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High Adventure on the Dark Continent
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10746 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
1,836 Words |
| Author
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Carl Purcell
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East Africa has captured the imagination of writers, artists, and explorers for generations. It is vast and mysterious, an almost magical land like Oz, with such bizarre curiosities as whistling thorn bushes, towering termite hills, and bloated baobab trees, which appear to grow upside down with their roots reaching upward. There are no yellow brick roads and the animals don't talk, but their behavior is just as startling. Countless thousands of zebras and wildebeest migrate for hundreds of miles across the plains of Serengeti and Masai Mara, guided by some primal instinct of herd behavior which tells them the gas is greener on the other side of the next river or beyond the distant horizon.
Like the animals of the Serengeti, my wife and I return to the vast plains every year to watch this seemingly endless sea of life in its relentless movement across the flat expanse of the savanna. We act as leaders for a group of dedicated photographers who have come to document this phenomenon of nature. With expert drives and guides, we plan our safaris to be in the right place at the right time to help our colleagues capture exciting images of animal behavior. What we see and photograph is often touching and sometimes tragic. The delicate balance of life depends on a food chain where the weak die to let the strong live.
We always stay, for at least part of our visit, in Governor's Camp along the banks of the Mara River in southwestern Kenya on the Masai Mara plain. This luxurious tented camp does much to dispel the image of "bush" living which Hemingway described in "The Green Hills of Africa," but in does preserve Kenya's reputation for unexpected adventure. There are no fences or barriers and the animals come and go as they please.
Awakening in a tent in Africa can be disorienting for the first few moments. The mind gropes for the familiar--the ticking of a clock or the steady hum of an air conditioner. All I could hear was a chorus of night sounds, a blend of deep throated tree frogs with the higher pitched song of insects. As I turned restlessly in the cocoon of my bunk, memory flooded back and I knew I was in Governor's Camp on the Mara. I also knew that some nocturnal creature had disturbed my sleep and the night air was permeated with the odor of musk. A deep guttural sound came through the mesh of my mosquito netting and I sat upright, the hair raising on the nape of my neck. Something large was close. Throwing back the net I lifted the window flap next to my bed and saw the massive shape of a bull elephant, so near that I could almost reach out and touch him. Suddenly there was a cracking sound, like the breaking of
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