Life in Cambodia

Mini-Safari Adventure

Only weeks after my arrival in Cambodia, and Maggie was about to jet-set off to Kenya for a conference. She invited me to come along, and with a little requisite arm twisting, I tagged along, for who I am to turn down a triumphant return to the Continent? So after getting to sit in a lounge far nicer than we deserved, and having a far longer and uncomfortable flight than I had expected, we arrived in Nairobi. It was almost too easy for Africa – the passport check guy smiled at me and even said “enjoy your stay” in a way that he genuinely seemed to mean it. I was only accosted by a single taxi driver, and he even gave up when I told him no thanks the first time. It was something like 4am when we arrived, so as soon as we got the hotel, we were out – it was Sunday morning.

We woke up in the late morning and wanted to take advantage of our first free day in Kenya, so headed out of town to a giraffe sanctuary. As we pulled in, the sign at the front of the sanctuary said “no hooting,” as if that might have been a common problem in the past. I don’t know about Maggie, but damn that sign, because I could barely hold back from hooting at the giraffes myself. They have free rein to roam around as they like, but I don’t know how far they wander due to the likes of Maggie, myself and plenty of other folks wishing to feed them. When you get there, they give you a handful of quarter-sized pellets that are apparently pretty tasty to your typical giraffe. You stand up on a balcony eye level when them, they open up, and never have I seen a longer tongue in my life, its like that lead-singer from KISS. The giraffes stick out their tongue, you put the pellet there and it slurps it up. Repeat until you run out, which coincidentally is the same time the giraffe loses interest in you. While you distract them with the tasty pellet, you can even pet the savage beasts, which eerily feel like any other animal with fur, though cool to say I’ve pet a giraffe.

While Maggie was in her meetings, I spent most of my time cruising around town. I spent all day on foot, so I covered a pretty limited area, but I think I got a pretty good idea of what it was all about. The rest of what we saw in the city was from the back of a taxi as we went out to dinner, went to the sanctuaries, etc. We got the whirlwind tour of downtown, saw the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, as well as the second-largest shanty town in Africa, though I forget the name, second only to Soweto in South Africa. On my walks around town, I didn’t see anything too outrageous or of note, though I did get my hair cut by a nice man from India. Nairobi, while nice, was not as cosmopolitan as I had expected it to be. However, it was relatively clean, hardly anyone stared at me, had good food, and nicest of all, it was cold. Cold, of course, being a relative term for those of us living in the tropics. Days might have broken 85 degrees, and nights probably got down to 55, so much so that one morning, I could even see my breath at breakfast. As former West Africans ourselves, I think Maggie and I were both surprised by the weather, even though we were prepared for it.

On Thursday, we headed a few hours north to Nakuru National Park. We booked the tour through one of the thousand agencies in town, and ended up having the entire trip to ourselves, which was definitely better than having to fight some chubby pimply faced little kid with a camera just to get a glimpse of the rhino. It was a pretty sweet ride, your usual bush taxi body, but with all the seats ripped out and individual captain chairs installed, with the ominous warning “do not stand in chairs” written on the wall. Another disruptive urge spoiled by a random sign. For the first hour or so, we were cruising along a pretty good road, but soon ran into some pretty bad stuff. Bumpy I can do, but the dust was suffocating, and we finally got the park feeling like I had smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds, and probably would have been better off with the cigarettes as well. Before we got into the park we came across one of those huge trans-africa buses. Its just a big open 4x4 bus that transverse the continent with a whole bunch of scared teenage kids in it. That’s just a joke of a way to see Africa. Granted, I’ll give it up that they were there, but to travel like that, you’d be better off staying home and watching National Geographic. What fun is traveling completely as a spectator? Travel shouldn’t be easy; travel is speaking to locals, travel is trying to figure out how to say “rice” in Hausa, its wondering what kind of meat is on your plate and eating it anyway. It’s too easy to drive by in your big car, point at the locals doing their thing, and go home “a traveler,” but hey, to each their own. So into the park and our driver/guide stops the car, climbs back with us and proceeds to pop the roof up, so that it ends up extending two or so feet above the body of the car, so that we could stand (hence the warning) and see the animals without anything blocking the view. And since it was only Maggie and I, we had free range to move about at will, without the aforementioned pimply faced kid in the way. Camera poised, free arm ready to shield Maggie from potential attack (hey, I’ve seen “When Animals Attack”; and I heard that zebras can get pretty vicious).

I don’t know what I was expecting from the park, but we were definitely not disappointed. We broke through the wood line and descended into the open areas around the lake, and it was literally full of animals. The lake might have well been pink, there were so many flamingos. We heard it was one of the biggest collections of flamingos in Africa, but that stat hasn’t been Googled yet--seeing what we saw then, I might believe it. We never got close enough to take good pictures of the flamingos, so they show up as a pink glob in the water, so you’ll just have to take our word for it that they are birds. As we got closer to the shore, we had zebras practically climbing in with us. Ok, not really, but we could drive up to within a few feet of them. I’d never really seen any of these animals before in my life, so it was awe-inspiring to see them so close, could almost touch them. For a split second, I thought about pulling that move you see in the Westerns, where I would jump off the roof onto the zebra. And as cool as that story would be, but though not posted with a sign specifically forbidding that, I erred on the side of caution and figured it was against park rules, and that I would no longer be welcome. The zebra were everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and after a while, it was “oh, another zebra.” But that’s definitely not to say I wasn’t impressed with them. As we drove through the park, we had antelope bouncing around us, jackals eyeing us from the bushes, and warthogs wandering around, doing whatever warthogs do. We later ran into a gaggle (or whatever) of giraffe munching away on some unappealing looking bristly plant. We had previously fed them at the giraffe sanctuary in Nairobi, so we were old-hat, but awed none the less. They seem to exude a stately manner, what with their heads held high, and seeming to care little of the teeming masses (including Maggie and myself) below. We saw a whole bunch of yung’ins as well, some no more than four or five feet tall all lounging in the shade of some trees, though we couldn’t get too close, as no doubt the mother wasn’t too far away. Upon leaving our long-necked friends we happened across a number of rhino (both black and white) as well. Most of the ones we were wallowing in the coolness of a big shade tree, and they looked more like boulders than rhino. One though was lumbering through an open field as we drove up, and was no more than 15/20 ft away. Those things are built like tanks and woe be the creature that steps in his way.

Enter Maggie: So what Matt forgot to mention were the band of monkeys and chimps that were ever-present and literally climbing on cars, jumping through windows and running across the entrance to the park. Crazy little things, staring right into the camera, not afraid to get close at all. Our driver had to remind us to close the windows when we stopped to pay the park entrance fee. Although we didn’t see any lions or leopards, I think we still had a really impressive introduction to East African wildlife…next time in the region we hit the big time: Serengeti and Masai Mara. We were sad to leave the park at 3:30 when it was time to get back on the road to Nairobi. We of course hit massive traffic due to a jack-knifed semi blocking the entire road. This presented several problems for not only us but other semis, bush taxis, bikers, cars etc. as everyone was trying to veer off the road onto a small hill next to the road, which had many large rocks, prickly bushes and well, most importantly, no clear road. Which also led to more traffic jams because cars/trucks etc. were coming from both directions on one side and causing grid-lock. Our driver wasn’t taking this easy and took his chance at one small opening, corralling over a steep hump, muddied by rain, but pushed our Toyota mini-bus over the top and we were just about home free. Sadly though, as we neared the Great Rift Valley, we had high hopes to get out and take a look but the fog was just as thick at 5pm as it was at 8am that morning, so we had to forgo that photo-op. Hope you can take a look at some of the pictures, we’ll post the link soon.

Our last day was spent relaxing somewhat at the hotel and going to the Masai market, which was interestingly held in a swanky mall parking garage. Curious. We of course had to sample the street food local women were preparing for the vendors out front: rices, beef, spicy red sauce and some light green ‘fou fou’ as we call it in West Africa. Good stuff. Once we entered the ‘market’ it was clear that it would be the usual tourist littered spot with the first row of vendors giving you a preview of what was to be found in the next 15 rows, so we spent a short time there, loaded up on some loot and headed back to the hotel. After packing up and heading out the airport, we were almost turned away at the ticket counter, as our flight was ‘extremely sold out’…we convinced her it was important we get back to Asia and we got on. Made it back to our dear Cambodia in one piece, feeling happy to be warm again, all the while planning our next trip to East Africa.

posted by Life in Cambodia @ 7:34 PM