Safari Read online

  {Ian Johnson}

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Colonel John and Valerie Kent, who shared my vision for how photographic safaris could help protect African wildlife and gave me an amazing childhood in the wilderness of Africa. To my sister, Anne, who has been with me throughout this great journey and has always been at my side and supported me in all my endeavors. And to my son, Joss, who loves the thrill of a great expedition as much as I do.

  And to my extended family at Abercrombie & Kent, men and women who are passionate about their countries and share my commitment to travel that both enhances and changes lives. To Jorie Butler Kent, who worked with me to expand A&K beyond Africa.

  And above all to my wife, Otavia, who has shared many great adventures with me around the world and who urged me to share these stories about my life and some of the remarkable people I’ve been privileged to meet along the way.

  {A&K staff}

  Abercrombie & Kent’s famous “Iron Snake” safari in Kenya. This steam locomotive hauled us from Nairobi to Mombasa in the mid-1970s.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction Life in the Aberdares, South Kinangop

  Chapter 1 The Masai Mara

  Chapter 2 Nairobi to Cape Town

  Chapter 3 Mount Kilimanjaro

  Chapter 4 The British Army

  Chapter 5 Tented Luxury Safaris

  Chapter 6 Egypt

  Chapter 7 Southern Sudan

  Chapter 8 Saudi Arabia

  Chapter 9 India

  Chapter 10 China

  Chapter 11 Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

  Chapter 12 Galápagos Islands

  Chapter 13 Oman

  Chapter 14 Papua New Guinea

  Chapter 15 Alaska

  Chapter 16 The North Pole and Antarctica

  Chapter 17 The Edge of Space

  Chapter 18 Iguaçu Falls

  Chapter 19 Botswana

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  {Warren Baty}

  Lone bull elephant in the wildflowers on the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater.

  FOREWORD

  BY JEFFREY KATZENBERG, CEO OF DREAMWORKS ANIMATION

  I am one of the lucky few who has had the privilege of personally journeying with Geoffrey Kent. Now, thanks to this book, any reader can experience what it’s like to tag along with him to some of the world’s most exotic destinations. The spirit of discovery is deeply embedded in Geoffrey’s DNA, and it rubs off on his clients. In my case, traveling with him to Africa, Egypt, and China directly inspired such films as The Lion King, Madagascar, The Prince of Egypt, and Kung Fu Panda. In this book’s pages, there’s an amazing “you are there” feel to Geoffrey’s travel tales. And, in one chapter, I actually was there, as he describes the extraordinary South American trip my wife and I participated in that included snorkeling in the Galápagos, boating down the Amazon, crossing Indiana Jones–like suspension bridges in the rainforest, exploring the heights of Machu Picchu, and hiking past the peaks of Patagonia . . . all in eight incredible days. There’s simply no adventure Geoffrey has met that he hasn’t fallen in love with. This is a must-read for anyone who is captivated by the magic, mystery, and majesty of travel, which Geoffrey understands better than anyone else on the planet.

  {A&K staff/Gavin Ford}

  It’s time for a four-wheel-drive safari.

  {Kent family archives}

  This is a modern tent, just like the one that Richard Burton would have stayed in on safari.

  PREFACE

  SAN FRANCISCO, 1976

  Meet me at Trader Vic’s.”

  Richard Burton’s voice on the other end of my hotel phone is like tires on gravel—strained, as usual, from smoking, and tonight, it seems, from stress. He’s in conflict, as he is any time he asks me to meet him for mai tais at San Francisco’s most famous tiki restaurant.

  On the line, I try to work out what could be the matter; he’s just gotten engaged to Suzy Hunt, the English model, following his second divorce from Elizabeth Taylor earlier this year. “I’ll be there,” I tell him. “See you at eight o’clock.”

  When I arrive, there’s a fresh cigarette wagging between his lips. “Lucky you were in town,” he says, hardly raising his gaze.

  “Only just.” I take my place across from him in the leather cushioned booth lit by an overhead wicker lamp. “I leave for safari tomorrow.”

  “I ought to come with you, Geoff.” He lights his smoke, tosses the book of matches onto the table, and wrings his forehead. “I need to get away.”

  “It’s Suzy?”

  “No, it’s not Suzy. Suzy is wonderful; in fact, Suzy is the one thing keeping me sane right now.” He looks up at me with tired eyes. “But work’s been mad, and frankly, this divorce from Elizabeth has been a nightmare.”

  “I’ve heard that, actually.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I can dodge the reporters, Geoff. Meanwhile, her lawyer won’t stop calling me, not to mention the children and still trying to sort out our properties.” Finally, his eyes meet mine. “You know why I called you, don’t you?”

  “You need a safari.”

  He exhales, a long stream of smoke diffusing into the lamplight above us. “I need a safari.”

  On my way over, I’d done all the calculations about the one location that I’d been saving for Richard Burton, just in case he wanted to escape. If we leave first thing tomorrow, we’ll be in the bush in no more than forty-eight hours.

  The Masai Mara in Kenya is a world away—and that’s precisely why I’ve brought him here. The ride from the Nairobi airport to my camp is smooth until the very end, when the road becomes so rough it makes our jaws rattle. Inside the Land Rover, Richard turns to me and grins. I hit the gas a little harder.

  Africa never fails.

  With its broad acacia trees and giraffes moseying among the grasslands, the Mara River is the ultimate escape: so wildly beautiful and beautifully wild, so incredibly much to take in that he has no choice but to lose himself in his surroundings and forget his troubles. They say only time heals a broken heart, but any man with a purpose knows that the far faster cure is adventure—and there’s no greater adventure than a safari.

  {Karoki Lewis}

  Cheetahs prefer a high spot for a view of the surrounding plains.

  Though on this, our first night out, as dusk sets in over our tents on the edge of the river, Richard Burton revisits his pain. “Elizabeth,” he says with a sigh. “This sunset reminds me of the day we got married.”

  “Which time?”

  “The second time,” he says, flicking flame under a Marlboro Light and taking a long drag. “In Botswana. Oh, rubbish,” he says, searching the sky for some solace. “Forget her. Thank heaven for Suzy, Geoff . . . that’s all I can say.”

  In front of our dinner table roars a great fire, built by my best guide. He carries out two cold martinis and sets them on the table in front of Richard and me before discreetly turning back inside. “How that woman loved to fight,” Richard says, in a way that makes it seem as though it’s just dawned on him.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Oh! You can’t imagine. Knock-down, drag-outs, and insults one could never dream of forgetting. And she thinks that’s love! Geoff, anyone who knows me knows that I’m all for passion . . . but a film set is the only place for her brand of drama—”

  Just then my attention shifts to a sudden commotion. A buffalo is charging into camp with three lionesses at its heels, and for a moment it looks as though they will end up in our laps. Richard freeze
s in terror and dives to the ground. “Geoff!” he hollers. “God, Geoff! I can’t look!”

  I upend the dinner table, our martini glasses splashing and shattering to the ground in the chaos. The lionesses team up to wrestle the wailing buffalo to the ground, finally ripping him apart at the foot of our fire.

  Richard stays ducked behind the table until the hisses and snarling have quieted. Slowly, he rises and joins me to look out over our makeshift shield at the pride of lionesses slinking away in satisfaction and the buffalo carcass crackling over the fire. He turns to me. “Geoff . . .”

  “What is it?” I keep my eyes fixed ahead.

  “If I bring Suzy here, will you do that again?”

  “Do what again?”

  “Would you set up that scene again?” He turns again to marvel at the lions making their way far off into the bush. “Suzy would just love it.”

  Without a doubt, Richard Burton was on to something: a safari wins anyone’s heart. Since those days, the only things that have changed about the thrill of East Africa are how greatly its appeal has grown and how we at Abercrombie & Kent have worked to refine this most rugged experience.

  My typical morning on a modern safari usually starts when the rest of the world is still sleeping. In the hush of dark, the tent attendant hums one of his native Kenyan songs as he walks along the path to my tent—this, and the quiet step of his shoes through the canvas tent, his manner of announcing his polite arrival. “Bwana Commander?” His voice is gentle and low and I know I am home: “Bwana Commander” is my Kenyan nickname. “It’s five thirty. Your breakfast is ready. Here is your early morning coffee and orange juice.”

  There is a delicate clinking—teaspoon inside sugar bowl—as I call out my thanks. I push aside the thickness of my comforter and set my feet on the woven bedside rug. Of all the things we’ve done over the years to evolve and refine the safari experience, these sensations remain the same. Nothing can keep me from the carafe of hot coffee and a few meditative moments on the deck as the land prepares for sunrise.

  When I step outside, there’s the yawn of the hippos just below, already resting in the cool Mara River to protect their skin from the first morning light. The stars sparkle over the river, which moves placidly around the rocks, and on the opposite riverbank are found only the shadows of the savanna—the tops of the trees, the bushes in cozy clusters. Here, each element of nature rests together. The person observing it is also a part of it all.

  The sun will peek its face within the next half hour—a gracious golden glow across the savanna, so beautiful that even after witnessing it for the past seven decades, I still feel my heart go tender at the sight. After more than fifty years in this industry, I read clients’ faces easily on a morning like this as I make my way to the dining room for a breakfast meeting. This is the moment of thrilled uncertainty. Anticipation. As their guide ushers them inside their Land Rover, they’re aware that life doesn’t get more daring than this. Are we pushing our luck? they wonder. They are pushing it—right over the boundaries of the wild. The Swahili word safari combines the ideas of “a long journey” and “adventure.” By nature, the only thing that’s predictable about a game drive is that it will be unforgettable. One day on safari is the great adventure that will change the rest of an individual’s life.

  {Kent family archives}

  My parents, John and Valerie Kent, canoeing down the Tana River.

  Throughout my career, whenever I’ve asked my clients why they travel, nearly all of them have given me some version of this response: they travel to learn about the world beyond their own experience. Travel teaches us as much about ourselves as it does about the world—it shifts our focus away from the meager challenges of every day and recalibrates our life’s vision to something broader and much more significant. One of my prevailing philosophies is that if any individual were to find out that he or she had only six days to live, all people’s final thoughts would revolve around life’s most important things: the people they’ve loved and the places they’ve explored. Nothing shapes an individual as much as these two influences.

  {Kent family archives}

  An early safari on the shores of Lake Baringo.

  My parents and I started Abercrombie & Kent out of necessity when the land in Kenya that we’d spent our lives developing was taken away from us. Many entrepreneurs agree that it’s our worst vulnerabilities that inspire us to find our greater purpose. When the most precious part of yourself is taken away, you will do whatever it takes to get your power back.

  You’ll even travel to the ends of the earth.

  This book is more than a collection of the best moments that I’ve experienced along the path; this book is my love story. By bringing the same sense of adventure found on safari to other places around the world, I defined luxury experiential travel . . . but my own greatest adventure has been this business itself.

  {Kent family archives}

  Taking a bath on my way to Ethiopia—my first safari.

  Introduction

  Life in the Aberdares, South Kinangop

  KENYA, 1936–1948

  On her first and only visit to a fortune-teller, my mother was told she would marry a tall, dark, handsome man and travel extensively in faraway places. Turning to her friends, she giggled and dismissed it: anyone who knew Valerie Worke knew she was as committed to the idea of finding a husband with an aristocratic upbringing as she was to her studies at Benenden School, the upper-crust all-girls boarding school outside London.

  However, it was just a short while later at a debutante dance in central London in 1936 when, surrounded on the ballroom floor by dozens of elegant young women and their suitors, she laid eyes on him: he was bronzed and brooding, achingly handsome in his regimental dress, laid-back and laughing inside an alluring huddle of friends. As if suddenly under a spell, my mother excused herself from the music and glided to an area of the room where she could delicately position herself for this young soldier to see her. When he crossed her path, he too was taken immediately—and by the time the band was breaking down, the young Valerie had fallen in love and decided that perhaps there’d been some truth to that absurd fortune. Indeed, she resolved that this man would be her husband.

  John Kent’s affinity for adventure is what made him equal parts intriguing and impossible to pin down, and the fact that the world was about to go to war didn’t do much to support her mission. After she had dashed all her desires for an elitist engagement and renounced the postgraduate debutante scene, there was no choice but to go all-in; in order to marry a soldier of the King’s African Rifles who spoke fluent Swahili and had been trained as an administrator for the British Empire, a woman had to commit herself completely. Over the next three years, my mother trained in London for the wartime nursing reserve and asked for an assignment in Kenya, where her beloved John was stationed. When the nursing reserve refused her request, she promptly signed up to join the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. “Are you out of your mind?” her mother asked her, in a moment that became famous within our family. “The nurses in the FANY are sent to the front lines of the war!”

  “I can manage,” my mother retorted.

  “You can manage? Your father owns one of the world’s most important exporting businesses between England and India; he raised you with a driver and a Jaguar . . . and now you’re going to learn to drive wounded soldiers inside an ambulance?”

  At that point, my grandfather boomed in. “You’re a girl from Mayfair, for God’s sake—one of the best neighborhoods in London. You could be killed out there, all for this ridiculous romantic fantasy of yours!”

  In response, the next day Mummie boarded a military convoy in Scotland that was scheduled to zigzag across the Atlantic and leave her in Kenya. When they docked in Mombasa, she encountered my father—sunburned and solemn—for the first time since he’d left England.

  “It’s been three years, darling,” he told her. “Do you think you still love me?”

  Mummie’s e
yes welled up and she wrapped her arms around his neck, overwhelmed with joy. “Of course I do!”

  “Well, I’m not sure you’ll like me very much when I tell you this.”

  Mummie stepped back calmly, composed herself, and braced for the worst. “By God, John, if you’ve brought me all this way to tell me there’s been someone else—”

  “There’s no one else, darling,” he said. “But in our letters, we made a pact to wait at least a month before the wedding.”

  “Go on . . .”

  “But I learned this morning that in six days they’ll send me off to Abyssinia. I put in for three days’ leave immediately—we’re getting married this Saturday.”

  “But John—”

  “Darling, I’ve made all the arrangements—”

  “Then who will present me?”

  “Sir Charles Markham has agreed.” Nothing like being given away by the second baronet of one of the most lauded noble families in Britain. “Have you got a dress?”

  Mummie looked at her leather suitcase and back up at him. “Of course I have.”

  “Good. Then this is the way forward.”

  On December 12, 1940, Mummie walked down the aisle of Nairobi’s Anglican Cathedral of the Highlands surrounded by Dad’s fellow officers and a host of other unknown faces. “You’ll be fast friends with all of them,” Dad promised in a whisper, and after the exchange of vows, Dad’s brother officers made a row of swords arched above their heads while the other guests roared in applause. Then they all headed to a reception at the legendary Muthaiga Country Club, where Mummie and Dad posed for their wedding portrait under a lush stand of bamboo bestowing a sweet blessing.

  Two days later when Dad caught up with his battalion in Abyssinia—known today as Ethiopia—Mummie was sent to stay with the other wartime nurses in Kenya in the last place a young wife in a strange land would dream of spending her first days as a newlywed: a convent.