The safari—the Swahili word for “long journey”—was born in Kenya, the former British colony where barons and plutocrats, maharajas and royalty once paraded across the plains to play out an expensive, outlawed fantasy. One blistering summer in this land before time, Paolo R. Reyes was given

a rare opportunity to experience Africa in its age of innocence

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“Kristine Hermosa. You know her? She very beautiful.” The immigration officer at Nairo-bi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in-quired—with a mischievous smile—about the semi-retired Philippine actress as he stamped my passport with a 90-day tourist visa.

I didn’t have time to tell him that I had in-terviewed Hermosa for the Inquirer in the past, or that her once-stellar career had been sidelined by marriage and motherhood. So I flashed him a similar smile, cracked a corny joke, and took my first step into Kenya: the land of Out of Africa safaris, world-class Olym-pic athletes, Barack Obama’s forefathers, and, as I soon discovered, defunct Filipino soap operas.

After claiming my luggage at the carousel, I was met at the arrivals hall by Rajab, a rep-resentative of my tour operator, Asia to Afri-ca Safaris, who was to escort my party to the nearby Wilson airstrip, where a tiny, twin-prop De Havilland Otter bound for the wilds of Meru awaited us.

Before I could even reciprocate Rajab’s warm “jambo” (Swahili for “hello”), he be-gan interrogating me on what I was begining to realize was a local obsession: the dramatic cliffhangers, twisted storylines, and tantaliz-ing stars of Pangako Sa 'Yo, Sana’y Wala Nang Wakas, and Kay Tagal Kang Hinintay.

These ABS-CBN telenovelas, all dubbed or subtitled in the vernacular, have taken the East African nation by storm in recent years, thus giving these expired Pinoy soaps a second life in the unlikeliest of places.

Perhaps not so unlikely, I thought, as the air-conditioned van crawled its way to Wilson, inch by inch, through the winding, honking crush of traffic that Nairobi—the capital city of third-world Kenya—has become notorious for.

The two airports are only 12 kilometers apart, so what should have been a 20-min-ute drive took us nearly an hour. But it was a good opportunity to get a glimpse of the capi-tal’s working belly, far removed from the fan-cy suburb of Karen (named after Out of Afri-ca author Karen Blixen), where the country’s 1-percent are ensconced post-colonial es-tates not far from the Danish writer’s former coffee  plantation.

High up in the air, however, Kenya trans-forms into a different kind of creature—pri-mal, prehistoric, and capable of inspiring won-der. As we hovered over game reserves where the grass seemed to roll on forever, the jangled din of the city dissolved into the gentle lull of the jungle.

“They’ve PumPed so much money into this place, it’s incredible,” I overheard my seatmate, the Vanity Fair and New York Times photographer Guillaume Bonn, tell the plus-sized American woman behind him as the De Havilland plane made its descent on the $1.25 million Meru National Park.

Bonn, a French photojournalist born in Madagascar, has covered the dark continent for over a decade, from the murder of conser-vationist Joan Root in Lake Naivasha to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of fugitive war-lord Joseph Kony in North Uganda. (His pho-tographs of the latter ran alongside a contro-versial Vanity Fair piece, “Childhood’s End,” written by the late Christopher Hitchens.)

Today, on commission for Condé Nast Trav-eler, he was en route to Lewa, the 60,000-acre wildlife conservancy where Prince William fa-mously proposed marriage to Kate Middleton in a rustic log cabin overlooking Mount Kenya.

The whirr of the plane’s propellers prevent-ed me from probing him further. But I gath-ered from the gruff, imposing tone of his voice that this was no fluff piece on a five-star eco-lodge or glamping site—which was where I, like most of the khaki-clad holidaymakers on board the flight, was headed.

Elsa’s Kopje, the first stop of my week-long safari, is a cluster of open-faced casitas built into the jagged folds of Meru’s Mughwango Hill, a pyramid of granite marooned in a sea of thorny thickets. It’s a luxury lodge with a killer view and a storied past.

Fifty years ago, before the park was near-ly destroyed by bandit gangs that swept down

from Somalia in search of ivory and rhino horn, this was the lair of Elsa the Lioness. The eccentric Adamsons, George and Joy, hand-raised the orphaned cub like their own child and reluctantly released her into the wilder-ness—a heart-wrenching tale of two conser-vationists that was immortalized in the 1966 movie Born Free.

Looking out from the balcony of my cot-tage, dramatically perched on a drooping lip of the kopje (small mountain), I understood how John Barry had been inspired to compose the epic film’s Oscar-winning score. Down below, on a corn-colored earth specked green with doum palms and baobab trees, Rothschild gi-raffes and Grevy’s zebras were cantering away in the twilight, as a thirsty herd of elephants dipped their trunks into the Rojewero river, one of 13 tributaries that bisect the park like tea-brown ribbons.

Francis Epong, a native of the Turkana tribe, served as our guide at Elsa’s Kopje. Tall, weather-beaten, and hardened by the harsh climate, he was a throwback to the days of the white hunter and the memsahib (colonial wom-en)—always ready to cater to our group’s var-ied whims, whether it was a champagne break-fast in the bush or a request to rifle through the forest to search for the elusive leopard.

As with most safaris, our days at Elsa’s be-gan before the crack of dawn, while the stars were still visible and as the mists rolled back slowly in the sunrise; a magical hour for bush walks and game drives, when the landscape and all its the living creatures seemed to be in the process of being created.

The day ended, more often than not, with

SPIRITED AWAYA twin-prop Air Kenya plane in the airstrip of Meru National Park. Opposite: The Boran-style tent suite of glamping resort Joy's Camp; the treacherous gorge of the Ewaso Nyiro River, once a hideout for Somali poachers.

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a sundowner at dusk, in an open-sided Land Rover well-stocked with wine and liquor. Upon returning to the lodge, the walinzi (night watchmen) would lead us to the clubhouse at the windy crag of Mughwango Hill, where a multi-course Italian dinner would be served under an intermittent shower of meteors.

Canopied under this cloudless sky the col-or of midnight, you will sometimes hear—if you’re lucky—the guttural moan of a wander-ing lioness, as if the ghost of George and Joy Adamson’s Elsa still haunted the savannah into which she was released.

AfTeR Two sPine-cRunching hours on highways that have seen better days, and a quick stopover at Isiolo, a sleepy backwater town where the men chewed on miraa (a herbal amphetamine), I finally arrived at the east gate of Shaba, a 59,000-acre reserve where the real-ity show Surivor: Africa was shot 10 years ago.

As my driver left the Land Rover to pay the entrance fee at the ranger’s station, I played a game with a few persistent locals, mostly chil-dren, who were peddling all manner of trin-kets, necklaces, and carved animal figurines outside my window.

“I will buy something if you can guess which country I’m from,” I declared, as the crowd, their faces pressed against the glass, gath-ered around the jeep like a friendly mob. They couldn’t, even with my clues. When I pacified their growing frustration by shouting “Philip-pines!” they erupted in laughter, still puzzled perhaps by the odd provenance of this passing stranger.

In Shaba, the equatorial sun doesn’t so much shine as strike. But its Martian land-scape, unchanged for thousands of years,

makes up for the blistering heat. In this parched corner of Kenya’s northern frontier, not far from Ethiopia, the Pleistocene Era en-joys a kind of eternal life: the volcanic moun-tain ranges of Bodich and Ol Kanjo swoop up theatrically from the savannah, where rust-colored boulders the size of buses are scattered on the red earth like forgotten dinosaur eggs.

For this second leg of the safari, I was lodged at Joy’s Camp, a low-key “glamping” resort. In the late 1970s, Joy Adamson called this remote corner of the reserve her home. It was then a ramshackle of tables and chairs, paint brushes and paper where she wrote her fi-nal book, The Queen of Shaba, and was mysteriously murdered in the summer of 1980. A concrete cairn, just behind the camp, marks the spot where she was slain.

If you’re looking for isolation—a real selling point for seasoned safari-goers—Joy’s Camp is the place to find it. Managed by Wil-lem Dolleman and Francien van de Vijver, an eco-conscious Dutch couple in their late twenties, the camp is made of up 10 tented suites, all designed around an ex-otic Moorish theme inspired by the local Boran tribe.

The main dining tent, a Med-iterranean-style oasis with a springwater swimming pool, overlooks a veritable Garden of Eden—a lush green plain with a large natural spring where lions, reticulated giraffes, and elephants vie for watering rights with buffa-lo, Beisa oryx, and zebras.

To truly appreciate the vol-canic terrain of Shaba, you must confront nature on your own feet. Instead of a game drive on my fi-nal day, I opted for a treacherous

trek through the Ewaso Nyiro River’s unfor-giving gorge: a daredevil’s playground of pred-ators, abandoned poachers’ caves, and poison-ous plants that can render a man blind.

Together with my guide, John Ebukutt, and an armed game scout in military fatigue

(“Whatever you do, don’t run,” he warned me), we trudged cau-tiously through the steep ochre wall of the ravine, the river’s chocolate-brown waters surg-ing 40 feet below us, until we clawed our way down to a san-dy beach, where we could make out the spoor of freshwater Nile crocodiles and the footprints of baboons.

At the flat crown of the can-yon, we came face-to-face with the prehistoric panorama of Shaba: a sweeping, grandstand view of Creation, the kind one imagines God might have had on the third day. Even in the blinding haze of high noon, it was possible to imagine what it must have looked like in the beginning.

The sToRy goes that when John Galliano, the dis-graced British fashion designer, first set foot on Elephant Pep-per—a traditional campsite in the beating heart of the bush—his jaw dropped upon catching sight of his “suite.”

Canopied under a grove of pepper trees where vervet mon-keys played and fought, and garrisoned by a row of Maasai tribesmen clad in shuka blan-kets, was a bare-bones canvas tent with a backyard unlike any other: the game-rich grasslands of the Maasai Mara, Kenya’s most famous wildlife reserve.

F RO M BA N K E R S

TO B U S H M E N

No one knows African

safaris better than Filipino

investment bankers Jose

“Litlit” Cortes and Victor

“Binky” Dizon, founders

of Asia to Africa Safaris (3/F, Lapanday Center,

2263 Pasong Tamo Ext.,

Makati; 812-2728; atoasafaris.

com), the region’s first and

only safari specialists with

headquarters in Manila,

Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Together with managing

partner Shy Perez-Sala,

they’ve arranged thousands

of unforgettable, tailor-made

trips for Filipinos since 2002.

“Africa has always been an

elusive dream for Filipino

travelers,” says Cortez,

formerly of Barclays Capital

and JP Morgan Chase. “At

Asia to Africa, we hand-hold

them through the process

of planning this trip of

a lifetime.”

Tall, weather-beaten, and hardened by the harsh climate, they were a throwback to the days of the white hunter and the memsahib.

ANIMAL HOUSETop right: A Maasai woman outside her manyatta in the Mara North Conservancy. Opposite, clockwise from top left: A cheetah, fresh off a kill, in the Maasai Mara; a Meru road sign; a Topi antelope in Shaba; an elephant grazing the Mara plains; a picturesque watering hole in parched Shaba; a male lion roars outside Elephant Pepper Camp.

rogue.ph JUly 2012 127

The witnesses I spoke to couldn’t con-firm whether Galliano raised his sculpted eyebrows in delight or disbelief. But for most first-time guests at Elephant Pepper Camp, the third and final leg of my Kenyan safari, it’s usually a mix of both.

With limited mobile phone access, no gen-erators (twelve solar panels power the entire site, when needed), no permanent structures (mindful of their eco-footprint, everything is completely mobile), and an unfenced location inhabited by all creatures wild and free, Ele-phant Pepper Camp offers what most five-star African lodges cannot: an opportunity to ex-perience Kenya in its age of innocence.

The Mara, once the world’s most popu-lar playground for hunters and poachers, was where this European pastime of game-view-ing began in the 19th century. In those days, when well-heeled Westerners with a sense of adventure went on “safari” (the Swahili word

for “journey”), it meant long, treacherous nights on horse-drawn caravans with a huge contingent of staff and crew ready to pitch a tent and prepare a campfire come nightfall.

When I arrived during the waning days of Kenya’s blistering summer, under billowing clouds pregnant with rain, I realized just how easy it was for writers like Hemingway or Hux-ley to wax romantic about those halcyon days of the hunt.

Gone, of course, were the crackling sounds of rifles being fired in the air and the constant drumming of hoofbeats in the red dirt. As I sat under a ceiling of stars, enjoying my cold glass of Tusker beer over the campfire, there was only the deafening silence of the night, inter-rupted only by a falcon’s contact call in the dis-tance or the deep-throated roar of a lion.

The old-fashioned charm of this 20-year-old mobile camp is its accommodations. Linked together by hurricane lamps and marked footpaths in the forest, each of the eight canvas tents consist of a queen-sized bed, an en-suite bathroom (with a wash basin, bucket shower, and eco-friendly flush toilet), and a private veranda with a hammock perfect for noontime naps between game drives.

Game drives are the highlight of any safa-ri in the Mara, a savannah so flat, leveled, and

Safari Camping In the Kenya Savannah

PARKS AND RECREATIONA Joy's Camp jeep parked at a hilly summit of Shaba. Opposite, clockwise from top left: Fruit bowl and glass-bead curtain detail at Joy's Camp; an antique gramophone at Elephant Pepper; Elsa's Kopje's infinity pool, suspension bridge, four-poster bed, and private house; Joy's Camp guide John serving cocktails; a bush breakfast at Meru.

eLsA’s KoPJe

WHERE: Meru National ParkLODGING: 9 elegant, open-faced cottages with killer viewsFILMING LOCATION: The 1966 hit movie Born Free AWARDS: “The World’s Coolest Pool” by The Daily Telegraph

Joy’s cAmP

WHERE: Shaba National ReserveLODGING: 10 en-suite tents furnished in chic Borana styleFILMING LOCATION: Survivor: Africa was shot in the reserveAWARDS: Included in Condé Nast Traveller’s 2007 Hot List

eLePhAnT PePPeR

WHERE: Maasai Mara LODGING: 7 canvas tents with traditional bucket showersFILMING LOCATION: The safari scenes of Out of AfricaAWARDS:Travel Weekly’s “Best Authentic Camping Experience”

WHEN TO GO: The best time to view Kenya’s wildlife is during the dry seasons from January to March and from June to October. GETTING THERE: Asia to Africa Safaris (812-2728; atoasafaris.com) specializes in organizing tailor-made safaris to Africa from the Philippines. WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Philippine passport holders can obtain a 90-day Kenya tourist visa ($50) upon arrival at Nairobi.

NAIROBI

K E N Y A

ELSA’S KOPJE

JOY'S CAMP

ELEPHANT PEPPER

Mt. Kenya

free of obstruction that it offers camera- and binocular-friendly views of the big cats, wil-debeests, zebras, giraffes, gazelles, and spot-ted hyenas on parade.

I can still recall the inimitable thrill I felt when I witnessed my first kill. On a clearing close to the Leopard Gorge, my guide Stan-ley Kipkoske called my attention to a cheetah rustling like a ravenous predator through the grass, her gaze directed at a helpless prey: a baby Thomson’s gazelle that had strayed away from its pack.

A panicked barking, like alarm bells, erupted from the herd, a futile attempt to warn the wayward fawn of an impending at-tack. My telephoto lens closely followed the action from stalk, to chase, to kill. In the blink of an eye, it was all over. The predator, her mouth firmly locked on the bleeding neck of its prey, grew increasingly paranoid as a flock of vultures began circling overhead in a ritu-alistic dance of death.

“The law of the jungle,” Stanley said as I sat motionless at the edge of my seat.

In this wild, primitive corner of Africa, a land before time where man stills seems be-holden to the beasts of a bygone world, na-ture—and not much else—puts on the greatest show on earth. •

In this parched corner of Kenya’s northern frontier, not far from Ethiopia, the Pleistocene Era enjoys a kind of eternal life.

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