The camp has several tented hotel rooms scattered on the property, each with a balcony overlooking the Mara River. Two young men on staff show us our room, and I squint my eyes to imagine Karen Blixen here on safari with her Swedish husband, Bror, only without our benefit of electricity and running water. Canvas walls roll up on all four sides and flowing mosquito nets smother four-poster mahogany beds.
After dinner down at the dining hall, I muster enough strength to take a shower before crawling into bed. I’m shaking with fatigue. I slide between the sheets, and I discover old-school toasty hot water bottles gurgling at my feet. “If you open the walls at night, you’ll hear hippos playing while you sleep,” a luggage carrier shared earlier. All night, hippos grumble outside our balcony while we sleep in the dark, dreamless. I wake up shivering in cold morning air, looking through the bed’s mosquito netting at our canvas walls and dark wood floors. After weeks of sleeping on ten uncomfortable beds in Africa alone, in one night I feel as if I’ve caught up on sleep last seen in Australia. This is heaven.
Last night we told John we preferred to sleep in this morning, even though we’d miss key animal-sighting opportunities, so we arrive at the dining hall for breakfast minutes before closing. Everyone else has already gone out to the savanna. We gulp coffee, devour eggs and sausage, and run out to John’s van waiting for us. He laughs at our tardiness.
His safari van is officially locked and loaded for its intended purpose: the roof is buttressed up like a convertible van with shade covering. This means there’s room to stand on our seats, our heads popped out the top like meerkats with cameras around their necks. John drives us away from the camp and heads into grassland, tracing wheel ruts left by thousands of other off-road vehicles. Safari hat provided by John strapped firmly under my chin, coffee-colored linen pants procured from Sydney, I have officially channeled my inner Meryl Streep.
Kenyan safari guides, like John, aren’t locals who’ve slapped a logo on their vans and recruited naive tourists out to the wilderness; they’re licensed by the government, navigators who have taken classes on flora and fauna and can answer any wildlife-related question lobbed their way. As he drives, the kids pepper John with questions, their expert on call about why hyenas prefer to lie in puddles on the path, why elderly elephants go rogue, why hippos are the most dangerous animal in Africa. John knows the answer to everything.
We come to a herd of zebras and Reed asks him, “How can you tell the difference between the boys and the girls?”
“Well . . .” John hesitates, looks at me. I smile. “Well, you just can.”
“But how?” Reed insists.
“They have different parts.”
“Like male and female humans?” he asks in boyish soprano.
“Yes,” John says, sighing. “Just like humans.”
“Hmm . . . weird,” Reed says. “It doesn’t look like it. They just look like plain zebras to me.” He zooms in his camera lens and John howls with laughter.
John weaves seamlessly through the savanna as he talks, having memorized these obscure bush paths over years of work. He knows where to find a herd of topi, silently munching on a grass lunch. He knows of an elephant family that likes to hang around a particular cluster of trees, and drives us twenty feet from a mother and her newborn before she rustles her ears, huffs through her trunk, and tromps toward us. John shifts in reverse and spins the wheels before we zoom away backward, our guide laughing. Nearby, giraffes mimic trees, indifferent and moving only leaf-chewing jaws. A herd of warthogs traipses by our van, en route to their next feeding. Crocodiles loiter open-eyed along the waterfront, behemoth in size and still as statues. Hippos splash in a slough of water. And after miles of searching, John finds us a pride of lions, sleeping underneath a tree, ten feet from our tires and indifferent to our presence.
None of the animals pretend to give us notice, in fact. We are human observers of our own nature documentary.
“Can we get out and take a family photo?” Kyle asks.
“Afraid not, no,” John says. “Kenyan law says no one but a licensed safari guide can exit a vehicle on the Mara.”
We head back to Nairobi tomorrow morning, and we want to surprise Tate, who will turn ten. Her birthday—the day we’ll do nothing but drive in dust for five hours. When we arrived at the camp, I asked the front desk woman if it were possible to order a small birthday cake as our dessert. Tonight over dinner, I still haven’t gotten word from the safari camp, and I wonder if they’ve forgotten. It’s after eight o’clock in the evening, and Finn is sound asleep, drooling facedown on the table. We’ve finished our meal in the communal dining room, and we’re desperate to head back to our room and crawl into bed.
I hear a faint beat of drums, and in the distance I see a faint glow of torches perforating inky night sky.
The sound grows louder and the light bounces closer, taking a few steps forward then reversing backward, then side to side, then another step forward. These drums and torches are dancing. I hear a murmur of rhythmic voices. As the fire glows brighter, so does the volume of drums and voices, locals chanting a song in cadence with bobbing torches.
“What’s going on?” Tate asks.
“It sounds like a battle’s about to start,” Reed observes. “Or maybe a concert.”
Closer and closer, a mob of singers heads into our open-air dining room, led by a man in a white chef’s hat wielding a chocolate cake in one hand and machete in the other. Guests at the other tables around us whip out their phones and start recording. They’re heading straight to us.
Tate’s face beams scarlet and she glares at me, mortified, with eyes big as saucers. The song ends, and the mob promptly begins a new one, another Swahili incantation. Two minutes pass of chanting and bobbing around our table, swaying with flame-lit torches and drumbeats. Finn hasn’t moved, and drool has collected on the table under his lips. He snores.
The chef places a chocolate cake in front of Tate, and I notice it’s sized for a full-scale birthday party. A woman lights ten candles with her torch, and the serenaders croon, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Tah-toom, happy birthday to you!” Tate blows out her candles and the surrounding audience bursts into applause. The chef hands her a machete half her size, and she carves the first slice, then hands the knife to Kyle to finish. Finn is immobile, drool now dripping to the floor.
We pass out cake slices to the surrounding diners and staff, eat our own share, and save an extra slice for Finn. Earlier this morning around four o’clock, Kyle had woken up Tate for a sunrise hot-air balloon ride and father-daughter breakfast on the Mara. Tonight, she is serenaded with torches, dancing, a cake, and song. I tell her that for my tenth birthday, I visited my dad’s office in downtown Austin and his secretary gave me a blank legal pad of my very own. And for her eleventh birthday, we will probably order pizza and watch a movie on Netflix.