JANUARY-MARCH 2020 TRAVEL AFRICA
by Geoffrey Dean
Our Samburu tracker had seen the three bull elephants nearly a mile away, high up near the top of the Yatta Escarpment as they were beginning their descent down through thick vegetation towards the Galana river. It was a remarkable piece of spotting that even Iain Allan, the doyen of Kenyan walking guides, admitted he would not have made with the naked eye, for the elephants blended seamlessly. Knowing the decades-old trail they would follow to the river, he led us to within 25 yards of where they would cross our route and motioned for us to crouch low and make no sound. Soon after, the three bulls sauntered noiselessly past us, completely unaware of our presence, for the wind was blowing our scent back behind us. The oldest, whom Iain put in his mid-thirties, had massive tusks that almost touched the ground. “Ninety-pounders,” he estimated afterwards.
All fifteen of us - nine walkers along with Iain and his five-man Samburu team - watched transfixed. It was one of those magical bush moments, a real hair-tingler. We were the only people for miles, for the northern sector of Tsavo East National Park is accessible only with special permission from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). Iain receives that for both his walks and specially-selected camps on the Galana river.
Nobody knows Tsavo better than Iain, an honorary warden of the park. It would be an exaggeration to say he knows every inch of it, for it is just too vast at 22,812 square kilometres, making it the second biggest national park in Africa and 10% larger than Israel. But since 2001, and at the time of writing, he has led walks across it 89 times. Each lasts ten days and is 100 miles, the width of the park from Tsavo West to Tsavo East. Throw in the scores of shorter five-day walks in the park he conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, and you realise he has traversed around 15,000 miles of Tsavo. And despite being 71, he has no intention of stopping. “I’ll keep walking here till I drop,” he chuckled with his Scottish lilt, still detectable six decades after he arrived in Kenya on the boat from Glasgow with his parents as an eight-year old.
Wild dog pups
Iain’s ‘Great Walk of Africa’, as his company Tropical Ice has coined it, is the last remaining foot safari of its type in Kenya. Indeed, very few walks of this length are still undertaken in any African national park or game reserve. Yet, it is the best way to gain a genuine feel for a park and to surprise its wildlife. “It’s like an old-style hunting safari except with cameras,” Iain declared. Moving noiselessly through the bush, for silence is strictly observed, we chanced on a cornucopia of animals and birds over the 100 miles. Some highlights included an elephant and her calf wallowing in a mud bath, oblivious to our prying eyes; a pride of lions coming down to the river to drink, totally unaware of our camp a hundred yards away; a hippo and a week-old calf on the riverbank opposite; several sightings of the rare fringe-eared oryx; and a leopard that drank long on the other side of the river before eventually seeing us. In all, we saw four leopards over the ten days, including one memorably silhouetted at sunset on the top of a kopje. Although we came across wild dogs, we were not so lucky with cheetah, seeing none, for their numbers are down in Tsavo.
A leopard drinks from the Tsavo River
Wildlife numbers in the park are a recurring subject matter for Iain, given the worrying fall in lion populations throughout Africa and the appalling levels of elephant and rhino poaching. Lion numbers in Tsavo were estimated at 300-350 in a count in mid-2019, although Iain thinks the figure is higher. Certainly, we encountered many, with males being predominantly maneless there. The park’s elephant population is put at 12-13,000. “It’s been that for the best part of a decade,” Iain mused at the campfire one night. “Fortunately, we’ve not had much poaching in the park in recent years, and it remains not just the biggest elephant population in East Africa, but also the one with the most super-tuskers. That’s when tusks touch the ground. As for rhinos, if there are any, we don’t see them, although there are an unspecified number in the heavily-guarded sanctuary in West Tsavo.”
Iain Allan
Iain fears the effect of any surge in poaching in the park. “Elephants can only increase their numbers by 5% per annum, but they are being poached in Africa as a whole at 7% each year,” he said. “If that continues, the species may only have fifteen years or so left. Several factors are at play here - the demand for ivory from China’s burgeoning middle class; the lack of political will in an African sense; and the killing by terrorist groups such as Boko Haram, Lord’s Resistance and Al-Shabaab. The latter are involved in the trafficking of ivory. The stance of the Vatican has not helped either, for they have refused to endorse CITES in banning the international ivory trade. The main reason is felt to be sales in religious trinkets made from ivory, in predominantly Catholic countries such as the Philippines.”
For the moment, though, KWS are working hard to meet the challenge of poaching, although in Iain’s view, “they will have their hands full, and will need to implement militaristic style tactics.” Important support comes from the Tsavo Trust, which has three spotter planes that clock up a monthly average of 72 flying hours and an annual distance of 102,000 kms around the park. Flying low-level at an average speed of 116 kph, they can keep an eye on the super-tuskers as well as identify cattle intrusions and potential poaching. Numerous KWS ground field patrols, with TT staff working alongside, are out every day and cover a combined distance of 180,000 kms in the park over one year. They do a vital job removing snares (458 in the first 8 months of 2019) as well as arresting illegal grazers (39 in the same period) and bushmeat poachers. A lioness was found poisoned in August 2019 not far from an illegal cattle boma. Human encroachment into the park is a major issue.
Happily, no evidence of poaching confronted us in our 100 miles of walking. The field patrols we occasionally encountered were the only people we came across on the entire walk, apart from a couple of safari vehicles on an evening game drive. We started walking at 7am every day and finished around midday, by which time Iain’s highly professional camp team would have driven ahead to set up our tents and mess tent. For logistical reasons, two of the days were double-headers with three hours of walking in the afternoon. Make no mistake, the Great Walk of Africa is a physical challenge. Without the deliciously wholesome food we ate - thoughtfully chosen by Iain’s wife Lou and cooked by his able Kikuyu chef of 40 years, Kahiu - the walk would have been that much more testing.
Pod of hippos
The park’s terrain differs quite markedly in West and East Tsavo. Riverine bush predominates in the hilly west, while the east is much more open with saltbush vegetation a feature along with the Yatta Escarpment. Saltbush needs careful negotiation, or avoidance, as it is favoured by lion as well as hippo, buffalo and elephant. Iain recalled how once a client’s mobile phone once went off in the vicinity of a matriarch, who promptly charged requiring him to fire a warning shot over her head. Quite rightly, walk rules stipulate phones must be off, although any signal was invariably unavailable.
Crossing the Tsavo River
Our walks always followed the two rivers: the Tsavo and the Galana (which starts at the confluence of the Tsavo and the Athi rivers). We could not walk every bend as the trip would have doubled in length. Rather we cut corners and walked inland some of the time. Every day, we had to cross a river at least twice, which may sound dangerous but by selecting wide shallow areas that were known elephant crossings, any risk of crocodile attack was negated. Not once in any of the Great Walks has there been any incident with a crocodile. Similarly, in camp, Iain says a solitary moment of alarm came when a leopard shredded a shower tent in the middle of the night.
Great Walkers by the Galana River - Iain Allan third from right back row; Geoffrey Dean second from right front row
On the subject of man-eating cats, Iain led us to the cave that was the home of the two male lions that, in 1898, terrorised the Indian workforce building the Nairobi-Mombasa railway. The line cuts through the middle of Tsavo. The cave has no signs outside it, and is well-hidden at the end of a lugga, but Iain managed to locate it thanks to the photo of it in the British engineer officer, John Patterson’s book, ‘Man-Eaters of Tsavo.’ Patterson eventually shot the lions, but not until they had eaten 132 workers, many of whose bones were found in the cave. Patterson’s antiquated railway bridge over the Tsavo River still stands, although it is now dwarfed by a modern Chinese construction that is part of a new much faster railway from the coast to Nairobi.
Iain by the entrance to the cave where bones of the victims of the Man-Eaters of Tsavo were found
If the Chinese bridge is a symbol of change in today’s Kenya, Tsavo, a national park since 1948, has changed little with the passage of time. “It’s still pretty much as it was 40 years ago when I first started walking here,” Iain mused. This magnificent wilderness faces a challenging future in his view, but for as long as he keeps walking there, a very special experience awaits those who join him.
Tropical Ice was founded 40 years ago as East Africa’s first adventure travel company. Nine ‘Great Walks of Africa’ are made each year between June and Oct. www.tropical-ice.com | safari@tropical-ice.com | +254 712 282 793
