays, with nothing too much to do. They are in charge of security - at night they bring their livestock inside the village compound and block the entrance with thorn bushes to keep the wild animals out. They used to be more martial, going on raiding parties to other villages to get more cattle and women, and were often at war, but of course those days are over. I asked Peter what his job was, and he said that it was to go to the school and teach the children Maasai traditions and stories, of which there are many.

Meanwhile, the girls are traditionally married as soon as they reach puberty, from age twelve and up. They therefore always marry older men. They do, however, sometimes have relations with warriors of their own age, but any resulting children are the responsibility of their official husbands.

All this sounds like what we would call "sexist," but it makes sense when you consider that in the "bad old days" warriors' lives were dangerous and often short. If a wild animal didn't get them they might be killed in battle, so the group would end up with more women than men. If the men married early there would be many widows. Women needed protection and children needed a father, so the answer was that men who survived the warrior stage had to be responsible for several women according to their resources, i.e. the number of cattle they owned.

Some no doubt well-meaning people are trying to persuade the Maasai to give up this traditional social system, and it is changing. But sometimes I wonder if it might in fact be more appropriate than the system that has recently evolved in the West - with its numerous unmarried or divorced single mothers dependent on the Welfare State to support them and their fatherless children. (Especially in a country like Kenya, where the Government does not have the resources to support husbandless women).

Men and women each have their own duties. The women do most of what work there is to be done, including fetching water and firewood, milking the cattle, cooking, making beadwork, looking after the children, and as I mentioned before, even building the houses. When I told my friends that in Canada men make the houses they were quite surprised - "Why would a man do women's work like that?"

Boys normally guard the livestock, except when special care is needed during a drought.

As mentioned, men are in charge of security, and they also help with the "cooking"! - not that they have much to cook, because my friends told me that one of their main foods is blood. The men draw blood from the necks of their cattle after shooting an arrow at close range. They make a drink from the blood, mixing it with milk to form their basic diet. They also eat honey, the meat of sheep and goats, and have recently begun to trade livestock for grains and rice. They do not grow crops themselves. I asked my friends if they ever ate meat from the wild animals that surround them, and they said 'no,' that is not allowed. I had seen some chickens in the village and asked if they ate them. They said chickens were kept just for the children to eat - grown men think of chickens as "vultures."

We took lots of photos

Not all the photos were very good. The Maasai aren't used to cameras. I hope this photographer is better at aiming his spear than my camera!

Somebody thought that I would look good in Maasai clothing!

A quiet moment while Peter has his hair fixed

I have read that the Maasai people in general have "many social, political and economic challenges," one of which has been finding enough land on which to practice their nomadic pastoralist lifestyle, particularly since the creation of National Parks put large areas off-limits.

The Maasai would be considered "poor" by our standards (yes, you with the electricity and the computer!), but they do have the comforts of carrying on much of their tried and true traditional lifestyle, together with friends, family and livestock that they have grown up with, and as I'm sure you can see from my photos, the Maasai that I met were very friendly, healthy, and happy people. It was nice to spend some time with them.

From Amboseli we drove north to the Samburu National Reserve:

Go to Part II: Samburu and Lake Nukuru