A Congo Christmas Part 1
A week of unpaved roads in an oversized safari truck with no shocks. The return trip looming ahead. A desperate, dire wish for my sports bra to magically appear in my rucksack. Who would have thought to bring extra support on a safari? None of the women on this trip did, and we were all regretting our oversight. Add the incessant bouncing to the crack-of-dawn mornings, lack of entertainment, and long days cloistered on the truck, and the entire group was grumbling by the time we were nearing the Congolese border.
Why would 20 reasonably, or at least arguably, sane individuals from various countries around the world sign up to be confined in a box on wheels with absolute strangers for two weeks of their lives? Camping in tents that require a degree from MIT to put up. Living with basic, and in some cases no, sanitation or electricity. Some campsites do have power, but not all. One of the Aussies nearly pitched a fit when she realized she couldn’t charge her cell phone the first night, and the English were in a panic as they couldn’t get updates to the ‘football’ (soccer) matches back home. The obvious question arises: Had we gone insane?
With one very certified exception, the answer is a resounding, “No.” We had all simply grown tired of the same vacations, at the same locations, year after year. We had come to the conclusion, quite independently, that it was time for something different, something unusual. And for nature lovers, there isn’t much out there that can surpass the ‘unusual’ we were suffering to see.
Rather than a week of drunken revelry on the beach, or bundled up for a swanky ski vacation, or shudder, yet another Christmas spent with dysfunctional relatives, the 20 random people on this particular safari had opted to celebrate this year’s holidays hiking through the Congolese jungle in search of our hairier relations.
Our safari (literally ‘journey’ in Swahili) started in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the scariest cities I have ever had the displeasure of visiting. While it seemed a bit safer, and was quite noticeably cleaner, than my previous visit, I was still anxious to get out of town. The world’s cities have a seemingly magnetic effect on the less desirable elements of human society, and Nairobi just might be the strongest magnet on the planet. It came as a relief when, brief introductions and final payments made, we departed on schedule.
Our first day was a long-haul down to the Masai Mara — the portion of the Serengeti that lies on the Kenyan side of the border. We spent a few nights here and had the opportunity to go on several game drives, as well as a visit to a traditional Masai village. For the uninitiated, a ‘game drive’ is just that — driving around the savannah, looking for game. While safari-goers no longer shoot live ammo, just pictures (hunting in the reserves is illegal), the name is a hold over from the colonial days when the animals were, in fact, game.
(Read the continuation of A Congo Christmas in a future issue of Pinch.)