Africa
Mountaineers, Harrowing Flights, Lions in Camp, and Interpersonal Safaris
After years of waffling about visiting my best friend in Arusha, Tanzania, I finally gathered the nerve in 2007. I’d missed Corbett’s brilliant and hilarious mind and his fierce penchant for adventure — a combination that ultimately led to his tragic and early death, but not before our mutual friend Soren and I joined him on journeys most people only read about.
Corbett — having been initiated into a local tribe in Kenya during an expedition in his teens, one of only a few Westerners to do this — had moved back to Africa after spending the time after college graduation pursuing a career in mountaineering while working at the Red Hook Brewery in Seattle. There he had grown weary of American decadence. Weathering one too many drunken “trustafarians” at the bar extolling their overblown rock-climbing achievements, what Corbett called “store-bought adventures,” he was ready to return to the real thing.
Ironically, his employer at the time, Mountain Madness, a climbing outfit based in Seattle, was very much in the “store bought adventure” business. The owner, Scott Fischer, was a lovely fellow of mind-boggling fitness, who I once witnessed doing multiple reps of two-finger pullups in an office doorway while answering a call on speaker phone; firmly obliterating any nostalgic notions I had of pipe-smoking, Sir Edmund Hillary-esque mountaineers. This was the ’90s, and the world of mountaineering had become big business, with opportunities for experienced mountaineers to guide eager (and wealthy) adventurers up the saddles of what had previously been unreachable summits.
Corbett’s boss took his operation to Everest and led expeditions up the world’s tallest mountain, which he performed expertly and successfully, until he perished tragically in an expedition. Corbett’s direction evolved to lead the charge up Mt. Kilimanjaro, which he continued for years, losing count at over 100 summits by the time I visited in 2007.
About six months before I flew to Kenya, my good friend Soren, another adventurer and close friend of Corbett, called me up and suggested we pay our expat buddy a visit. Soren had had his own mountain misfortunes, losing several of his fingers and most of his toes on an expedition a decade earlier, when he fell over 1,500 feet while climbing Tibet’s 25,243-foot mountain, Gurla Madhata.
Corbett flew to New Mexico after the accident, just in time to see Soren’s blackened, frost-bitten fingers fall off, despite extraordinary attempts to save them, including experimental treatments of imported snake venom. As Soren recovered, he and Corbett, alpine kindred spirits, kept in close touch, exchanging news of the mountaineering world, as well as updates on Corbett’s new safari business, which now included guiding big-game and bird hunting expeditions. As we discussed the trip, the prospect of Corbett with guns in hand gave us pause, but the fact of Africa’s unparalleled vastness serving as the stomping grounds for our open-range Texan eased our concern.
To be clear, when Soren and I met up at the airport bar in JFK, I had no plans to climb mountains or shoot anything in Africa, except perhaps with a Nikon. Corbett had been sending us increasingly worrying letters (people still wrote letters back then), as after marrying a striking and headstrong heiress of British and Italian colonial descent and fathering two exceptional children, domestic life had proven to be an expedition for which he was ill-equipped.
The idea was to get down there and assess the situation, maybe even provide some emotional support — a dubious notion, if you knew anything about Corbett’s reception to constructive criticism. Regardless of his presumed aversion to our prospective arm-chair psychoanalysis, we were long overdue for a visit, and so there we found ourselves, sipping overpriced tequila and waiting to board the 14-hour flight.
Soren had been to Kenya once before, but this was my first visit to Africa, and I was equal parts eager to spy a wildebeest and petrified that I might become big game lunch. Corbett had recently begun offering “walking safaris” — taking clients deep into the Serengeti bush to get a close-up experience with Africa’s biggest wild animals on foot — an option I was fully prepared to pass up.
Taking pictures of lions and warthogs with a telephoto lens from the comfort of a jeep sounded just right to me, preferably adjacent to a case of cool beer in the back seat. Being gored in the duodenum and flung into a tree after accidentally strolling between a mother elephant and her child sounded less great. We would soon discover, however, that in Africa, one is far less likely to be eaten by a wild animal than they are to die by man-made vehicle, an axiom that was reaffirmed relentlessly throughout our journey.
After leaving his Amex behind at the airport bar (an oversight that would haunt us throughout the trip), Soren and I stumbled onto the Boeing 787 and slept for most of the flight to Kenya. I woke up over Sudan, the size of which surprised me; it continued out the window for hours as we approached Kenya and finally landed at Kenyatta Airport.
Corbett was busy at home in Arusha, hosting family from Texas and guiding a Belgian duke on a week-long, bird-hunting expedition but had made reservations for us to spend the night at the House of Waine, a luxurious boutique hotel in the Nairobi suburb of Karen.
We hailed a taxi and were soon on our way through the city. The driver was pleasant, but the drive less so. Weaving in and out of what I can only describe as a free-for-all, dodging cars and pedestrians both with inches to spare, we passed Kibera, the largest urban slum in Africa. Our driver offered a tour of the neighborhood, which we politely declined. Perhaps this had been a draw for ethically challenged, post-colonial tourists, but Soren and I were eager to take off our shoes, shower, and get a drink.
Arriving at the hotel, our expectations were exceeded. The buttoned-up staff met us at the entry with passionfruit cocktails and led us to immaculate and air-conditioned, amenity-laden suites. The shoes came off, followed by a glorious shower, and dinner with drinks. If this had been Corbett’s attempt to calm my nerves about travel to Africa, it worked.
The next morning, we said a reluctant good-bye to the House of Waine’s robes and slippers and headed back into Nairobi. Our directive was to meet Corbett at Wilson, the old airport, and fly across the border to Tanzania on a chartered flight. His parents had been down for a visit, and we would be taking their seats on the return flight to Arusha.
If Kenyatta International Airport represented the JFK of Kenya, then Wilson was more like a used-car-lot version of LaGuardia. Established in 1929 with an investment by Florence Kerr Wilson, a wealthy British expat, the airport served as a hub for local aviation. Wilson included one of the first mail-carrier services in East Africa. It was headquarters for the British Royal Air Force, briefly, under the colonial-controlled government during WWII, after which it was returned to civil aviation.
The airport has since become the preferred choice for politician’s helicopters, bush pilots flying repurposed aircraft from the colonial era, and all manner of smuggling operations — groups willing to forgo modern comforts in exchange for the least conspicuous method of getting in and out of Kenya.
Sitting in the blazing morning sun on a runway-adjacent bench outside the check in area — a low-lying structure that more resembled a Louisiana bait shack than an airport lobby — “modern comfort” was certainly not a term that came to mind. Soren was in the bathroom, a brave move, surely, but necessitated by martini-overindulgence at Waine Manor, and I was looking out over the tarmac, waiting for our plane to arrive.
Most Airport runways are between roughly 2,500 to 4,000 meters in length. Wilson’s is about 1,500 meters, on a good day. Add to that fact that the airport’s elevation is 1,700 meters, and you’re in a situation where the safest way off the ground would be vertical takeoff in a rocket. No one had offered me a spacesuit, so I sat in the sun in my cargo shorts and looked out over the Band-Aid-sized landing strip’s horizon and prayed for an aircraft with at least ten seats.
Waiting for the plane, I remembered the antimalarial medication I was ordered to ingest and dug through my bag for the pills. Mefloquine (sold as Lariam) is known to have serious side-effects — including anxiety (which I already had in droves) and vivid, terrifying dreams, which indeed bore out that evening, but both were preceded by the waking nightmare that was about to unfold.
I was popping out one of the pills from its tin-foil casing and unscrewing the last of my American bottled water, when a uniformed airport cop wearing aviator sunglasses with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder rounded the corner and sat down next to me.
Not wanting to come off as aloof, I managed a quick nod and half-smile, respectfully acknowledging his presence, but trying to keep to myself.
You are American, yes? he asked, though I had yet to utter a word. Cargo shorts, I guess.
I would recreate the conversation if I remembered it, but I’ll spare you my attempt at a Kenyan cop’s dialogue. Essentially, the policeman (if he really was a policeman), made it clear to me “how very hard life is in Kenya” and repeated this point over, and over, and over again. It was almost as if he was trying to give me a message — one which I was getting very clearly. The only problem was that I had absolutely no money on me, except for $100 USD in a money belt that I was saving for emergencies, for which I wasn’t sure this yet qualified.
Either way, I figured if I was going to survive this trip, ponying up my rescue-cash to the first guy who hassled me for a bribe was a bad way to start.
Where the fuck was Soren, I thought, though I’m not sure what help he would have been. The card containing his travel funds was still somewhere behind the bar at JFK airport, and I’m pretty sure this guy wouldn’t have taken American Express.
I decided stonewalling was the best option, nodding my head in concerned agreement for the twentieth time, when I heard the faint sound of an aircraft engine. Staring skyward, I was tempted to close my eyes and pray, but the distraction of the arriving plane gave me an out from the shakedown. I announced my flight was here, wished the Kenyan Bad Lieutenant good luck, stood up, and took a few confident strides towards the runway.
The only real experience I had in judging the size of an aircraft was from looking at the big ones that come in and out of regular-sized airports, easily identified by the roar of their jet-engines. I was also aware that no jet of any size was likely to land on so short a runway, so when I spied the single propeller emerge from the clouds, I wasn’t too worried. Then the plane banked, and what I thought was the size and sound of a much larger aircraft several miles away, turned out to be what could only be described as a toy plane, almost directly overhead.
The Cessna 172 Skyhawk, a fixed wing, single-engine aircraft with four seats, is aptly named. It looks less like an airplane, and more like a large bird. An encouraging detail I did not know at the time was that, since the plane’s inception in 1955, more 172s had been manufactured and sold than any other plane on earth. Less encouraging was that had I known this I might have wondered if the Skyhawk I watched skip-landing along the runway in front of me might have been the first one off the assembly line.
As the weather-beaten Cessna taxied all of twenty feet from where it landed, I was considering asking the machine-gun cop if I could take him out for lunch, when Corbett emerged from the aircraft and Soren gave me a shove from behind.
Let’s go, Douglas!
Jesus, that’s a small plane.
Corbett’s parents welcomed us with a hug and a wink and left quickly to catch their flight back to the United States out of Kenyatta, while Soren and I dragged our bags out to the plane. The Belgian pilot was a diminutive fellow, which turned out to be a good thing, since Soren and I are both over 6 feet and had brought too much luggage.
A fuel truck trundled over and began refueling the Cessna while the pilot regarded our bags with open disdain. He paced the tarmac, looking back and forth to the plane and finally muttered something in French to the effect of “Fuck it,” heaving our gear into the hold.
A sufferer of chronic motion sickness since a child, I was ushered into the front seat next to the pilot, and Soren and Corbett climbed into the back. The pilot ran through his flight check, radioed the tower, and we began a long taxi out to the end of the short runway.
Ideally, Corbett, being shorter in stature, would have ridden in the front, incapable of inadvertently tapping the pedals with his shoes, which, to the furious consternation of the pilot, I began to do almost immediately. Begging forgiveness, I did my best to stop randomly adjusting the flaps with my feet, but my appalling French only made things worse.
Randomly trimming the plane’s trajectory, undoubtedly always a measure of poor copiloting, was particularly unhelpful when taking off in Nairobi. The Wilson Airport runway sat at an altitude of 5,546 feet (1,700 meters) above sea level, which is sort of like taking off in Denver — or in our case, with an overloaded four-seat Cessna — more like Kathmandu. The air is thin at that altitude, so the plane must work twice as hard to gain elevation, and our little Skyhawk struggled mightily.
With my face pressed against the tiny triangular vent window, sucking air to avoid throwing up, I could see the Belgian out of the corner of my eye, pumping his head in a “I think I can, I think I can” Little-Engine-That-Could mantra. We took over thirty minutes to climb to what was deemed a cruising altitude of 10,000 feet — probably about as high as we could get in that thing — a low enough altitude that I guessed if we got into trouble, we would at least be ensured much less velocity, plummeting to the Earth.
As if the thickness of actual air wasn’t enough to contend with, not long after takeoff, between my sucking of air from the window crack and apologizing for inadvertently pedal-dipping the plane into a dive with my size-13 boots, I noticed the pilot surveying the airspace with a constant head swivel. He looked like an over-caffeinated pigeon protecting a nest, whipping his head from side to side and looking through the windshield at the clouds above. Though not a bird himself, of course, his mind had been very much on the topic.
Raptors! Corbett spoke up from the back.
What! I asked, picturing scenes from Jurassic Park.
Birds! They get spooked by the engine sound and go into a dive. Sometimes they hit the prop. Big Birds!
Corbett’s easy smile was meant to reassure, but my Sesame Street brain pictured a panicked Big Bird dive-bombing our tiny plane and exploding in a shower of yellow feathers. I pressed my nose to the window vent, focused on my breathing, and kept my feet off the pedals.
Twenty minutes later, mercifully, we began our slow descent into Tanzania, with Mt. Kilimanjaro, the world’s tallest free-standing mountain, rising majestically in the distance. Corbett had guided folks to the summit so many times that he stopped counting, but to me, the 20,000 ft. peak looked insurmountable.
After a series of nauseating circling maneuvers, our Pygmy Belgian navigator landed the plane without incident. We unloaded the bags and after a string of negotiations and bribes with local officials — all conducted in Swahili, which Corbett spoke fluently — and then hefted our bags into a vintage, chop-top Toyota Land Cruiser and headed for town.
Arusha, imaginatively referred to as “A” by the locals, the third largest city in Tanzania, with a population around a half-million, sits near the base of Mt. Meru, the country’s 5th tallest mountain, and serves as a base of operations to the region’s Northern Safari Circuit. After years of working for hire, Corbett had recently established his expedition company, leading big-game and bird-hunting trips for wealthy foreigners, as well as photo-safaris for groups and families.
The Land Cruiser, while not exactly state-of-the-art, served as a perfect advertisement for his business, and driving across town, we looked the picture of post-colonial-era adventure. Corbett, wearing an unbuttoned linen shirt and sunglasses, driving with one hand and pointing out the sites to two oversized tourists dressed in conspicuous khaki getups, as if they had been teleported from a ’90s era Banana Republic window display.
The streets of Arusha were loosely organized chaos. As we drove to Corbett’s new city compound — he had recently separated from his wife, a third-generation British Italian expat and the daughter of a fabulously wealthy colonial-era big-game hunter and land baron — our jeep passed throngs of pedestrians crisscrossing the avenues, bearing what seemed impossible loads atop their heads.
We dodged and weaved through oncoming traffic that seemed oblivious to traffic rules. Trucks blew their horns at homemade, two-stroke-engine tractors and workers running with pull-carts and rickshaws, while cyclists with wooden milk crates filled with fruit or aluminum cans stacked high on the wheel racks crossed oversized traffic bumps.
Passing through the center of town and nearing the house, we entered a free-for-all, four-lane roundabout that circled the Arusha Clocktower, which, according to legend, is located exactly between Cairo and Cape Town and is considered the center point of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. The historical significance eluded me, however, as Corbett down-shifted, gears crunching, and whipped the Land Cruiser into the flow, only to abruptly pull to the shoulder in a hail of loose gravel. As the traffic honked and swerved around us on both sides, Corbett called out in Swahili to a gang of young children who immediately swarmed the jeep, jumping and yelling excitedly.
Apparently, someone had recently stolen the batteries out of two of his safari vehicles, and he was determined to find the thieves. The kids around our jeep were the neighborhood’s eyes and ears, and Corbett promised a reward if they took their Dickensian gang on a detective mission to root out the culprits. Soren and I, understanding little Swahili, had no idea this was the conversation at the time, and assumed this was some sort of freestyle philanthropy by our host on behalf of the town.
We left the clocktower roundabout and pulled up to Corbett’s compound a few minutes later. A guard let us through the gate into a high-walled courtyard, and we drove up to the front door of a sprawling four-bedroom, single-story concrete home. Greeting us from the stoop was the largest dog I have ever seen — a lumbering bull mastiff that must have weighed over 200 pounds. I can’t recall the dog’s name, but he resembled a mythical creature from a Tolkien novel.
After unloading our bags, we were led to our rooms, which were spacious but had no furniture, and more alarming, had square-cut holes in the walls for windows, without screens.
I had been given many warnings of the dangers of Africa, but none more so than suffering the bite of a malaria-carrying mosquito. Soren and I were taking the antimalarial medications — complete with their electrically vivid nightmares, some of which I recall to this day — but a failure to screen the windows seemed like a major oversight.
Corbett shrugged off my entomological concerns and blasted the room with a can of what I’m pretty sure was straight DDT, a practice that over the course of our visit, became a sort of twisted good-night routine.
Sadly, our host’s marriage had been on the rocks for a while, and our visit came at time of peak tension. Corbett’s wife was living outside of town in their first home, with the kids, and he had only recently relocated after being thrown out of the house for taking up with his current girlfriend, a concert violinist working for a local NGO’s music school. This reality accounted for the sparse furnishings, as well as a bohemian vibe to the scene, with a broad cast of eccentric characters flowing in and out of the house at all hours, from expat hunters and guides to local merchants and musicians.
If part of our motivation had been to come to town and help our buddy get the train back on course, it soon became clear that whatever normalcy we had hoped to restore had left the station long ago.
We spent the first evening catching up over (many) Tuskers, the aptly named regional beer, as a cast of “musicians” swarmed through the compound as if it were the African version of a 2nd Avenue subway turnstile. Corbett, a prolific poet, and not so prolific guitarist, was always trying to keep a band together, and Arusha was no exception. The current iteration, The Rusty Strings Band, had current and prospective members stopping by throughout the evening, dropping off amps and guitars or just sitting down for a beer and haphazardly running through the latest unfinished ballads at full volume. When the industrial hootenanny mercifully shut down around 2 a.m., Soren and I were exhausted. Corbett led us to our rooms, blasted the air with his unlabeled fire-engine-red can of DDT, and explained that tomorrow we would pick his kids up in the morning for a visit to the local snake park.
I was excited to meet his children, both in elementary school, as he had been the first of our college friends to start a family, which fascinated both Soren and I, who could not imagine parenting, on any level. We said good night and despite my anxiety over mosquitoes, and gazing up at an enormous gecko crawling across the ceiling directly overhead, I slept.
It turns out that mixing malaria medication with jetlag and a half dozen beers is a bad idea. The pharmaceutically-induced nightmares were next-level — a combination of Steven King’s most horrifying imagination in a Jacob’s-Ladder-type horror film about murderous geckos and giant mosquitoes, all set to a terrifying soundtrack of rampaging wild dogs.
My own screams woke me (and the house) at four in the morning, and I bolted upright in my sleeping bag, drenched in sweat.
To my horror, the nightmare’s soundtrack somehow grew louder after I awoke, with the howling and growling wolf-pack nearing the back of the house just outside my windowless window.
Corbett, in what turned out to be a rare, if not singular occasion of comforting host-mode, appeared at my door in a sarong and quietly explained that it was “just the local pack of wild dogs,” and though they roamed through the neighborhood nightly, they mostly kept to the trash-filled arroyos between houses. He assured me there was nothing to worry about, blasted the room with a fresh plume of industrial insecticide, then left me to the dogs, lizards, and mosquitoes of my dreams.
In the (later) morning I awoke to the pains of a Tusker-infused, anti-malarial-drug hangover, augmented by what sounded like two slowly moving city buses brushing against each other. Corbett’s years-long struggle with electric slide guitar continued.
I drew myself up to look out my window and saw no dogs as the sun rose over the neighborhood. The housemaid came to my doorway and alerted me to breakfast. The coffee was strong, and an excellent meal of eggs, toast, and a prolific amount of local fruit proved restorative.
Corbett’s son and daughter arrived, and we all piled into the Land Cruiser for a trip out to the snake park. I had never been to a snake park. I didn’t really know they were a thing, but apparently this place just outside Arusha was a “can’t miss destination” and one of the children’s favorite spots.
As we drove along the dusty roads outside of town, Corbett’s son served as tour guide, pointing out and explaining the sites in detail. His father seemed genuinely pleased to have his buddies hanging out with his children, and we felt the same. It must have been a welcome respite from the recent family stresses.
To be fair — personality defects aside — raising kids in Africa presented unique challenges. On the way to the snake park, for example, we did a drive-by of the international elementary school, and when I asked about the conspicuous lone gravestone on the front lawn, his son lamented as a matter of fact: Oh, that’s James. He was a good lad.
It turned out James had been bitten by a black mamba during recess and died on the spot. The irony seemed absent as we drove on to the snake park, which turned out to be a legit wildlife conservancy, complete with its own cantina. After touring the many snakes and reptiles and demonstrating how to soothe baby alligators by rubbing their bellies, Corbett regaled us with safari tales over a round of Tuskers at the bar.
The next morning, having recovered from jet-lag and feeling we had a general idea of how things work in Tanzania, Soren and I offered to give our chaperone a break. His phone had been ringing non-stop since we arrived, and his professional business of guiding, along with the family chaos, seemed in need of attention. Corbett suggested we take one of his trucks over to Arusha National Park and make the drive up Mt. Meru, Tanzania’s fifth highest peak. Eager to provide our friend some much-needed space, Soren and I agreed, and loaded up our daypacks for a proper excursion.
Soren, despite the catastrophe in Nepal, was still a seasoned mountaineer, and I had years of experience hiking the American West, so the prospect of using a vehicle to summit a mountain was not daunting to either of us. There were other reasons to be cautious, however, which Corbett outlined as he added oil the SUV and gave directions.
You can’t drive anywhere in East Africa without coming across armed police. Usually this consists of two or three cops sitting in chairs on the side of the road with machine guns across their laps. These makeshift “checkpoints” are sometimes there for legit reasons, but often primarily exist to liberate unwitting tourists and expats from their cash.
Corbett, assuming this might happen to two lanky white dudes in an SUV, suggested that if we were waved over by police, instead of pulling to the shoulder, heartily return the gesture, as if you’ve known these cops your whole life. If they don’t fire their guns in the air, or throw out a spike strip, just smile, wave, and keep driving. The cops will be annoyed, but they’re usually too lazy to get in their truck and chase you down.
Corbett’s second bit of advice concerned his 1995 Nissan Patrol, which he swore, after years of churning through vehicles in the rugged African terrain, was the only truck he could manage to keep in one piece. He explained that Meru was 12,000 ft in elevation, so the Nissan would need frequent rests in order not to overheat. He packed us extra quarts of oil and suggested adding the oil first to cool the engine, should we run into trouble.
Lastly, he checked the tire pressure on the spare and showed us where to find the jack, though from the sheer size of the off-road tires, we couldn’t imagine what it would take to end up with a flat. Soren got behind the wheel, and I hopped in to ride shotgun with an old-fashioned road map in hand.
Driving in Africa is often a bit of a free-for-all, and Arusha was no different. Steering from the left side of the road, Soren adjusted to shifting the Patrol with his one remaining finger — the thumb of his left hand, actually — navigating to elude random homemade tractors, rogue pedestrians, stray dogs, and enormous speedbumps that seemed to appear without rhyme or reason, while I called out directions from my copilot seat.
Arusha National Park is about an hour’s drive west of town, so our goal was to enter the park by mid-morning, then drive up to 8,000 ft. to the Kitoto View Point below the summit, and either hike to the top from there, or just chill out and take in the views.
We managed to navigate our way out of the city and were cruising along Nelson Mandela Road when I spied a roadside police checkpoint up ahead in the distance.
Get ready to wave, I suggested.
I don’t see a spike strip, he observed.
We approached the machine-gun-toting cops on the shoulder and one of them indeed raised a hand to wave us over, but we never gave him the chance, smiling and waving back vigorously, as Soren kept his foot on the gas. For a moment, the cop looked pissed, but not enough to pursue, and the law-enforcement diminished in the mirrors.
An hour later we entered Arusha National Park, and after paying a fee at the entrance, drove under the historic fig tree archway and began the steep drive up the mountain. The winding road, often no more than a one-lane track, was deeply rutted after seasonal rains, and after relentlessly bouncing along, half-way up, Soren reluctantly gave up the wheel.
Excited to drive, I took over the Patrol, but soon found it nearly impossible to keep the truck from haphazardly lunging out of the tracks and towards the jungle. Soren implored me to “find the middle of the road,” but it was no use, and a few minutes later, amidst his panicked shouting, we were hung up on a roadside log, with the rear right wheel off the ground and spinning freely.
We got out and surveyed the situation, which seemed dire. Even if we tried to raise the truck and rock it over back onto the road, there was no solid ground to set the jack, and we had yet to pass another soul. I took a walk up the track to see how far it might be to the summit, but there were bends in the road and it was impossible to gauge the distance. Worse, our cell phones had no service, and the vintage Patrol, while sturdy and reliable, had few buttons on the dash, and certainly none that read “On-Star,” even if we did somehow find a GPS signal.
Feeling guilty for my paltry off-road driving skills, I stared into the woods — perhaps looking for a sign from God — and caught two eyes staring back at me through the trees. It took a moment to register, as this was not an animal I thought inclined to high altitudes, or jungles, for that matter, but looking me over with a cold stare from about 25 meters away was an enormous cape buffalo.
This was the first of the “Big Five” African animals spotted on our trip, and as they normally travel in herds, I was stunned to see it alone up on the mountain. I called Soren over quietly, and he advised us to back away toward the truck, as this guy was likely an older bull, cast out by the herd, and grumpy, defensive, and prone to attack.
Great, I thought, after surviving a tiny plane with dive-bombing raptors, death-defying traffic, anti-malarial meds, nighttime packs of roving wild dogs and roadside machine-gun wielding cops, I have driven a truck off the road in the middle of nowhere and will trampled and gored by an irritated, elderly, sub-Saharan African bovine.
Luckily, while I was about to lose a staring contest with the Cape Buffalo (I was unaware of their terrible eyesight), a road-maintenance crew appeared from below with several large trucks and within minutes, had us winched out of the gulley and back on the road.
Soren took the wheel for the rest of the way up, but by the time we reached Kitoto View Point, the staging area for mountaineers on their way to the summit, our trusty Nissan Patrol’s engine was severely overheating. We added fresh motor oil to cool the engine and took a moment to gather our wits and take in the view, which was spectacular.
This was my first proper glimpse of the majestic African landscape people write about. A family of giraffes grazed in a nearby meadow, just above the tree line, with thick jungle blanketing the mountainside down to the valley and grasslands below. Birds of prey circled overhead and the only sound was the wind (other than the idling Nissan Patrol, which we were afraid to turn off).
Not entirely unlike mountaineers who have reached a summit, only to hastily acknowledge the moment before quickly descending to safety, we soon decided it was time to go. We were confident that pointing the truck downhill for most of the way back would be to our advantage, but still, any chance of being waylaid in the jungle as darkness set in was a risk we were keen to avoid.
Soren took the wheel and soon we were bumbling down the jungle track towards the valley and the park exit. The road crew had packed up and left, and we passed not a single soul on the drive down. I kept a keen eye for the cape buffalo, but he had moved on as well, leaving me to an occasional glimpse of an unidentified exotic bird taking flight or an anonymous monkey leaping from tree limb to tree limb as the sound of our truck startled the wildlife.
Whatever wonder and solace I took in being on our own in the African jungle soon gave way, however, to the reality of actively being alone in an African jungle, shielded only by the thin fuselage of a relatively unreliable Japanese SUV.
A few minutes after passing under the fig tree arch, and meandering along the gravel road through the valley, Soren noticed the Nissan pulling to the right. Unlike on the jungle track, there were no mud-dried ruts to navigate, so there was either something wrong with the steering, or God-forbid, we had a flat tire. We drove for another minute, hoping, as one does, that the situation would somehow correct itself, but the truck refused to straighten, so Soren pulled off to the side and we got out for a look.
God turned out to be open to all possibilities. Rounding the back fender, we could see clearly our enormous, off-road, rear right tire was indeed flat, undoubtedly strained beyond its limits by my bush-league mountainside driving. Soren swore, and I stared at the tire in disbelief.
Shit.
As part of my brain registered the reality of the flat, the rest of my mind failed to grasp the remainder of reality. While Soren dutifully searched the truck for a lift-jack, I stood alongside the truck, scanning the horizon for another vehicle — perhaps a passerby on their way to the store for the newspaper or a gallon of milk, like back home in the states — but Soren, jack in hand, burst my bubble.
No one’s coming, he deadpanned.
Yeah, seems unlikely.
We’re on a dirt road at dusk in the African savannah. It’s literally the middle of nowhere. Help me change this tire.
I joined him on the back wheel, and we raised the truck with a thousand twirls of the factory-issue jack, which was still not quite enough. The road was uneven, and we had to dig out under the tire to free up the wheel, an activity which Soren was engaged in, dutifully, while I took a break and returned to the cab for a bottle of water.
At least we won’t die of thirst, I thought, as I gulped the lukewarm water, still hoping to spy a park ranger in a Land Cruiser, coming to our rescue.
Roadside assistance failing to appear, I remained unconvinced that help wasn’t just around the corner and strolled around the front of the truck to have a look southward. Approaching from the opposite shoulder of the road was a scene straight out of Planet of the Apes. A large family of baboons, about twenty-five, ranging from large males to mothers with babies clinging to their backs, was advancing towards our position.
What I did next I’m not proud of, but in fairness, this was not a situation I had ever expected, or had even read about. In an overt act of self-preservation, I ninja-walked backwards around the front of the truck and deftly stepped up into the cab, gingerly pulling the door closed.
Click.
Soren, still flat on his stomach and digging away around the wheel, must have heard the door or felt the truck’s weight shift.
Dude, what are you doing?
Hey man, what’s the protocol with baboons?
Why?
Well, I don’t want you to panic, but there’re baboons out here.
Where?
Everywhere.
Soren lowered his voice to a whisper-hiss.
What do you mean! How many?
I counted at least twenty, but aside from one or two that had paused to look about and sniff the air, they didn’t seem all that interested in our truck.
Well, there’s a lot of them, but they’re crossing the road on their way somewhere, so I think if you just lay low, we’ll be good.
We! You’re inside the truck.
Yeah, well, they can see me, man. I’m pretty sure they haven’t spotted you, yet.
Experiencing a legit monkey-stalking is uniquely unnerving. Unlike being advanced on by dogs, an angry cat, or even a curious bear, baboons’ faces share a human element — which was clear in one of the larger males, who stopped in the middle of the road to give me a bone-chilling stink-eye through the windshield.
If I’d had a newspaper, I would have raised it to cover my face and feign a read, like back on the subway in New York. Instead, I navel gazed.
Soren asked how things looked, and I told him to lay still while I counted to thirty in my head, praying to avoid a King Kong action sequence that I was certain would not end in our favor. Somehow, despite this being a game-hunter’s vehicle, we had no weapons on us, and even if we had, I was an awful shot, and Soren was lying face-down under the truck.
Corbett — often prescient and unsettling with his tales — had recently relayed a baboon encounter he witnessed outside a bar. A drunken tourist, unable to wait for the bathroom, had staggered outside to relieve himself in the tall grass and foolishly antagonized a nearby male baboon. Before he could unzip his pants, the baboon was tossing the man about like a hand puppet, and when his buddy ran to assist, both were instantly flung through the air like rag-dolls in the grip of an angry child.
Patrons from the bar heard the commotion, rushed outside, and the hunters among them — knowing that even a juvenile baboon’s arms are stronger than a professional footballer’s legs — reluctantly pulled their pistols and shot the animal dead.
Fortunately for us, by the time I counted to thirty and looked up, the baboon had lost interest and moved on. I watched as the remaining members of the clan trickled past in twos and threes, on their way west towards the jungle’s edge and the setting sun.
Eventually, after digging out the rear wheel and wrenching the spare onto the truck, we were on our way. Soren drove (slowly), and I thought about how, despite our good friend’s profession, we hadn’t been given even a rudimentary pamphlet for our visit.
A short chapter, titled Baboon Encounters, would have been nice, but in fairness, any such guidebook for people like me would have required volumes.
Instead, Corbett’s approach, akin to his style back in the states, was to set worry aside, count on a fair amount of luck, and maintain a sense of humor, without which, life in East Africa would have been insurmountable.
The following morning, after finding a new spare tire, all three of us piled in the Patrol and drove to Ol-Tukai, a nature conservancy Corbett was stewarding, where he had plans to build a lodge for photo and hunting safaris. The region was on the outskirts southwest of Arusha, and the drive across town, like much of the urban scene in Arusha, was equal parts illuminating and depressing.
We passed throngs of pedestrians along the road, with everything from cardboard boxes and milk crates to stacks of wood or straw, piled high upon their heads. Some of the women were dressed in brightly colored sarongs and led children along the dirt shoulders that doubled for sidewalks.
Even though we looked disheveled, and our vehicle was by no means state-of-the-art, there was no concealing our tall, white, touristic identities, which drew noticeably icy stares. Soren seemed unaffected, but I was beginning to take it personally.
Corbett chimed in, pointing to what appeared to be a sleeping dog, aside the road.
See that?
The dog?
Yeah, he continued, as a woman led her child, stepping over what, as we drew closer, was clearly a carcass.
That dead dog will be there in three days when we come back through.
I never asked, but I’m pretty sure the point he was making was that the looks we were receiving were not simply a distaste for entitled tourists, but a paralyzing fatigue from life in general. There was no public works budget to speak of in Arusha, and judging from the size of the pack of wild dogs rumbling through town at night, folks were unlikely to be sympathetic to the loss of a single animal. The thousand-yard stare we were seeing in folks’ eyes was a tiredness that went beyond envy or contempt. It was the observable manifestation of a basic defense-mechanism to what was for many, an exhaustingly shitty set of circumstances.
On the way out of town we soon experienced another example of this desperation firsthand, but it didn’t play out as one might expect.
We pulled into a gas station and were approached by an older woman hustling beaded necklaces. Soren and I had no use for her wares, but might have entertained the notion, had she not been so overly aggressive with her sales pitch — thrusting the necklaces in our face and barking at us.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
After a minute or so of this relentless sales pitch, Soren, never one to play the victim before, had had enough, and thrust his fingerless hands into the woman’s face, showing that despite the expensive sunglasses, his own life had not been so rosy. The fast-talking panhandler took one look at his injuries, and seeming genuinely horrified by his wounds, begged forgiveness and moved on with her wares.
Leaving the city behind, we headed south for Ol-Tukai, Corbett’s conservancy area alongside Lake Manyara, an alkaline body of water just east of the Rift Valley. The road was surprisingly good, I commented, and Corbett told us about a recent safari to a remote region in the bush.
Their group had been driving along a dusty dirt track for hours, when out of nowhere, they bumped up onto a perfectly paved road, extending for miles. After several minutes on this pristine lone highway, the road ended as abruptly as it began, returning them to the gravel track, with no clear visible indication of why the road had existed in the first place.
It turns out that Chinese investors, having purchased the rights to mine in the area, identified a particular mountain as rich in rare earth minerals, built a runway to the front door, then proceeded to excavate the entire mountain, leveling it to ground. When they were finished, the mountain was gone, but they left the road — a stark reminder and modern attestation to the centuries-old routine plunder of the African continent.
There were no mountains near us on the way to Ol-Tukai. We exited the highway onto our own dirt track, and after some time, left the roads entirely and cut across the bush — testing the limits of the trusty Nissan Patrol.
One complication of off-road driving in Africa is the inevitable interaction with not only wildlife, but sometimes with what they leave behind in their wake, and it wasn’t long after we cut across the meadows toward Lake Manyara that the truck began to bump and bounce violently. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the relentless jarring as our heads careened off the roof and our arms flew up and down in our laps as if gesturing, Who knows? in unison.
Corbett, unfazed, whipped the wheel back and forth with one hand, while fielding venomous texts from his wife with the other. Despite our best efforts to be a calming influence, their relationship had not improved. Corbett clapped the phone shut and tossed it in the glove box, regaining control of the wheel in earnest with both hands.
Damn elephants! he shouted, explaining that after a recent rain, a herd had come through the area — the sheer weight of their footfalls leaving pothole-sized divots in the ground, which had hardened over a few days — and we were driving over them.
The trees on either side of the meadow also bore signs of elephant — branches stripped of all vegetation, and saplings trampled as if a hurricane had come through. The sheer destruction visited upon the land by the herd gave me new respect for these animals I had seen only at the zoo, flapping their ears at flies or sucking up gallons of water and flipping their trunks to the sky.
Mercifully, the bouncing ceased a few minutes later, and we pulled into a clearing alongside the lake, where we were to make camp. Soren and I stumbled out of the truck and unloaded our gear, grateful to be free of the Nissan, but wary of our exposure so far out in the bush.
Any fool can be uncomfortable in the bush, Corbett boasted, and directed his porters, including one lovely Maasai gentleman named Ole-Maria, to get to work setting up camp.
To call our living quarters “tents,” would be a gross understatement. “Luxury yurts,” would be more appropriate, as canvas pavilions were constructed over raised platforms, complete with washing stations, portable lanterns, mosquito netting, and proper mattresses. A mess area soon materialized, complete with a gourmet table-spread, including fresh mangoes, watermelon, grapes, cheese, salamis, baguettes, and a fully stocked bar.
A separate table was set aside, loaded with an array of guns and ammunition. We had no plans to hunt on the trip, but Corbett kept an arsenal on hand to deal with menacing animals (including humans), and for us, a recreational shooting range.
Ole-Maria, carrying embers from the porters’ small nearby cook fire, got to work building up a bonfire, and we cracked Tuskers, ate dinner, and proceeded to shoot cans and bottles downrange towards the lake. Corbett’s girlfriend strolled in the background, practicing violin concertos and providing the soundtrack as the sun set on an East African surreality all its own.
When folks describe what it’s like to visit Africa, they often fail to mention the bugs.
I had grown up in Maine, where black flies, yellowjackets, and mosquitoes can be maddening, but nothing could have prepared me for the entomological experience of the Tanzanian countryside.
I used the latrine before going to sleep and left a battery-powered light on for a couple of minutes outside my tent. I came back to a wash-basin full of more insects than I could count — beetles, stick-bugs, moths, spiders, and other insects I had never seen in a book, all engaged in an impromptu, porta-sink pool-party.
I slipped inside my tent, and pushing the bugs from my mind, prepared for sleep. Dizzy from the endless supply of Tuskers and exhausted from the excitement and heat of the day, I crawled into my sleeping bag and passed out.
I slept alone, but between the electric Mefloquine dreams and being subconsciously aware that only a thin layer of canvas separated me from the African wild, sleep was fitful. I almost woke up sometime in the early morning, hearing what I could have sworn was a horse, grazing and huffing outside the tent. Half asleep, I figured it was a gazelle, or maybe even a warthog wandering through the camp, and fell back to sleep.
I woke in the early morning with a furious itch, and removing my shirt, found a running line of blisters across my chest. I showed Corbett the red trail of ulcerated boils, and he gave me his assessment.
You’re gonna die.
I protested, but weakly, after spotting a sleeping bag next to the remains of our fire and realizing that Corbett had slept outside his tent, fully exposed to the elements, animals, and insects.
Coffee in hand, shirtless and barefoot, he found my worry amusing but dug through his bags and tossed me a tube of Benadryl, for which I was grateful, and I applied it liberally while the team sorted out our gear and supervised breakfast.
Having calmed my itching chest, I threw on a shirt and walked behind the tent to pee, where I spotted a small monkey at the base of a tree in the distance. He looked right at me, with a face so profoundly human, that when he scampered off into the trees, I followed without a second thought. I was tracking the little booger for a few minutes, calling out to him as though he were a golden retriever, when Corbett came up behind and beaned me in the shoulder with a rock.
Ow!
What are you doing out here?
I was following a monkey.
You can’t wander off like that, man. It’s not safe.
Why?
You didn’t hear the lions last night?
Seriously?
A pride came through camp around 2 a.m.
I want a shotgun.
Probably not a bad idea.
Day two in the bush found us surveying the conservancy by jeep, bouncing along the dried riverbeds, crisscrossing the bush, and skirting Lake Manyara, which, while an alkaline lake and not swimmable, was stunningly beautiful, with copper and magenta surface reflections framing the towering Great Rift Valley bluffs as they met the horizon. Giant flocks of pelicans flanked the shoreline where jackals patrolled for breakfast.
Corbett was in a good mood as we turned inland and slowly crisscrossed the bush, spotting elephants, warthogs, Grant’s gazelles, and a rare serval cat, which I was lucky enough to photograph.
At one point, bouncing down through a dry riverbed, we nearly got the Patrol stuck, which beforehand had seemed impossible, but as the wheels dug in and we spun gravel and drove up and out the other side, Corbett pointed to a couple of sizeable man-made holes just beyond the river’s edge, where just such an unfortunate event had occurred only days earlier.
Corbett had been surveying the area, planning a sightseeing route for our visit, when the SUV got bogged down to the axels in quicksand. After several attempts to spin out of the muck, they had given up on the four-wheel drive, and alone with the one vehicle and nowhere near a sizeable tree to attach the hydraulic winch, employed an emergency tactic to free the truck.
This last-ditch method involved digging what’s known as a “ground anchor” — a tactic even seasoned off-road enthusiasts refer to almost mythically, as the vast majority have never been impossibly stuck in a location truly as remote as the African Bush.
The process involves digging a deep hole (at least two meters deep), wedging the spare tire into the hole sideways — preferably against any rocks or roots that can help brace the wheel — then looping a tow-strap through the center of the wheel and running it low along the ground in a shallow trench back to the vehicle’s hydraulic winch. This can only work, of course, if you drive a truck that doesn’t have the spare tire set beneath the carriage, and the Patrol’s was fixed to the tailgate, so Corbett was fortunate in that respect.
After hours of digging and positioning the wheel deep in the hole, they buried their “anchor,” set the strap, and fired up the winch — which after about a minute, and moving the truck a few inches, popped the tire sky-high out of the ground in a hail of sand and gravel, leaving the Patrol firmly stuck to the axels.
I’d like to imagine they looked around for a moment, as I had in Meru, hoping somehow that a tow-truck might magically appear on the horizon, but they had been running safaris for years, so they just picked a new spot and got to digging. Hours later, the second attempt was successful, and they drove back to camp, bloodied and exhausted.
Luckily for us, the ground had dried considerably since the ground-anchor debacle, and we coasted up and out of the riverbed without incident.
Soren and I spent the remainder of the safari “hunting” with our cameras — the goal of capturing as many “multi-species” shots as possible. A photo of a warthog above its den was great, but a warthog flanked by a gang of mongoose with a monkey looking on from the tree above was a keeper.
The next day, on a surely inadvisable morning stroll, I stumbled upon a hippo grazing along a riverbank — rare to spot outside the water — and was amazed at its agility and grace as it spotted me and took a running leap back into the river with a thunderous splash. I was too stunned to think to grab my camera, but the scene is burned in memory.
In the late afternoon, despite being feeling worn out, and longing for a lazy noodle on the guitar around the fire, Soren convinced me to go for a game drive. I reluctantly agreed, mostly because we had an unspoken rule not to leave the other alone for any amount of time on this adventure, but also because we had yet to photograph a leopard, and this was likely our last chance.
Ole Maria drove the truck, while Soren and I bounced around in the back, scanning the dusk for a glimpse of the big cat, maybe nestled in a tree, or emerging from the tall grass in the distance. The sound of our vehicle all but assured there was no chance of spotting a leopard, but Tuskers in hand and oblivious, we were enjoying the breeze and taking in the spectacular scenery.
Five minutes into the drive, however, something bit me on the back of my neck. I slapped hard with my hand and came away with a large black fly in my palm, like the horseflies back home in Maine, but the bite was worse. Before I could ask the driver what species this little bastard was, another one nailed me on the thigh, immediately followed by two more on my chest, then scalp.
These suckers are vicious, I called out to Ole Maria.
Tsetse!
Oh no.
I grew up reading about tsetse flies, and none of the literature (or legends) were encouraging. Like the dreaded “lockjaw” that would inevitably come from contracting tetanus from stepping on a rusty nail in the barn, the dreaded sleeping sickness from the bite of a tsetse fly was the stuff of nightmares. I was trying to recall the likelihood of imminent death, but it was impossible to focus, as bite after bite ensued, causing me to flail about like a swarmed sub-Saharan carwash inflatable tube-man.
Soren was confused, as he wasn’t being attacked, and implored me to chill out as I screamed and whacked about, arms tiring from the assault. Ole, however, eventually responded to my desperate pleas and turned the truck around for home, and when we pulled into camp minutes later, I ran for to the campfire and waded into the smoke.
Corbett emerged from his tent, and I explained the situation. He looked at the lavender linen shirt he had lent me and grimaced.
Tsetse hunt on the ultraviolet light spectrum. That color was probably not the best choice.
Seriously?
It’s the only spare shirt I had.
Indignant, but too tired to complain, I took off the shirt and sat by the fire. At least my bare skin more resembled the time-honored beige of traditional safari wear, which, considering the tsetse fly, was likely popular for more than fashion sense.
The next day, while sad to end our safari, we left the bush and headed back to town for a proper shower and a change of clothes. On the way into Arusha, however, while circling the clock tower roundabout, Corbett’s truck was again hailed by the gang of juveniles, and spotting one of his young agents — the kid who he’d tasked with the recon mission days earlier — we pulled over for an update on the whereabouts of his stolen truck batteries.
The thieves were nearby, it turned out, so instead of making the turn for home, Corbett popped the glovebox to retrieve his 9mm pistol, and we drove off, with his Tanzanian Oliver Twist directing the way from my lap in the front seat.
Desperate to avoid an international incident, Soren and I offered to replace the batteries, but Corbett would have none of it, and as we rolled up on the house, he leapt from the truck, kicked open the door, and emerged moments later, leading a stunned teenager by his earlobe down the drive, carrying the two stolen batteries.
I jumped into the back seat and the thieving teen took my place while Corbett drove, pistol in his waistband, berating the culprit in a hail of Swahili.
By the time we entered the compound, things had calmed down considerably, and while my understanding of Swahili was pathetic, it was clear that they had come to an agreement. I assumed the boy would be punished, and he was, but not in a way we expected.
Corbett — perhaps understanding the plight of a young man trying to get ahead in Tanzania as well as his own vulnerability and exposure as a privileged, white employer in Arusha — instead of calling the police, simply gave the kid a job doing maintenance on the vehicles and around the compound. The money he would earn long-term far outweighed any quick cash and personal risk he would incur from robbing his neighbors — even gringos from Texas, and Corbett knew it was better to cultivate an ally, than to create an enemy for life.
Corbett had been visiting and living in East Africa since he was himself a teenager and understood the troubled colonial history and socioeconomic realities of the region better than most. In addition to taking the time to learn the language fluently, he had deep ties to the community, and at the time of our visit, employed locals both domestically and within his safari and hunting operations. Despite his struggle to be successful in business, he was magnanimous, kind-hearted, and philanthropic to a fault, and hiring this wayward kid was one example.
We spent our last couple days in Tanzania with a day trip to Ngorongoro Crater — a wildlife sanctuary in the base of a giant caldera on the Tanzania-Uganda border — which, if possible, should not be missed in one’s lifetime.
In the span of a single morning, we photographed lions, rhinos, hyenas, hippos, jackals, enormous flocks of flamingoes, and yet another rare serval cat that walked right up to our feet, emerging from the tall grass, weary from a failed hunt.
Returning to Arusha in the evening, Corbett took us to a couple of local bars where we played pool and drank Tuskers, followed by a meal of foil-wrapped barbecued fish from street vendors, which had I been on my own, I never would have touched, but turned out to be excellent.
The day before we left, a “friend” of Corbett’s arrived at the house in a rush, seemingly on the run from someone, or perhaps the police. Whoever this guy was, he was in trouble, as he immediately took off his clothes and borrowed a very different set. There was some talk about passports, then a car pulled into the driveway and the dude pulled a hat down over his head and was gone, tires screeching, headed for the border with one of Corbett’s drivers.
I’d like to say this was exciting to witness, but “petrifying” would be a better descriptor. I had no idea if the house was about to be stormed by the cops, or worse, shot up by some local gangsters out for revenge. Getting on the wrong side of the law in a foreign country is never a good thing, but the prospect of a jail cell in Arusha seemed particularly grim.
With all of this in mind, when it came time to plan our own departure for the next morning, Soren and I felt like the time had come to get out of there.
Corbett was crestfallen to see us leave, but not too paralyzed by sadness to drive me to an ATM and encourage me to withdraw the cash limit on my bank cards and hand it over, which irked me at first, but when I considered what tourists usually paid for two-week safaris — even those as unorthodox and perilous as ours had been — the fee seemed fair.
Soren, recalling the ground anchor story, bought a set of new tires for the Patrol, along with a tow-strap and heavy-duty lift-jack, gifting it all to our buddy for at least some vehicular piece of mind while out in the bush, as the safari of his personal life remained a challenge.
Recalling the harrowing Cessna flight, and dreading a return on the same aircraft, when Corbett offered the driver service our fugitive guest had taken earlier, I leapt at the opportunity.
Soren ended up at the airport, where I later learned, instead of a 4-seater Cessna, he boarded a decent-sized commuter plane to Nairobi, which took under an hour.
I, on the other hand, said my good-byes to my best friend (and his giant dog), and piled into the front seat of a weathered Honda Civic, driven by a kid who looked no older than fourteen. The bumpy road out of town was bad enough before we stopped to pick up three more passengers: a dude with his girlfriend that looked like a serious criminal, followed by a strung-out Kenyan, who looked like he had been lost in the jungle for a month.
As our newly formed Honda-clown-car headed for the two-lane highway north to the border, the sun began to set, and visibility diminished. Still, I couldn’t understand why the road was so damn dark until we stopped for gas and I got out to stretch.
Rounding the gas pump to the front of the car, I saw that although our driver’s headlights were indeed on and working, they were angled straight down, beautifully illuminating about three feet of road. When I mentioned this to the teenage driver, he laughed.
Back on our way, it wasn’t ten minutes later, squinting to scan the road ahead, that I swore I saw something. I told the driver to slow down, but he ignored me until I screamed.
Stop the car!
He braked hard, skidding to a stop, belly-high and inches from a perfectly road-grey camouflaged donkey standing in the middle of the highway.
Our headlights barely lit up its knees, and if we hadn’t stopped, that donkey would’ve decapitated the Honda and us with it.
The driver laughed again, although at least this time it was more of a nervous laughter. As we drove around the donkey and kept on (more slowly) towards the border, I considered the prospective obituary headline.
40-year-old American tourist killed by wild ass collision on the outskirts of Arusha, TZ.
In Africa, you’re unlikely to die from a lion or even a hippo. Far more people are killed in car accidents, either in a situation like our near-miss-donkey, or by simply getting run over on a city street.
Over the course of our two-week visit, I had seen at least a half-dozen people either clipped, or outright knocked down by passing vehicles. The pirate minibuses, or “Dala Dalas” (named after the American currency), were the worst culprits — dangerously overpacked share-taxis, crammed in and overflowing with travelers in need of cheap transport and operated by greedy psychopaths who drove like Han Solo navigating an asteroid belt.
An hour later we reached the Kenyan border, and like most international border towns, Namanga left much to be desired. While the Honda wouldn’t have been my taxi of choice, it was clear from the wandering pilgrims on the streets that we were experiencing a higher class of travel.
At the risk of overdoing the Star Wars analogies, think Mos Eisley, the smugglers’ haven spaceport on Tatooine, but scarier and rife with crime, including Maasai-run Somali refugee smuggling rackets and rampant human trafficking involving huge sums of money. The Somalis were mostly on their way south, through Arusha, with the goal of reaching South Africa, so the passage north was a bit less dicey, but I knew none of this at the time and just wanted to get the hell out of there.
My hopes for a quick crossing were soon dashed, however, as our chauffeur explained he needed to “pick up his driver’s license,” which made sense, but not in a good way.
We picked our way through town to his aunt’s house, where my co-passengers got out and walked off into the dusk. Nervous, I waited in the car for twenty minutes before the driver emerged with a smile and we made our way to the border crossing, which we thankfully crossed without incident, my paperwork and his license — apparently legit — bolstered by a decent-sized cash bribe smoothing the way.
Hours later, by the time we approached the southern edge of Nairobi, night had fallen, and the traffic picked up considerably — cars, vans, buses, lorries, motorcycles, and all manner of makeshift transportation clogged the streets as we slowed to a crawl. Nervous about missing my flight, I foolishly voiced my concern to the driver, who abruptly banked a turn off the main drag into a random neighborhood, boasting he “knew a shortcut.”
These days, I play golf in Dubai with a Kenyan tea importer, who swears Nairobi has changed dramatically since my visit, and I believe him, but at the time of my airport journey, the city was downright scary, especially at night.
The main road into the city, which we had just abandoned, had actual streetlights lining the highway, which I hadn’t given much thought to until we hit the side streets and were plunged into absolute darkness, only slightly mitigated by the Honda’s now utterly ridiculous, low-angled, headlight beams.
As we banked turns in what seemed like a random fashion, pedestrians appeared suddenly like wraiths in the night, briefly lit up with stunned expressions as they leapt out of the Honda’s path at the last minute, whacking the car with their hands, while some were thumped by the fender.
I longed for the main highway, and would have gladly missed my flight, had I known we would be plunged into a sadistic, night version of Frogger. Yelling through the windshield to evade prospective vehicular homicide, I was amazed that a city of nearly three million could function without any streetlights, but there we were, threading our way through the urban dark, banking turn after turn after turn.
How that kid was able to even know where we were, much less navigate to the airport, I’ll never comprehend, and I’m not sure how much of a shortcut it was, but eventually we made it to Kenyatta. I bailed out of the death-trap Honda, thankful to be alive, and perhaps only to appease the greater forces of Karma, tipped the teenage driver with one of my last remaining American twenties.
I was on time for my flight, and after checking in, made my way to airport security, which proved to be a bit tricky, though entirely my own fault.
Corbett had gifted me a hyena skull. We’d separated the lower jaw from the top, then wrapped each part in a bunch of laundry, and tucked the bundles between a couple of wooden animal carvings to fool the scanners. What was I thinking? I had just survived a trip where, by all accounts, I shouldn’t have and was now tempting fate one last time on the way out of town.
Luckily, my plan eventually worked, but not before my duffle bag was emptied several times, with the smiling TSA agent commenting.
There is something that should not be here, he said over and over, but somehow never finding the bones.
An hour later, as I boarded my flight home, I was relieved to be on my way, though crestfallen to have provided little more than a brief distraction from my good friend’s chaotic expat existence.
I’d like to believe Corbett was better off than when we had arrived, and perhaps he was, for a time, but in the ensuing months, his big lovable bullmastiff’s heart gave out, his marriage continued to spiral, and two years later, the fierce velocity of his life proved unsustainable.
Corbett died in 2009 at the age of 38.
Before nodding off, soaring above the vast swaths of Sudan, I considered the hyena skull tucked away in my luggage — Africa’s notoriously mischievous species — unique and untamable, much like my friend.
