Safari Page 7

  “Yes, General.”

  “Whenever one of my operations succeeded, it was always as a result of careful planning. It’s a British principle of war: time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted. You and I are scheduled to leave Malta at the end of this week to visit King Idris at his palace in Tobruk; then we’ll head to Benghazi to visit your regiment. Let’s review the itinerary.”

  I learn quickly how precise the details need to be. “Geoffrey,” General Frost might say, “there’s a gap of three minutes here between my taking leave of the palace, walking down the steps, and driving off in the car. What happens in those three minutes?”

  “Well, General, while you’re saying good-bye to King Idris, I shall be fixing your flag to the front of your car.”

  “Very good, Geoffrey. And how long will it take you to fix the flag?”

  “I should allow one minute, General.”

  “Very good; write that in. And the other two minutes?”

  I plan for it all, depending on the situation: the fractions of a minute it could take for him to have a hushed conversation with a private secretary, the moments we might sit in London’s rush-hour traffic en route to his plane at Heathrow. General Frost’s exemplary service to the United Kingdom and his reinforcement of my work bring out an inspired dedication in me, and I devise a plan.

  One afternoon in Malta, I visit Corporal Taylor of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. “Corporal Taylor, I’d like to create a mobile refrigeration plant to have a few surprises delivered to General Frost. Would you be willing to help me out?”

  “Don’t see why not, how big?”

  Together we design and build a generator connected to a truck that provides power for a miniature freezer and a fridge. I chill gin for a good martini and stock the fridge with a cold smoked salmon. “Goodness, Geoffrey,” General Frost says, “even in the desert at Kufra Oasis we’ll be able to enjoy a good drink. Gentlemen, I have to commend you. Very well done.” My loyalty to General Frost is cemented.

  Our year together in Malta and Libya is intense but interesting, colored by the conversations I’m on hand to witness between King Idris and General Frost. One afternoon, in an official meeting with the sandalwood burning in the background, King Idris in a joking fashion asks the General, “How is it going training my officers?”

  “The training is going very well.”

  “Not too well, I hope,” the King chuckles, and then turns rather serious. “There’s a young soldier that concerns me,” he says. “I hope you aren’t doing such a good job that he could lead a coup.”

  Instantly, I know which young Libyan soldier he’s speaking of: Muammar Gaddafi, a young officer who’s friendly, a natural leader, and who takes easily to our training.

  At the end of my yearlong attachment, the general and his wife host a farewell dinner for me in Malta. Before dessert, I summon up the nerve to ask the general what he sees in my future. “General, do you think I have what it takes to make a career in the army?”

  “You’d be great in wartime, Geoffrey,” he says. “But during peacetime, you’d soon grow bored. You’re a self-starter, you know that. And just from your love of polo, it’s clear how much energy you have.”

  His wife, Jean, leans in toward the center of the table. “Geoffrey,” she says. The candles in the center of the table flicker ever so gently with the genuine intent of her word. “You need a career that will harness all your passion.”

  “That’s right,” says General Frost. “Find the one thing that would make you feel as though you’ve done nothing with your life if you don’t accomplish it. It’s nice seeing the world, but England is my home. The army will fly you anywhere you like at the end of your service. You have to decide where your home is, as well.”

  The next day, we arrive at Heathrow together for the last time. I step out, fix his flag on the car, and salute him.

  Then I arrange for a Royal Air Force flight back to Kenya.

  {Charlie Grieves-Cook}

  Enjoying Sundowners around the campfire in Kenya, 2007.

  Chapter 5

  Tented Luxury Safaris

  1962

  In 1952, in an effort to gain independence from England, a large group of Africans band together to take their land back from white settlers. During the worst of the conflict, which becomes known as the Mau Mau Uprising, my sister, five years old, and I, age ten, leave our home to stay in the center of Nairobi with my parents’ friend Dr. Flowerdew. When my parents come to visit us, they offer hushed accounts to the Flowerdews about the massacres happening on the Kinangop. “I can’t bear to think about what happened to the Rucks,” I hear Mummie tell Mrs. Flowerdew in the next room.

  “What’s happened to the Rucks, Mummie?”

  “Geoff, that wasn’t meant for your ears,” she says. “Darling . . . they’ve all died.”

  “The Mau Mau killed them?”

  “Yes.”

  The Rucks were our family’s good friends on the mountain, and their youngest son was just a toddler. But even as the attacks reach their most horrific points, my father won’t dream of leaving the South Kinangop—and my mother won’t dream of leaving my father. But when she makes the drive into Nairobi to see us, in addition to donning a hat and gloves, she also has a .32 Beretta pistol strapped around her waist.

  In February 1960, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, gives his famous “Wind of Change” speech in Cape Town, stating that colonial rule cannot go on. Despite the fact that British settlers have put down the uprising, the British government in 1962 gives Kenya self-governance and determines that the farms in the white highlands will be taken away and returned to the Kikuyu. Ironically, because my father knows all the land and all the people in the area, he takes a temporary job with the new Kenyan government to help them decipher exactly which land belongs to which owners in the land settlement. Then, after they have possession of everyone’s properties, the new Kenyan government force my parents off the farm they’ve spent two and a half decades creating.

  Fortunately, Mummie and Dad sensed this coming. As they face the prospect of having no home and no income, my father lands a part-time job as a tour guide with a local travel company. Finally something is going well: thanks to his military experience of having been the first person ever to map the route from Kenya to Nigeria, Dad knows the roads and sights of Africa better than any tour guide in the region and is earning a good wage—especially from American travellers, who are known to tip generously when they especially like a guide.

  At this point, every few months I’m making regular visits home from the army. During one of these visits in 1962, Dad, Mummie, and I make a decision. We love Africa, and travellers are clearly growing more interested in the place we call home. We three go in as partners, founding our own travel company, with the intent to host safaris around Kenya, and then possibly moving into other areas of East Africa.

  By 1965, when I return to Africa for good, friends of mine are leading hunting expeditions, and some of the locals have set themselves up as travel agents, guides, and drivers—and everyone is beginning to make money.

  My parents find a house to rent in Rosslyn, one of Nairobi’s most genteel suburbs, and I move into the tiny guesthouse on the grounds of their new home.

  In a bold move to set the tone for our brand, I use the money the army paid me when they discovered that my working on tanks had left me with high tone deafness to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser—one of the first-ever Land Cruisers sold in Kenya. “Not a single travel company in Kenya even owns its own truck, and you had to go and buy a Japanese one,” my father says. “Don’t you remember what they did in the war?”

  He, my mother, and I spend evenings drinking Dad’s gin, developing a business plan, and brainstorming a name for the company that will both sound grand and put us at the top of the yellow pages. Abbot & Kent is a little too sleepy; Aardvark & Kent would make for a horrible logo. And then we all think that “Abercrombie” sounds like someone who i
s rich and powerful. “Abercrombie . . .” I experiment with it. “Abercrombie & Kent.”

  Mummie and Dad both look up, turning the phrase over in the silence between them. “I quite like it,” my dad says.

  “Rather elegant, isn’t it?” says Mummie.

  Our challenge now is to find clients. After reading an issue of Time magazine, I learn that Texans are the richest people in the world. Whenever I station myself outside the New Stanley Hotel or in the adjacent Thorn Tree Restaurant, I find it easy to spot the Americans in contrast to the travellers who arrive from London or Johannesburg. Americans usually carry lots of baggage, and they wear cowboy boots, and sometimes Stetsons.

  Americans are very picky about their guides, and my friendliness proves to be a selling point—indeed, we begin to magnetically attract business with this approach. As we book our first few clients, I’m motivated to think even more critically about what people really want from a once-in-a-lifetime safari vacation. We’ve set ourselves apart with a nice truck, and we send our clients out for the day with drinks chilled in our ice bucket. Still, there’s so much opportunity for us to stand out. The lodges for nonhunting safari clients are lackluster, sometimes offering only a couple dozen tiny rooms and zero in-suite dining. The last thing a tourist wants to do after a flight from London or New York is to locate an African market and then navigate his or her way around it, looking for a nice bottle of wine or foods that are particularly appetizing.

  {A&K staff}

  My first design of a mobile tent, canvas and poles, Ngorongoro, 1966.

  My idea lights something in me so serious that I know I can’t share it with my father. “Let us carry on as we are,” he’s taken to saying, but I know his true conflict is with how much money we’d need to invest to grow our business into something unique.

  While he and my mother are on vacation trekking through the Khyber Pass, which connects Pakistan and Afghanistan, I make a trip to the bank. “I’d like to make a withdrawal from our business account, please.”

  “How much?” asks the bank manager.

  “All of it.”

  “That’s seven thousand pounds, Mr. Kent.”

  “OK, I’ll take five thousand pounds,” I tell him. “Leaving two thousand pounds for a rainy day.”

  I call my old army friend, Corporal Taylor, and inform him that I’m preparing to buy a secondhand army Bedford truck—four tons, with four-wheel drive. “I’m putting in a refrigeration system,” I tell him. He agrees to meet me in Nairobi.

  We work day and night to build the freezer—five feet long, three feet deep—and we fit the refrigerator with special rubber balances to keep everything steady across rough terrain. When we finish, we drink Tusker beers chilled on ice made from a generator connected to the truck: Abercrombie & Kent is officially the first East African safari outfit to develop mobile refrigeration.

  I order tents from Low & Bonar, a Scottish textiles company that makes the best-quality tents for hunters. Then I travel into the city on a shopping spree for beds and furniture, blankets and linens, pots and pans, china and silver, Royal Crown Derby teacups, and, in a nod to my mother, cut glass decanters for the wine and a silver ice bucket.

  In our driveway in Rosslyn, I lay everything out and pack it into trunks that I’ve had custom-made to fit into the back of the Bedford. Then I line the trunks with thick layers of sponge rubber to protect all the delicate items during transport. On the sides of the truck I attach containers for spare fuel, emergency supplies, and first-aid equipment; and, finally, I make a checklist to ensure each item is present. (Imagine arriving at your objective one hundred fifty miles into the wilderness and realizing you’ve forgotten the toilet paper.)

  Corporal Taylor agrees to accompany me to the campsite for two weeks, as do Omolo and Wilfred, the driver I’ve hired, and Joseph Nduati, the chief salesman from Low & Bonar. We color-code our tent poles for the fastest assembly possible, and then at four in the morning we pile into the back of the truck and trundle out of Rosslyn. To train, we drive out a hundred seventy miles to Lake Baringo in the Great Rift Valley—a spot that I know well from the crocodile-shooting escapades my parents took me on as a child. Its shallowness—the lake is at maximum thirty-nine feet deep—makes it a prime habitat for crocodiles and hippopotami, meaning we’ll get the experience of setting up camp in the wild.

  When we arrive at our training ground, I pull out a stopwatch, a pencil, a yellow pad, and my whistle. “Logistics training at its finest,” Corporal Taylor rags.

  Meanwhile I take my place to coach the team on our objective. “We have two weeks,” I tell them. “We have to learn to set up camp in under twenty-four hours, and strike it in less than twelve.” I click the stopwatch and we unload the truck, the tents going up and down, up and down, up, down, up, down, until the staff is exhausted.

  After just over a week’s time, we pop a bottle of champagne: there before us stand four tents, each of them fifteen feet across with a veranda six feet deep in the front. In an afternoon’s time, each tent can be erected by this, my new staff, to hold an occupancy equivalent of a double room in a hotel. The floor of every tent is covered with a groundsheet to keep out bugs and beetles, then covered again with a beautiful rug. The walls of the tents rise about twelve feet and slope somewhat inward, making the interior feel much like a bedroom. The veranda leads into the living-room portion of the tent, and the entire thing feels spacious and bright, with electric light, bedside lamps, beautiful carpets, and lovely sprung double beds high off the ground.

  The lavatories are located outside, near the tents. They consist of long drop holes, about three feet deep, treated with lime and covered with a proper seat—a handsome mahogany box, which totally conceals the fact that there’s only a deep hole underneath it. Inside the outhouses are tables carrying current copies of Country Life and Punch. There’s a heap of earth behind the lavatory seat and a little drawing of a rhino on the wall, with the inscription Rhinos cover it, so will you too, please? We’ll never stay at the same site for more than three days, so the conditions are perfectly hygienic.

  Inside the tent we’ve put lovely Plastolene tubs for women to take bubble baths in, and out back we’ve put in showers for the men. The showers lie directly behind the tent and consist of a perforated showerhead attached to a large canvas bag that’s filled and refilled with heated water, operated by a chain and slung over the branch of a tree. A guest can soap up and pull the chain, then down will come the water at an impressive pressure. When they’ve had enough, they’ll pull another chain, which will cut the water off.

  Inside the suite we lay out a bottle of Scotch on ice, chilled martinis, crystal wineglasses, and sideboards displaying fresh vegetable crudités, smoked salmon, and chocolate cake. I look at my men, and we behold the total luxury experience before us. The whole scene is completely ace. I vow that this marriage of adventure and extravagance will be the stamp that Abercrombie & Kent’s brand will come to be known by: the Off the Beaten Track Safari.

  I leave Corporal Taylor, Omolo, and Joseph looking after camp while I head into town to sort out the final details. I stroll in past the grand columns and coral pink facade of the Muthaiga Country Club, where my father has recently had me instated as a member. Sipping a drink in the lounge area, I take in the club’s incredible beauty: the polished wood shelves and trim, the rich flower arrangements, the stained-glass windows and French doors. The head barman, Francis Maina, calls over to me from the far end of the bar. “Would you like to see the lunch menu, Mr. Kent?”

  {Charlie Grieves-Cook}

  Each mobile tent contains a fully flushing toilet, washbasin and shower, and arched, netted windows that allow the breeze to pass through.

  “Please.”

  He comes to me, opens the leather binder, and places it between my wrists resting on the bar. I have to control my appetite as I view the lunch menu. Francis walks over to take my order—the usual: potted shrimps in frozen butter on well-done toast, roast beef, and Yorkshi
re pudding. “I’ll start with ice-cold avocado soup with Tabasco sauce,” I tell him.

  “And to finish? Chocolate pudding with ice cream, or sticky toffee pudding?”

  “Chocolate,” I tell him.

  Abercrombie & Kent needs the best chef in Nairobi, I sit thinking. Where will I find a hospitality staff as good as the Muthaiga Club’s? When Francis returns from putting in my order, I lean in. “You’re known to be the best barman in Nairobi,” I murmur. “If I told you I had a job for you, and that you’d make more money with more interesting clientele and more flexible hours . . . would you come with me?”

  His eyes go wide as we exchange a glance. He nods inconspicuously.

  “What about the maître d’, and the chef—do you think they’d come along with you?”

  Again, Francis nods.

  “Give your notice and plan to start in two weeks,” I tell him. “And don’t say a word to the members.”

  However, my parents return from their vacation the next week, and my father’s gotten wind of it. “You’ve spent our entire savings, you’ve killed our business, and you couldn’t fail to do so before nicking the best staff the Muthaiga Club has ever seen. Jesus, Geoff, have you gone completely nuts?”

  “Dad, I’ve told you that we need to do something to stand out from the competition. It was a risk, but now we’ve done it, and soon we’ll be the envy of every safari outfitter in Kenya.”

  “Darling,” says my mother, “I think the idea itself is marvelous, but the price of something like this will cost three to four times what we’ve been charging, at least. Where on earth do you think we’re going to get clients who can spend that?”

  In a huff, my father speeds off—to the club, no doubt—and I look at my watch: the first flights from London and Johannesburg will arrive in time for lunch. I dash out to the New Stanley Hotel, sit down at my usual table, and order my usual lunch: a milkshake. From my bag I pull my calculator and a notebook and lay out my maps, staring hard.