Day 3: Getting kitted up in Kitengela

I awoke on Thursday morning to find Impi grazing outside my window. Our eyes met in a moment of polite acknowledgement: she was having her breakfast, I was about to have mine. As we tucked into our omelettes and Impi munched on her grass, Enoch Number 2 told us that he had been walking early in the morning and saw some lions around the perimeter of the camp. This news injected an air of excitement into the group, which we promptly diffused with some morning yoga and reading. Vervet monkeys watched our feeble attempts to stretch as they chattered and cartwheeled through the trees, no doubt laughing about how much easier downward dog would’ve been for them.

If you look closely, you can see that this vervet is, in fact, laughing at us.

After a hearty lunch of vegetables and ugali (an extraordinarily dense and filling block of maize which is beloved by Kenyans and feared by the stomachs of Cambridge students), it was time to get down to business. We inspected our camera traps, and found them a little lacking. In total, there were supposed to be eight of them floating around somewhere, left over from the 2015 and 2017 trips. At this present moment, we had four on the table in front of us, and one of them appeared to be somewhat broken. The others, apparently, were being used by TWF, which we were actually quite pleased about. The hope was that members of the community would make use of the camera traps while we weren’t around, so this was a Good Thing. A more salient problem was our lack of memory cards. No memory cards, no photos.

Fortunately, Enoch had a plan: we would drive to Kitengela, the nearest town, and indulge in a bit of shopping. Oddly enough, our trip to Kitengela turned out to yield our best wildlife sightings so far. As we rumbled through the bush, we encountered not only the usual bevy of impala, zebra and wildebeest, but also a whole family of olive baboons bounding alongside us. Even better, we then caught sight of some heads that were above the treeline, instead of below the trees as heads usually tend to be. These heads belong to reticulated giraffes, and we were very pleased to see them.

The local giraffes valiantly failing in their attempts to hide from us.

Before long, we had left the wildlife behind, and found ourselves in the dusty chaos of Kitengela. Most of the population of the town seemed to be scattered along the big dirt road that we were doing our best to circumnavigate. Exactly what they were doing was unclear – some were walking up or down the road with varying degrees of urgency, others were standing around selling anything from flip flops to chickens, and others seemed to just be standing. Though this made for an eye-catching backdrop as we drove through Kitengela, it was also a stark reminder of how many Kenyans struggle with unemployment. The places that might’ve employed them didn’t look all that promising either, sporting names like ‘Arusha Meat Den’ and ‘Klub Uncle Dave’.

Doing our best to avoid reckless motorcyclists and errant chickens, we weaved through Kitengela until we arrived in a sort of shopping district, patrolled by gun-toting men in uniform for no reason that we could discern. Enoch acquired a fresh batch of memory cards for the camera traps, while several of us decided that we could abide the lack of WiFi no longer and bought some Kenyan SIM cards. This turned out to be a fairly complicated process in which Enoch had to provide ID and let the shopkeeper photograph his ever-bemused face, but the cards were dirt cheap and worked excellently. Satisfied with our acquisitions, the time had come to hightail it out of Kitengela, but the cars, trucks, motorbikes and goats in front of us had other ideas.

Stuck in such formidable traffic, we contented ourselves to make friends with the locals, who pointed and cackled at each sweaty mzungu (a Swahili word for white people that we had become very used to hearing) baking in the jeep. One man reached out a hand in greeting, hollering that I looked familiar and that he had seen me before, which was either the start of a scam or a wonderful reunion. The girls were propositioned with remarkable ardour, receiving phone numbers and even a mildly concerning offer of money from one particularly determined suitor. Feeling like minor celebrities, but also slightly like the butt of a big joke that everyone else was in on, we pulled our windows closed and at last made our escape from Kitengela.

The delighted faces of people with a fresh batch of memory cards.

At this point, I should probably say something about Mandela. No, not that one. Mandela was a friend of Enoch’s who joined us on the trip to Kitengela, and would be accompanying us for the next few days while Enoch attended to other business. Ah, Mandela. How to explain him? I have met few people as simultaneously thoughtful and irreverent as him. He had a devilish sense of humour, and wanted to know everything – our thoughts on religion, politics, vegetarianism, the death penalty. Sometimes he would say things that scandalised us, other times he would be insightful and profound. Most importantly, he was extremely knowledgeable about Kenyan wildlife, having spent years researching cheetahs in the Maasai Mara. He could identify every winged speck and distant lumbering shape, which would prove invaluable for our foray into Nairobi National Park the following day.

Stay tuned for that one – there might even be a lion.