Africa gets into your soul: A trip to Kenya is everything you'd expect, and more

“To see thousands of animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told – that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”

— Beryl Markum from “West With the Night,” 1942

The sounds of the afternoon in the African bush are few — wind rushing, locust chirring and small birds singing as they flit among the thorns of the flat-topped acacia trees. Beyond that all is silence as many of the bush’s creatures are resting during the midday heat.

I am seated on a wooden deck of a small thatched hut perched on the side of a rocky hill. Beneath me stretches mile upon mile of grassland dotted occasionally with low bushes and lesser things that hug the ground. The wind is at my back.

Directly below me a gazelle stands placidly in the shade of a tree and to my right, a bull elephant moves slowly beneath another small stand of trees. On the rock-strewn path that led to this hill, shy dik-diks, rabbit-sized antelope, ran as they heard our van approach and baboons paused what they were doing to curiously watch us go by on our way to where I am now, Lions’ Bluff Lodge in the low-lying Tanai hills.

As I sit on the deck in the sweltering heat, the green plain stretching out before me is alive with giant shadows cast by the clouds as they race across the sky. In the very far distance, a line of mountains demarcates the end of this vast expanse and somewhere there, behind the dusty horizon, is the largest of them, Mt. Kilimanjaro.

This is Kenya. It is also my first stop on a four-day safari deep into the wildness here.

Africa had always been at the top of my bucket list so when an opportunity arose unexpectedly to come here, I jumped. A scant three months later, I and two other Jacksonville women touched down in Mombasa and our adventure began.

A few days were spent on the lovely Diani Beach coast, whose white sand stretches for miles along the Indian Ocean south of Mombasa. The Diani Beach Sea Lodge and other lodges here are great choices for the African visitor drawn to the beach.

But it had always been our goal to go on safari. After all, while there are many things that are amazing about this continent, it’s the animals that capture the imagination. So, on our second day here, we set off.

A safari is essentially a very long road trip during which the mission is to stop frequently to view the vast number of species here in Kenya. Once people have set up camp – or been ensconced in a lodge somewhere in the bush or savanna – the daily safaris are limited to two- to three-hour trips in the early mornings or just before sunset when the animals come out.

Our safari — a word that means “expedition” in Swahili and is used as both a noun and a verb — didn’t officially begin until we entered the privately owned Luma Community Wildlife Sanctuary, 125,000 acres of land run by some 2,500 local shareholders. Residents contributed their land and community members are still allowed to graze their cattle in the sanctuary, but its primary purpose is for wildlife protection.

Our thatched huts were perched high on the side of a steep hill, the proverbial Lions’ Bluff. Each contained two single beds draped with mosquito netting that could be pushed together for more familiarity. A wooden deck stretched above the savanna below.

We had already seen numerous African species as our jeep ground its way up the nearly impassible incline into the lodge. Most impressive might have been the red-dusted elephants, stained by the brilliant orange-red soil here.

Zebras – instead of the normal black and white – were stained black with stripes of a stunning pinkish-red. Even the giraffe, whose heads peered out at us from above the trees, were lightly coated a red shade.

Hooved creatures of all kind — gazelle, impala, kudu and more — scattered with the sound of the approaching jeep. Birds, ranging from the almost iridescent superb starling to the strangely turbaned secretary bird, were omnipresent.

In the very early evening, we again took to the roads to see wildlife. Along the way, we halted to extend handouts of bread to birds that mobbed our car. Most were superb starling, which unlike our own mundane black starlings, are brilliant oranges, blues and greens with white feathers encircling their eyes. Before too long they were joined by a red-billed hornbill that also jockeyed for the bread.

From there it was on to an outcropping known as Lions’ Rock, where reddened boulders seem cast by giants in a jumble. While lions are generally elusive, here is where lionesses often go to birth their cubs to protect them from aggressive males.

The static on our driver’s walkie talkie suddenly came alive with a sighting of lions. Ahead and around a curve, a tawny lioness climbed up the rocks followed by three 2- to 3-month old cubs. Further down the road, we encountered a shaggy-maned male.

After one night, we journeyed to Severin Safari Camp, deep within the bush of Tsavo West National Park. There, we were sternly warned that this was an open camp, where animals roamed at will and humans kept to the graveled paths. After nightfall, visitors must be accompanied from the restaurant to their thatched huts by a resident Masai staff member.

Clad in their crimson robes and intricately beaded neck and wrist ornaments, the Masai could be summoned from any far-flung hut by the flick of a switch. They would appear out of the dark along the pathway armed with flashlights to ensure their visitors didn’t fall prey to an errant water buffalo or hyena.

The lodge was surrounded by four manmade waterholes where animals could be spotted as they wandered in for a drink. Buffalo, gazelle and, yes, even elephants visited stealthily to sip water often not readily available in the hot arid bush.

At the restaurant itself, birds of all colors, shapes and sizes swooped down to catch any small crumbs diners dropped. Splendid starlings, brilliant in the hot sun, paused warily on the white tablecloths to beg for scraps before being shooed away by waiters. The more cautious hornbills and grey louries, also known as the go-away bird for its raucous call when disturbed, perched in the trees just off the patio hoping for hand-outs.

But on that first night it was the elephants that graced us with their presence. The two great beasts approached the watering hole warily, emerging slowly from night’s shadows. They flared their giant ears forward to capture any of the sounds of humans from the brightly lit lodge.

The dozen or more visitors eating their evening meal at the lodge restaurant paused, forks in air and drinks on the way to lips. All eyes were trained on the giant pair not 50 yards away. The elephants swung their huge heads from side to side as if straining to catch any errant sounds.

They took another step toward the waterhole, then hearing a sound from one of the watching humans, they huffed, turned and evaporated back into the night. Phenomenal that an animal of such girth could vanish so quickly.

That is the way, however, of the African bush. We could be surrounded by animal life but be oblivious of it. Driving down the road, we might catch sight of four legs or a pair of ears only to stop the van and have the leg- or ear-owner melt into the surrounding acacia trees.

Unlike the savanna at Loma, where grasslands prevail and animals have few places to hide, the bush is filled with thorny shrubs and small trees that served as perfect veils to conceal creatures. Tsavo West at the time we visited had received some needed rain so was lush with green grass.

The only animals that seemed unperturbed by the presence of humans or clattering vehicles were the giraffe. Easily sighted as their tall necks emerged above the tops of the trees, their whitened ears twitching, they peered curiously at our approach, seemingly endlessly interested in us.

Other than the giraffe and the hippos and crocodiles spied luxuriating at a crystal-clear spring, most animals would flee as we approached, some languidly and some, such as the yellowish flash of a leopard as it bolted from its treetop perch, quickly.

On our way leaving Tsavo on the final day we encountered for one final time the animal that I consider the king of Africa, the elephant. Just before we left park boundaries two herds of the behemoths ambled through the brush. Like the giraffe, they largely ignored our presence until we got a bit too close and the mother of a small baby determined us too close and took several paces toward us, her ears wide. We promptly retreated.

Safari. The word to me will forever be connected with magic and majesty. It has impressed upon me the divine beauty that exists in our natural world.

“Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there, you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe its magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are elephant paths? Could it be because Africa is the place of all our beginnings, the cradle of mankind, where our species first stood upright on the savannahs of long ago?”

— Brian Jackman, a freelance writer known for his writing about Africa