Why go on an African safari?
Africa remains the last outpost of raw adventure, a refuge
from the modern world. From the splendor of the
Maasai Mara to the teeming with herds of a million wildebeest, to the pristine beauty of the Ngorongoro Crater and the vast Serengeti or majestic Kilimanjaro- this ancient land and its people offer a
travel experience truly unlike any other.
For many dreaming about a safari begins with an image – a
pride of lions stretching in the shade, a tented safari camp, a lean Maasai
herdsman watching over his cattle, brilliant red shuka draped over his shoulder.
The images accumulate. Amboseli. Samburu. Spice Islands. Savannah. Mt Kenya.
Wildebeest. Mountain Gorilla. The Big Five. The Big Nine. Lake Victoria, Source
of the Nile.
The images become stories, true and untrue, of visitors to
East Africa and what they saw and what they did. Speke, Stanley, Burton,
Livingston searched for the headwaters of the Nile, naming mountains, lakes,
rivers, and people along the way. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania instead of Kenya
because Queen Victoria wanted to give her nephew a gift. Theodore Roosevelt shot
game from the front of a locomotive. Ernest Hemingway chased the Big Five and
netted wilier game, the great short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The
Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber,” and the travelogue " Green Hills of
Africa". For twenty years Dian Fossey lived on the side of a volcano in the
realm of the mountain gorilla, watching them day after day from just a few yards
away.
Eventually the stories become an idea, at once simple and
complex. Go to East Africa. See it with one’s own eyes. Plan a africa safari, kenya safari or tanzania safari. Find the answers to questions you can only answer yourself. How does Swahili sound? What does the savannah smell like
in the mid afternoon? How wet is the rainforest on the side of a Virungas
volcano? What does antelope taste like?
Until finally one wonders . . . how do I get there?
