External Reviews

• The Independent - UK, 08 April 2006

  On safari in Kenya: John Walsh

  Safaris, thankfully, are no longer the glorified turkey-shoots they once were, but John Walsh finds plenty of blood and gore in Kenya as he goes out and about with the Masai

  The hyenas are doing their best to ignore the camera. The one standing up lifts his head to sniff the weather and his sloping, hatchback body takes a few paces, but I know his dark, smudged-mascara eyes are watching me. His two grim associates are lying down, gazing moodily at the horizon, but their nasty little teeth are slightly bared, as though sensing trouble. Something about their casual preparedness puts you in mind of hoodies, street corners and flick-knives.

  John, the Masai driver, starts up the Land Cruiser and we drive away from the feral trio. They watch us go, giggling softly. God help any innocent creature that strays along this track. Two hundred yards further, an innocent creature does just that.

  A baby zebra is trit-trotting along in the morning sunshine. It is the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm of the zebra world and any minute now it's about to be eaten alive.

  "For God's sake," I tell the Masai. "It's walking straight towards the hyenas. It'll be ambushed. Can't we do something?"

  They look at me. Do something? Like what? Call the police? The men turn back to the spectator sport. So do I. Through my binoculars, I watch the baby zebra trot round the corner of the track. There's the hyena's head poking out of the grass, unable to believe its luck that lunch could arrive in such pink-and-black lusciousness.

  The zebra turns its head, sees the black eyes regarding it from the grass and leaps a foot in the air. I can hear it crying with fear as it runs off. Two hyenas come loping out in pursuit. The zebra runs towards the jeep, swerves away and gallops across a sloping field - and the third hyena springs from the right and sets off in a flanking pursuit. "That's that," says John, "It's dead." We start the Land Cruiser to follow the four creatures bounding across the green, the stripey one still hanging onto the lead and disappearing, half a mile away, behind a hedge.

  When we reach the hedge, there's no sign of the zebra. It has managed to outrun all three predators and gone crashing into a wood where they are reluctant to follow. The frustrated muggers stand outside, their chests heaving and their tails drooping with disappointment.

  On day three, after seeing your 738th zebra or 19th waterback, you may start to flag. You have, after all, seen most of these creatures in the zoo. Either you must decide to observe them more closely or look for other entertainments. You can go walkabout and check out the vegetable garden that services local villages. You can visit a Masai village where boys will dance their - *competitive pogo and show you how to make fire, collect honey and stalk an elephant by employing a donkey disguised as an oryx. Purists may object to the fact that they charge you $20 (£13) a head for the privilege, and steer you towards a lot of overpriced bracelets on a bush, but the Masai have always been an enterprising bunch.

  They're the only nomadic tribe in Kenya, the only tribe that doesn't farm, the tribe that uses cattle as a currency. Their staple diet is an emetic concoction of blood drained from a cow's jugular vein, mixed with milk and curdled with cow urine, but they eat Western food with relish. They grow up in primitive huts of twigs and mud, weatherproofed by dried dung, but the brightest children are packed off to Kenyan schools, even universities. They cling fast to traditions and abide by the counsel of tribal "elders" but are sophisticated talkers and pursue their own intellectual promotings.

  Rekero is a tented camp on the bank of the Telek river, near where the famous migration of several thousand wildebeest takes place every July/August. When I say tents, I mean big, grown-up, walk-around-inside-them, state-of-the-art tents, with two solid beds, lots of tribal rugs and an en-suite bathroom. There are drawbacks, of course: for a shower, you have to organise a chap to tip a bucket of hot water into a reservoir over your head, opened by a chain - and you've got just three minutes to wash and rinse all of your body. And you light your way everywhere by solar-powered hurricane lamp. But it's pretty minimal hardship. In this canvas Arcadia, wild animals prowl at will and aren't kept out of the camp. You're quite likely to find a hippo, a buffalo or a family of baboons gazing inquiringly at you. But don't panic, because the camp employs a dozen "night-watchmen" who'll accompany you from your tent to the communal dinner-table (and back), armed with a flashlight and a spear in case of attack. I was awakened two nights running by feral snorting noises from what seemed only three feet away, and accompanying cries of men trying to shoo it away. ("It was a hippo," they told me, "but not an angry one." Oh, cheers.)

  Around the table were a motley crew of travellers: Mark and Ali, a charming and funny honeymoon couple from Bury St Edmunds, Pam, a white-haired Kenya veteran who lapsed instinctively into Swahili when talking to the serving staff, Ray and Earle, a Dubai-based Canadian pilot and his grizzled frontiersman father, and Henry, a droll psychiatrist from the Bronx with a strong Runyon-esque accent and a beautiful second wife with the burlesque name of Ricky Fier (pronounced Fire). Hosting the evening were the extremely agreeable and easy-going young owners of Rekero, Gerard Beaton and his artist wife Rainee.

  It was Gerard's father, Ron, who started the Rekero camp in 1984. Ron is the classic English hunter, square of jaw, hairy of chest and no-nonsense of approach, whether to tribesmen or charging buffalo. His own father was Kenya's first park warden; it was he who looked after Princess Elizabeth when she was visiting Kenya and heard that her father had died. Ron has had his own brushes with celebrity - he once met Ernest Hemingway in his hunting period, and Lady Delamere, who was believed to have been behind the murder of her ex-lover Lord Erroll in the Happy Valley scandal. Ron used to take tourists on walking tours (armed with rifles) into the Ngurumans Hills. Now he leaves the running of Rekero to Gerard and devotes his efforts to running a school teaching young Masai students to be professional wildlife guides. The school is at the Koiyaki Masai Group Ranch, a massive 250,000-acre spread on the north border of the Mara, and the latest generation of guides - 23 of them - were about to receive their diplomas when I left Kenya.

  They represent the future, when the Masai who own the land will gradually get to run the place as a professional reserve (at present fewer than a fifth of the people employed in Mara tourism are Masai); when more Masai will start moving out of their temporary mud encampments and into houses with chairs and tables and metal roofs; when more of them will get a degree and become biochemists and agronomists and get a proper toehold in the Kenyan economy. By the end of my stay I'd become rather passionately concerned about them.

  But that's Kenya for you. You fly out there expecting to trot around like an old-fashioned colonial hunter, inspecting the fauna, basking in the past. Then you find the present chasing behind you like a three-headed hyena.