We walk into her home, and Pamela explains that she is an event planner, and as such, likes to make sure all details are just so.
“Please, use all the food in my fridge,” she says, showing us a kitchen smaller than my bedroom closet in Oregon. “I just bought eggs and yogurt, and there is pasta over here in the cabinet.” She leads us to the bathroom and shows us how to finagle the quirky turn of the shower nozzle and where she keeps travel-sized soaps for guests.
“Where are you staying tonight?” I ask her, now that I realize we’re staying in her actual home and not a second guesthouse.
“Oh, my mother lives a block away,” she says. “I just crash at her house whenever I have a guest here. It’s okay, actually, because I have a wedding to run tomorrow and have to wake up early.” She pours us cups of tea and asks us to sit, asks questions about the details of our travels thus far, where’s been our favorite place and what’s been surprising. She asks about our plans for tomorrow.
“Oh, you will love the Maasai Mara!” she exclaims, clapping her hands. “I used to go there on family vacations every year when I was a child. Lovely memories.” I already wish we could take her with us.
She stands up, gathers her keys and sunglasses. “I want to hear all about it when you come back! I’ll see you soon, okay?” Pamela says good-bye, walks out the front door and down the concrete path in her yard, then turns left to walk to her mother’s house. There’s no dining room table in her diminutive cottage, so we eat pasta for dinner on the hallway floor. The kids find this a special treat and ask if we can do this all the time.
Our flight itinerary the past few days has been excruciating: from Victoria Falls, we flew to Johannesburg, then waited two days for our flight to Nairobi by way of Dubai. We’ve been moving for seventeen hours, and yet John insists on an early departure the next morning, since the drive is long and it’ll get hot. Early the next morning, we push through exhaustion and load our bags into John’s van, ready for another lengthy, jerky ride in another rickety van.
John makes his living guiding tourists on safari through the Maasai Mara National Reserve, a dedicated space in Kenya where wildlife roam free. It’s where Karen von Blixen-Finecke, also known as Isak Dinesen, set her memoir, Out of Africa, about her life on her beloved Kenyan coffee plantation from 1913 to 1931. It’s where Kenya makes the bulk of its tourism revenue. It’s not cheap to go on safari here, which is why John is unaccustomed to taking visitors to one of Nairobi’s sketchy neighborhoods parked on the flight path. We’ve been given a sizable discount because a friend of ours in Oregon, a former resident of Kenya, works for a socially responsible safari company, and they’ve invited us to see their work.
John drives through Nairobi traffic and tells us about his childhood in the city, how he and his wife and kids recently moved to its outskirts to be closer to his mom, who is in poor health. “I spend half my time guiding safaris, and half my time feeding my mother,” he jokes.
We push our way through traffic and out of town, and begin our zigzag through the Kenyan countryside. John tells us most of his clients miss this drive. “They prefer to fly a private jet to the Mara, so I drive this by myself, then meet them there,” he explains.
An hour into the drive, he pulls over to a wide shoulder with a scenic overlook and a restaurant teetering on the edge of a cliff, held in place by support beams.
“This is the Great Rift Valley,” John says as we gaze over the edge at an immense vista of rolling hills around flat plains in shades of umber and sepia. “And there is where we’ll be going today.” He points to a spot far in the distance, past hazy skyline and the burnt sienna valley. “And notice that satellite dish, right there in the middle,” he says, pointing next to a small white dot in the center of the vast landscape. “When we get there, we’ll be halfway to the Mara.”
John leads us to the restaurant and introduces us to staff behind the counter. We order a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs served on stainless steel plates and chase it with a slurp of British tea in plastic cups. For three more hours the drive remains fairly blithe and breezy, and as we pass the satellite dish, a giant white man-made dome interrupting the bushland topography, I give thanks that this ride is smoother than Ethiopia’s.
The van turns left, and here it is: a long, craggy, interminable road with no end in sight. John veers sharply to the far right of the road to avoid a pothole he’s memorized, then yells at us through the cacophony of cheery kid chatter, “Roll up your windows or you’ll eat dust!”
Thus ends the breeze and thus begins the second leg of our drive, a two-hour traverse so shaky I pop a part of my back that’s been stiff for two weeks. Even with the windows rolled up, for the next two hours I continually flush out my eyes with drops and brush off dust collected on my pants. Ethiopia coached us to stare straight ahead to avoid carsickness. John drives and drives, flying through and skidding over washboard gravel for two hours, and then, finally, a sign: Masaai Mara National Reserve. A baboon sits on top of the sign, picking at his fingernails, ignoring us.
We turn right, drive twenty more minutes, then reach our safari camp and tumble out of the van, sweaty, disoriented, and caked with layers of dirt. We are in the epitome of the middle of nowhere. This camp is parked in the middle of the East African savanna, a manufactured conglomeration of tents and gathering spots with little more than hippos and acacia trees as neighbors. Camp staffers unload our van and bring our bags to a covered check-in desk, and I wonder, Where do these people live? Here? We are miles from anything man-made beyond this camp, several hours’ drive from any sensible living quarters. And yet, as a woman on staff explains to us after handing out water bottles and wet washcloths, they manage to bring in several hours of Wi-Fi a day, they generate their own electricity, and there will be three catered meals per day. There is a pool. I can’t imagine how they’ve carted in the water for it. I silently speculate how much this place costs regular visitors who don’t benefit from our discount.