Samburu - Quest for the Big 5



Baby Elephant

Boy was it windy last night!  The heavy cancass tents were flapping and flailing like an angry raven resulting in very little sleep for me...ya that's it, the wind...had nothing to do with the roars and grumbles we heard through out the night.  All joking aside we did here a few strange noises which were later revealed to be elephants disgustive systems, which can be heard for kilometres. The experience definitely wins over lack of sleep, by a long shot.  The feeling here in Samburu is one of very remote authenticitiy, which is what we have been so excited for.  Unfortunately, that authenticity was also met with slight disappointment as this morning's game drive was pretty much for not. Althought 2 hours in authentic Africa is much better spent then 2 hours on the job, we did end up driving around for 2 hours in the safari van without seeing a single point of interest!  After the game drive, Mike declared that all of the animals must have migrated southward already toward more fertile lands.



Samburu war dance



Women of the Village



As previously mentioned, it gets way too hot by mid day to be searching for animals, whatever animals were still remaining, would be hiding in the shade of trees and bushes.  So we decided to take a drive into the local Samburu village which we had passed yesterday on our way in. The understanding here is that we would be given a detailed tour of a traditional Saburu village.  The deal here is that it is regarded as rude and disrespectful to take candid shots of the villagers, who instead invite you to join them in their daily activities.  Judging by our guide book and our official tour guide, the belief is that these villagers are the real deal, what you see is what you get.  Being who I am, I often approach situtation like this with skeptisism.  My first hint was that they wanted $25 US from us each for this village tour.  In our opinion this was quite a bit of money for people who don't own, nor have a need for, a material single item.  Anyway, we decided to go as this was the proper way to be able to take pictures and it gave us the chance to interact with the tribe. 




how the Samburu make fire

My failed attempt






Inside the Hut

From the introduction to the end, their manner was very professional, polite, and inviting. They performed a few war and welcome dances for us and even gave us the chance to join in on a couple of them.  After the dances and a quick round of questions, we were brought inside the Samburu village, which consisted of about 2 dozen shelters.  The village guide explained to us that the shelters are made of cow dung and old cardboard making it easy to pack up and move the entire village as the Samburu people are nomadic hunter/gatheres.  For me, the $25 entry fee became worthwhile when we were given a glimpse inside the hut, and were even allowed to climb into the hut itself.  The hut consisted of two areas to sleep (sheep skin blankets on the ground), one for the parents, and one for the children, and also fire place in the middle. placed for both cooking and for warmth...although its very hot during the day, its quite cool at nights.  The next stage of our tour brings us to fire making 101.  This is fire making African wilderness style...with two sticks, a few grains of sand, and some bark shavings. The demostration seems easy enough to replicate until I attempt it for myself.  The process seems fairly straight forward, you've got one piece of stick being rubbed quickly between the palms of your hands as you drill the tip into another stick which has a hallowed out bottom where they throgh some sand in for added friction.  The idea is creat enough friction to bring smoke, add some tree bark, blow a little oxygen into it, and voila!  I have little (no) success and am quickly demoted.  Clearly there is much more complicated technique that I'm not about to master in a couple of minutes.



Authentic Samburu Hut - The reality is they do sleep and live in these things

    

Samburu children getting primary English lessons

Later on it is explained to us that some of the local villagers are sent off to be educated by catholics in the local schools. But in order to do so, the children must have uniforms which cost money which, of course they do not have...of course this is all mentioned to us very casually...but two and two? We casually ignore these "subtle" hints but this of course, resulted in further eyebrow raising on my part. The interesting thing I discovered while here is that a) they can't wear traditional clothes to attend these schools b) they can't have those huge holes in their ears they make as part of their tradition if they wish to attend, and c) they can't wear their traditional jewelry to the schools either.  Its no wonder they think the west is trying to brain wash, manipulate, and control them.  The second to last portion of our tour takes us directly into and area where a "professor" is teaching the village children to count to 10 and sing the alphabet in English. The Children vary in age but are all looking at us with their best puppy dog eyes.  Our guide continues, "it is through the donations of people like yourself that we are able to educate ourselves".  He had already mentioned this to us at least 4 times by now and eventualy asked us directly "so if you'd like to donate, if you can find it in your heart, just let me know".  At this point I began to feel very awkward as I felt as though the $25US I already gave, should be going to these children. It is one thing to bring in foreigners in an attempt to guilt them in to handing over peity money, but what really bothered me was the fact that this tribe owes its existence to their persistant refusal to adopt to Western norms.   



Samburu Warriors





So by giving this money am I not contributing to the destruction of their traditional ways of life, instead of their prosperity? These sale by guilt tactics continued as we were introduced to the town "black smith" who, as far as we could tell was just some random guy sitting beneath a tree.  We were then quickly ushured/escorted toward a large number of local women encouraging and begging us to buy some of their beaded jewelry.  I am always one for supporting locals when I travel but in all honesty, neither of us were interested in anything they were offereing. I'll leave it to you to decide for yourselves as I seem to be jadded when it comes to these things, but again, other then education, what could these people possibly need money for?  The Samburu diet consists of milk, blood, and goat meat..no vegetables as nothing grows here...their houses are free, they own no vehicles, they don't have electricity and they are nealy 100% self sufficient except in times of drought. 

 

Some additional random information ont he Samburu:  their enemy is the Somali tribe to the north east and they apparently still have raids on each other once in awhile.  They still have traditional medecine men, and blacksmiths, and they are pretty well 100% carnivors as there is very little edible vegetation which grows. All in all I'm glad I went as I really did enjoy learning about them, meeting  them, and of course, the pictures are absolutely stunning if I do say so myself!



The elusive greater Kudu!! These animals are extremely rare, we saw 2 in 2 days!

Later that afternoon we went to see how the rich travel Africa.  We went with our guide to the nearby resort to see what life is like on the other side.  He needed to check his tire pressure and get a shave so we decided we needed to tag along fo a cold beer!  This place was very extravagent and we sat in a covered oval room perched high above the meandering river and watched the birds fly by, all while enjoying our cold Tuskerrs.  I was informed that later they would be feeding the crocodiles in the river for the entertainment of the resorts guests...but we didn't stick around.  As nice as it was, it didn't have the genuine feel of the park that we had in our campground. After some quick tea and biscuits at our camp we were off to our late afternoon gamedrive. 


 Todays late afternoon drive once again began very slow but ended spectacularly.  We found ourselves hanging out by the river as yesterday this is where most of the action was .  Sure enough this time the river yielded us a couple of lionesses that seemingly everyone else in the park was also aware of.  The lions were very actively moving around (maybe even hunting?) but Mike wrangled his way into an incredible spot for us where we were able to get extremely close to the lioness' resulting in an incredible sense of amazement.  They are such beautiful animals, and to see them from this close, in their natural habitat is truly a thrill. The lionesses actually walked right beside our van at this point and Marlene swears they were eyeing us hungrily head to toe contemplating the difficulty of the kill!


Dinner tonight was traditional African food including oxtail soup, chepati with fish masala and veggies...and of course lots of passion fruit for Marlene.



Lions on the prowl