travel – Lyrebird Mountain

The game drive – death on the African plain

THE beginning of the 1960s was a bad time for Kenya farmers. First, in 1960, came a severe drought which hit the Ukambani around Machakos harder than most other areas. As so often happens in Africa, the drought which forced farmers to sell off cattle cheaply or else move them to other and often remote grazing areas was followed by some of the worst flooding known since European settlement.

And then came the army worm (Spodoptera exempta), a voracious little caterpillar that can gobble up entire pastures in a few hours. This time the army worm plague was so thick on the ground that the Mombasa-Nairobi train couldn’t run on its tracks, greased to impassability by the crushed bodies.

After the army worm the precious new grazing that came up after the rain was suddenly invaded by herds of zebra and wildebeest. The first time in years such a thing had happened and the timing seemed almost deliberate, as if the game was getting its revenge for the invasion of the wilderness with our pampered domestic stock.

And so the farmers gathered in the Ukambani to save their grazing by driving the herds of zebra and wildebeest, impala and kongoni back into the Masaai Reserve. Half a dozen families including children over the age of twelve, assorted friends and relatives from “town” who enjoyed a bit of shooting, and plenty of watu to do most of the “driving” because it was not only white settlers who were affected by the infestation of game but also the squatters who lived on their land and those who worked the village shambas.

Imagine if you can today, in the age of endlessly clicking cameras and little zebra-striped safari buses and game lodges with infinity pools what is was like to rise in the chill of dawn on the day of the game drive. To eat a hearty breakfast of porridge or cornflakes, eggs and bacon, kedgeree and sliced venison, toast and marmalade. To hear the click of bolts as guns were checked and feel the excitement sizzle through your veins like a lighted fuse. It sounds terrible to tell such a tale today, but this is how it was, back then and one shouldn’t judge the past by the mores of the present.

All had been planned days before. A shallow valley selected along which the herds could be driven; the strategic placing of the best shots along that route, the starting point for the mass of yelling beaters waving sticks and bright pieces of cloth and clubs to finish off the wounded animals. Also in the rearguard were those Europeans who would follow the herds in vehicles, some armed, some just along for the fun of it, all making a great deal of noise as they bush-bashed their suffering vehicles over the rough and mostly trackless terrain. Here and there lookouts were stationed on rock outcrops and small kopjes along the slopes above the valley. These were mostly younger people and the less-experienced shots, positioned where their sharp eyes could be of benefit to the hunters but where they were in no danger from the stampeding mass of hooves and horns. We (for I was once one of them) were given light rifles and two pieces of cloth, one red and one white. We waved the white “flag” when we first saw the game coming towards us down the valley. The red cloth was used mostly to drive back any animals desperate enough to stray up the slope. It could also be used to signal danger to the other watchers, for where there are zebra and wildebeest in a panic there are also lion and hyena. Other creatures used to get caught up in game drives, too, made dangerous when their natural fear of humans was overcome by confusion. Rhino for example. Or stray buffalo.

Standing on one of the kopjes with hands shading eyes, we looked to where we’d been told the game would come. It was a long wait, in the hot early sun that drove the chill from the air and hyrax back to their holes after a night’s foraging. This was Africa so in that early hour there was always something to see; a Bataleur eagle soaring overhead, a cloud of vultures rising on distant thermals, a family of wart hogs trotting busily by, tails in air, a cobra slithering hood down in the grass. We were always warned to be wary of cobras which were plentiful thereabout and used to lie and sun themselves on the rocks, ever ready to take offence. Meandering across the long, shallow valley was a creek, dry in that season and a likely hazard to the vehicles that would soon cross it in pursuit of the driven herd. Its belt of shrubs and long grass was a daytime shelter for the small solitary antelope such as Dik Dik and Duiker and they, too, would be caught up in the general stampede and perish there, unless they could stay calm and low among the boulders.

It takes a long, long time to get grazing herds of wildebeest and zebra on the move. They start easily when disturbed by humans but don’t run for long. They must be steadily, mercilessly harassed until the spark of panic ignites into a headlong rush that will not easily be stopped until the stronger beasts tire. For once they are in range of the guns and begin to fall they must run on and on, or die. On the particular day that lives in my memory, it was early afternoon before those of us acting as lookouts far down in the valley saw the first puff of dust on the horizon. The puff soon became a cloud, thick and brown, rising higher and higher, sinister as smoke. Then we heard the dull, insistent thud of many thousands of hooves and, as they came closer, the wild cries of the beaters and the blare of vehicle horns. We enthusiastically waved our white flags to signal the distant marksmen and soon enough the vanguard was a hundred yards from us, heads down, back legs driving through under the hard bellies or else kicking up in occasional bursts of terror or perhaps rage.

On and on they came, the heavy grey bodies of the wildebeest, the flashing stripes of the zebra, an occasional flash of dun or chestnut. Small self-contained herds of impala stayed wisely on the edge of the stampede, leaping high and long, graceful even in panic. You could smell them from a long distance; the bovine gaminess of fleeing ungulates; the reek of squirted dung turned liquid by fear. And over it all, and through it all, the coppery smell of African dust that is made up of so many elements both ancient and new. Amazingly, despite the general pandemonium, a few creatures here and there would stand off to the side, grazing for a few minutes as if they hadn’t a care in the world, before suddenly rejoining the stampede. Some of these strayed innocently up the slope to where the lookouts were waiting to shoo them back into the mainstream and though here and there some developed a sudden sense of self-preservation and broke through to safety up the slope and beyond, most obeyed the herd instinct and continued to run with the rest.

The din was beyond description yet soon another and louder sound reached our ears as the guns began their merciless slaughter. And slaughter it was, because the point of the exercise was not fine shooting but simply to send the herds far enough away from the European-owned farms and tribal shambas so that they could not easily come back. So the hunters – and perhaps hunting is not quite the right word here for it denotes skill and there was no skill involved in this – just fired into the solid mass of animal flesh as it galloped by, not worrying whether they killed outright or merely wounded. In any case, no wounded animal would survive long in the rush for if it stumbled or fell the hooves of its fellows would make sure it never got up again. And so it went on, hour after hour, and we all felt the blood-madness that takes over at such time until the last few exhausted stragglers staggered by.

This blood madness is a fearful thing and when it passes people look at one another uneasily or cough and turn aside or light up a cigarette or shuffle themselves about a bit, embarrassed by such a loss of the self that is usually governed by everyday decencies. Some find it harder to shed than others. I remember an incident involving two young soldiers from the Cameronian regiment, invited out for the day by a kindly farmer who feeling sorry for them as being far from home and friendless in a strange land, thought they should be given a chance to know Africa better before being sent elsewhere. This pair were not officers but ordinary squaddies from the slums of Glasgow whom nobody else would have thought to invite into their homes.

They were conspicuously ill-at-ease among the settlers, shy and mumbling and sounding so much like the comic-book hero Oor Wullie that nobody could understand a word they said. Yet at the end of the day, with the blood madness still on them, they suddenly became volubly over-excited. As we drove home in the red dusk, with several of us standing close-packed in the big farm truck, they were swearing and yelling every time the wheels hit a pothole, boasting of all they had shot that day. Game drives got to some people like that; they just couldn’t come down or let go. A jackal ran in front of the truck, its eyes glinting in the dusk, presenting an easy target. One of the soldiers picked up his rifle and shot it, but the shot only caused a gut wound and the jackal spun round and round, shrieking and snapping at its side. The soldiers laughed at the spinning jackal; almost screaming with mirth that sounded every bit as frenzied and horrible as the shrieks of the wounded animal. The whole convoy of vehicles stopped and somebody – I can’t remember who – finished off the jackal with a merciful bullet. The soldiers stopped laughing and there was a dark silence. Having killed all day and seen others kill, they couldn’t understand that what they had done was an appalling breach of etiquette. That enough was enough, even for hunters. That we were sated with slaughter and could suddenly bear no more of it. Especially when it was gratuitous and unnecessary. I think one of the soldiers had been planning to jump out and seize the dead animal’s brush, as a trophy, but if so he thought better of it and they were both silent for the rest of the journey. Nor did we see them later at the post-hunt barbecue on one of the farms, for they had been packed off back to their regiment.

Behind us on the plane we had left more than a thousand corpses scattered in heaps of grey and brown and black-and-white. The watu from the farms would take some of the meat and so would the tribespeople from the reserve but most would be left to the scavengers, for Africa has a vast appetite and can soon swallow up any excess, any outrage. Blood and bone and flesh would soon enough be reduced to fragments in the dust and where in the fresh morning the herds had grazed and kicked their heels, now the carrion eaters would come through the evening murk for their turn at the table.

Rumours of blood travel far and fast in Africa.

My first love affair

The sea was sparkling blue beneath the summer skies

And all alone with you I was in paradise

We wandered hand-in-hand, along the golden sand

Into my first love affair

That song was a big hit back in the late fifties when I was at boarding school in Nairobi. It was made famous, I think, by an English singer named Craig Douglas (possibly not his real name; very few English boys were called “Craig” back then); a milkman who had enjoyed a brief flare of fame before sinking back into obscurity. I feel I have a small claim on Craig Douglas because my cousin Susan, who lived (and still lives) on the Isle of Wight knew a girl who went out with him. Presumably while he was still a milkman. His songs, of which I can only remember two (the other is the more famous She Was Only Sixteen), seemed to echo the clopping sound of a milkman doing his horse-drawn rounds, or so my father once commented. Though by the late 1950s I don’t suppose there were many milkmen still driving horses, not even on the Isle of Wight.

For those of us who WERE about sixteen when the bland but boyishly pleasant-looking Douglas (he didn’t smoulder like Cliff or have the cheeky charm of Adam) enjoyed his brief hit-parade success, it was a song for our time and place. I was slightly younger but already well awake to the possibilities of love. It was no accident that Shakespeare made Juliet fourteen; we forget as we age that the most intense love is felt in our teens, when our hormones are most urgent and our emotions untempered by reality.

To live in Mombasa, back then, and walk along one of those endlessly pefect beaches, beside the Indian Ocean which ALWAYS sparkles, hand-in-hand with the boy of our choice (and who had, oh bliss! chosen us) really was paradise enow! True, our sand was white rather than golden, and all the better for that. Our cousins in England, poor pale things, could only enjoy that gold for a brief summer each year, and that fleetingly. Whereas we Kenya kids had our white beaches always there for our delight.

And so, for the teenagers of Mombasa, and those older than us who, for reasons which we found incomprehensible and faintly revolting, still insisted on romance in their lives, the beach was an essential factor in our love affairs. So it was for me, and I still remember those moonlight walks and frenzied gropings in the sand with great affection. But my first love affair was not with a boy – it was with Mombasa itself; the town and the coastlines north and south. Mombasa was the first great love of my life; like all great loves the memory still warms my heart and like all lost loves it haunts me still.

I still remember the day I fell in love. My father had taken up a new post and so we packed up the house in Nairobi and headed for the coast. We were, I remember, all ecstatic about this. Nairobi had come to seem grim with the dark shadow of Mau Mau still upon it. We didn’t doubt that the British Government and the stalwart nature of the settlers on their fortified farms would ultimately prevail over a handful of disaffected and witch-ridden tribesmen but there was nonetheless a strong sense of unease in the European community, sensed even by children at a time when children were seen and not heard and certainly not informed about adult affairs. It is not of course the done thing to say this now, but we felt betrayed by those we considered in our trust and wondered whether we could ever feel safe in that beloved country again. Too, the winds of change were beginning to blow just over the horizon, perceptible to those astute at reading political weather. Terrorism was all but defeated but those of us who thought we had won the battle were soon to find we had lost the war; within a decade we would no longer rule the land and our way of life would be gone forever.

None of this weighed on my small family, however, as we took the red road to the coast. We knew what to expect because we had holidayed at Jadini where the simple thatched banda with its iron beds and primitive bathroom, sited between the jungle and the splendid beach, was all that up-country folk expected of a holiday in those simple times. But to actually live there with the beach forever at the door and the palm trees waving and the warm, moist seawind blowing over the island was unimaginable bliss. Especially after Nairobi which seemed colourless and dreary by comparison.

I should admit here that I never did really care for Nairobi. Most Mombasa people didn’t. Perhaps I associate the Kenya capital with boarding school (which I loathed and where I always felt I’d been exiled from my coastal heartland) and also the earlier period of Mau Mau with its curfews and alarms. Beyond that, however, I always sensed (and still do in memory) a darkness at the heart of the city which Ewart Grogan once described as “that miserable scrap heap of tin”. Of course it had changed a lot since pioneering days and had its revered icons – the Norfolk Hotel, the New Stanley bar, the markets, the game park at its boundary – as well as some fine social and civic developments such as theatres, shops, cinemas and Ledgco. For me, though, there was always a faint sense of depression to be found in the neat suburbs where so many of the houses were built of a grim grey stone, imprisoned by dense hedges of cypress or kai apple. I felt this most keenly on those Sunday afternoons when I was taken out of school on one of the precious exeats by well-meaning aunts who took me to their homes and tried hard to feed and amuse me. The homes all seemed to be filled with a kind of sad Sunday silence . Even the gardens were darkened by overhanging trees which seemed vaguely threatening to me; occasionally leopards were seen in those trees, hunting the suburbs for dogs. Such leopards, the servant of one of my aunts once told me, were really were-creatures and therefore dangerous because they had no fear of people and were particularly fond of the flesh of children. He was a Kikuyu and thus believed strongly in such things and I believed too, because it seemed quite natural that Nairobi would harbor black horrors behind its sombre hedges.

The coast, by contrast, was all lightness and sun and happy glitter. We arrived there as eager new residents after the long drive which at that time was still an adventure. Traffic was low enough that when you passed another car, in a cloud of red dust, everyone waved and sometimes we would stop and exchange news of conditions ahead of us. Animals large and small crossed the road with insouciant frequency; everything from tiny ground squirrels by the dozens to buck and gazelle of various types, zebra and wildebeest on the Athi Plains as far as the scarp above Hunter’s Lodge, then rhino and elephant in the hot lowlands of the nyika. The mandatory stops were Kibwezi and Mtito Andei where there was a passable roadhouse; Voi if you needed fuel or felt you couldn’t go any further.

On this occasion we drove across the Causeway and on to Mombasa Island late in the afternoon, our car covered in red dust that also lay thick and gritty in our eyes and throats. Our first stop was the office of “Uncle” Peter. This was a courtesy title only; he and “Aunt” Kay were friends of my parents and no relation at all but it was common then for children to address close family friends by familial titles. The Japanese do it too, and the Australian aborigines. It’s one of those little social niceties that we have now lost in an age where even very small children call all adults by their given names.

Uncle Peter worked for the government and though I don’t know exactly what he did it must have been reasonably high-ranking because he and Aunt Kay had rather a splendid house on the seafront, next-door-but-one to the Golf Club.

And it was there, sitting outside his office, in the back of our brand-new albeit dusty Morris Oxford, that I fell in love. I remember the moment perfectly, though I can’t remember for the life of me exactly where we were. Somewhere around Treasury Square I should imagine. My father had gone inside to announce our arrival and while he was there I looked up and saw a coconut palm, heavy with fruit, leaning over the pavement. This tree, in all its slender elegance, repeated itself in shadow upon a white wall. And that was it! That’s all it took! Something about the tree and the quality of light and the feel of the air pierced my young heart as surely as Cupid’s arrow and skewered it firmly into the sandy soil of the Kenya coast. Seven decades or so later I remember the moment quite clearly.

We then drove round the seafront where the usual afternoon breeze freshened the humidity. The grass on the golf course was bright green patched by the sandy bunkers. Palms framed the large houses up on the cliff, huge baobabs spread their sparse branches below. The sea was as blue as only the Indian Ocean can be on a fine day. A large ship in the dove grey and red colours of the Union Castle Line lay just off-shore awaiting the services of the small white pilot boat that bobbed over the waves towards it. Apart from one or two cars and a couple of golfers the whole expanse before our delighted eyes was devoid of human activity.

Just think, said Uncle Peter. I can walk out on to that course and play golf whenever I like – it hardly costs a thing.

Could you swim, I wondered? Swimming was new to me and associated with waterholes in the Athi River where you had to watch out for crocodiles.

Not here, said Uncle Peter. It was all coral cliffs and no beach. But you could walk round to the ferry and back one way, or to Fort Jesus and back the other way and hardly see a soul. And there were plenty of good beaches north and south of the island.

I was to do those walks many times, as child and adult. The seafront was to become focal to my life; a place to play in the baobab trees and the ruins of the wartime gun emplacements; to drive around for coolness of a Sunday afternoon and watch the bright-coloured Indian families debouch from their small cars; to buy peanuts in cones of newsprint from vendors pushing small carts; to ramble from end to end while pondering everything from failing relationships to major life-changing decisions; to swim away the school holidays in the Florida pool and, when it became a night club, to dance away the small hours. It was here that my beloved island met the sea head-on; beyond lay a world which, back then, I had absolutely no desire ever to see.

We spent our first night in the Manor Hotel. It was old and a bit fusty, with large and heavy wooden furnishings. My brother and I went to the first sitting for dinner, the only people in the dining room and the only children in the hotel at all. The waiters wore the standard uniform of white kanzu and red fez and served us with the kind, slightly irreverent deference with which African servants treated white children in those days. I remember there were four courses and that we ended with floating puddings which we thought a great novelty. Perhaps, like bread-and-butter pudding, they’ll make a come-back one day and be all the go in fashionable restaurants.

That night we slept for the first time under mosquito nets; these had not been necessary in our Nairobi house and we found them strange and a bit claustrophobic when the hotel ayah tucked us in. Funny to think that for many years after I left Mombasa I was unable to fall asleep easily because I missed the security of a net over me. Large ceiling fans stirred the air, another novelty. My parents, all dressed up to dine, came in to bid us goodnight. Isn’t it exciting?, said my mother looking happier than she had for ages because she was recovering from a serious illness that had left her thin and gaunt and very nervy. I thought it was exciting and knew myself already besotted by this new home, though I couldn’t have put my feeling into words.

Next morning I awoke and saw the sunlight glinting through the heavy shutters and, once again, that already-familiar silhouette of the coconut palm with its fronds gently shivering. The day would be full of new things; a house, a school, a different life. I don’t remember feeling even the tiniest regret for whatever I had left behind. I knew I was home.

In the years after that I came to know my island intimately, even to its furthest and least likely corners. I walked everywhere, to school, to town, to visit friends on the other side of the island. And where I didn’t walk, I cycled. It was nothing to us then to cycle all around the island and across the ferry to the south coast or over the bridge to Nyali. I’ve sailed down Kilindini Harbour and up the further reaches of the creekways beyond Port Reitz where even African fishermen didn’t go. I’ve explored the upper reaches of Tudor Creek, too, in the small and unstable canoe made by my father. There was a world of adventure for children in those places and nobody told us we shouldn’t seek it out, though the waters were full of sharks, especially around the Kenya Meat Commission and the port. I’ve swum across from the old Swimming Club to the Mombasa Club and back and cycled through the African townships and the commercial go-down area at Chamgamwe. I’ve trapped fish in the mangroves along the edge of Mbaraki and explored the forgotten caves near Fort Jesus. I’ve walked to town down Cliff Avenue when the Poinciana trees were in full bloom and wandered the streets of the Arab old town where street vendors were generous to children and old women swathed from head to toe in black bui-buis would scold us and tell us to go home.

Here, the old harbour could be glimpsed through narrow gaps between the pastel houses, busy with dhows in season, a glimpse of an earlier and more romantic epoch. We learned about this time in school; of conflicts up and down the Zinj coast, of Portuguese adventurers and Arab sultans, of slavers and missionaries and the explorers who ventured into the interior for ivory and the renown of discovering the sources of great rivers. The names of Speke and Burton, Grant and Thompson, Krapf and Rebmann were as familiar to us as were the names of Columbus and Magellan and Drake to children elsewhere. There were missionary graves just north of the island and the remains of the old Freretown slave market. Fort Jesus was a stalwart reminder of past battles; the small mosques dotted around the island a reminder that such battles had ended in compromise. We were taught that Mombasa meant “island of war” and Dar es Salaam meant “haven of peace” and that both had been havens for the pirates who sailed the waters from the Horn of Africa to Zanzibar, long before the slavers came.

I absorbed all this as if it was my birthright but strange to tell, when I learned all these things, it did not occur to me that there was anything extraordinary about the place in which I lived. I used to sit in the hot classroom at Mombasa Primary School, head on one hand, and dream of places that I considered truly exotic; Pago Pago, Rangoon, Rio di Janeiro, and great, slow-travelling rivers such as the Irrawaddy, the Brahmaputra and the Amazon. When I pictured pirates they were always walking planks in the Caribbean. Those were the faraway places with strange-sounding names of which I dreamed; it never occurred to me that the Kenya coast was in any way exciting or exotic. Like children everywhere we played at pirates and at one time our games were centred on an old wrecked boat that we found in the mangroves far up Tudor Creek. We shouted “ooo aarrhhh” at each other in the accents (or so we thought) of Devon and wore eyepatches and made swords out of timber and made each other walk the plank. We were always Blackbeard (a film that came out of Hollywood about that time) and never Sinbad. It was a triumph of culturism over geographical reality; who we were – little colonial Bwanas and Memsaabs – was more powerful with us than where we were.

Looking back like this it can be seen that I had soon learned to take my great love for granted. And yet I do think that one of the genii of the place had writhen its way into my spirit so that I “belonged” to the island in a way that my parents and other adults could not. Adults of my own kind, I mean, who had come to Mombasa too old to fall wholly under its influence. They liked it for its easy working hours, its obvious beauties, its pleasant life of clubs and sport and parties and beaches. I – and I know others who grew up there feel the same – knew something much older and deeper. It came to me in strange moments but the feeling is impossible to describe though it has something to do with Kundera’s unbearable lightness of being; a sublimity of soul envoked by a full moon over the sea, the sun shining in a certain way on a white wall, a dusty track between mbati-roofed shacks, the shocking contrast of white sand and green dune-plants and blue water, rain washing the squalid streets down the far end of Salim Road, the elegant stone fretwork of Islamic architecture, the rattle of the planks on the old Nyali Bridge, the song of the men pulling a ferry across a sun-splashed creek.

And there is a feeling more powerful than all the rest that today, long-exiled, I associate with Mombasa. It’s a purely personal feeling rather than one which others might share and though it manifests itself in the guise of memory it is not of any one particular memory but rather a synthesis of recollection that stands for a time and a place precious to my soul. I call it my “red lamp feeling” for want of any more telling description. There is a room, at that point of darkness which comes just after sundown on the equator, and in it are a mother, a father and two children. I think they are reading or listening to one of those old fashioned radios with a cloth piece at the front – I can’t quite be sure because, as I say, this is not quite a memory and not quite a feeling but something in-between. In that room there is a red-shaded standard lamp whose light shines kindly on them all and is also reflected in a nearby window. The room has window bars and the general appearance of my childhood home in Kizingo Road; beyond that I recognize and remember nothing. I have no idea what triggers this feeling/memory today but when it comes it washes over me with indescribable intensity – a sort of hot flush from the past which is at once painfully nostalgic yet deeply comforting. “This is absolutely the right time and the right place” it seems to say. I’m an atheist and a rationalist but if I believed in Heaven I would want it to be back there and back then for eternity!

So deep was my attachment to Mombasa that throughout my youth I could not bear to be anywhere else. I didn’t care much for going on long leave with my parents; the sea trip either way was fun but Europe – and England especially – seemed grey and cold and dreary to me in those years after the war. Who could find pleasure in bathing in a grey sea where the beach is full of stones, when they had known the soft white sand and coral pools of the Kenya coast? Who could enjoy the dull and rainy streets smelling of wet wool and the dank garden laurels of London suburbia when they were accustomed to dusty red-brown roads and flame-red poincianas and the beloved silhouette of palm trees? How could anyone LIVE in England, I wondered? France was a giant gallery of art and architecture intimidating to children, Italy a place of ruins both ancient and modern inhabited by voluble fat women in flowery penziones who fed and minded my brother and me while our parents went out to dine in little cliff top restaurants overlooking the sea. Well if that’s what they wanted they could do it just as well at Nyali Beach was the way I looked at it then. All I wanted was to get back home where I belonged.

Even worse was being sent up-country to boarding school. Again, it was as if all the colour had been taken from my life and I hated it! I pined and wilted and begged my parents to let me stay and finish my schooling at the coast where the old Loreto Convent seemed to embody the spirit of every such school in every tropical colonial outpost, its deep verandahs shaded by frangipani and Poinciana trees, the sound of chanting softening the wet and heavy air. Eventually I got my way; on the day when I was sent home by train, in disgrace, though fearing (justifiably!) the retribution that awaited me all I could think of was that I would soon be back in Mombasa Island’s safe and sunny embrace.

And so the years passed and in my memory we danced them away with no concern for the future. Dancing was very much part of our lives; we started when young at the Railway Club’s school holiday Wednesday night rock ‘n roll sessions for teenagers , graduating to the Sports Club at New Year and the Sunday night live band out at Port Reitz. While my parents and their friends danced sedately at the Chini Club we younger folk did the twist on the floor under the stars at Nyali, or at the Sunday tea dances further up the coast, or at private parties on Saturday nights. Nightclubs opened, seedy and mildly wicked, and we danced there, too. We danced on New Year’s Eve and at Government House on the Queen’s birthday, and on board ships in the harbor. We drove to the dances in open cars with the soft wind of the ocean blowing our hair, and back from them late at night on the long, empty roads, spoiled children of Empire who would dance forever as long as they never left the Enchanted Isle.

Yet leave we did, most of us. The problem with all great loves, whether they be for people or for places, is that they change. And so do we. When this happens we either try and accept the changes and grow old together, wrinkles and all. Or we part and go our separate ways. When Independence came to Kenya and Mombasa began to change, not dramatically at first but in small, insidious increments, I knew I couldn’t stay. The reasons for leaving were all commonsensical but in my heart I felt that a serpent had entered Eden and I and my kind were being cast out and that Eden itself was about to be despoiled. Fanciful, I know, but then love is not a reasonable emotion.

Sad to say, so disenchanted had I become with my Enchanted Isle that when I finally left I did so without a twinge of sorrow. All I can remember is driving one last time through to Tudor to say goodbye to a friend and thinking how dull and flat everything seemed on a Sunday afternoon. The very palm trees that I’d always so loved seemed to droop with lethargy. I, by contrast, was filled with the vigour of seeking new and larger horizons and I felt quite sorry for those whom I was leaving behind! It was only later, quite a bit later, that the soft and sweet memories stole over me and I wept for all I had given up, even though I knew that what it was I missed was gone from me forever, stolen by time as well as politics.

In time I learned to love a new land where the beaches, like those of my childhood, go on forever. True the sand is not quite so white nor the sea quite so brilliantly aquamarine; the coconut palms have been planted and there is no protective line of reef. Yet still it’s a fine place where I can wander the tideline safely and alone, and where I can still recapture something of my magical childhood.

Because the essence of your first great love is that you never forget it. Never, ever, quite manage to tear it from your heart. In memory, Mombasa is never very far from me and because I have not been back that memory is pristine and preserved in time as perfectly as an insect in amber.I began this story with a song and I’ll end it with another; one that, when it came out, I felt had been especially written about Mombasa. When I sing it today, it still makes me cry!

Oh island in the sun

Willed to me by my father’s hand

All my days I will sing in praise

Of your forest, waters your shining sand

A day in Denali

Denali – the very name has magic. To the Athabascans who speak the Koyukon language it means ‘The High One’, a fitting name for the highest mountain in North America.

Donald The Trump wishes it to be once again called Mt McKinley, named for a particularly dull president of the Republican persuasion, distinguished only by his assassination. But most Alaskans I have met, and those from the Lower 48 states, prefer the original name for its musical quality.

Denali is a magnificent mountain and all the more powerful and mysterious for being rarely seen. I am one of the lucky few who have seen it, three times this past June, and I have a badge to prove it – now worn proudly on my down puffer jacket.

The mountain is the crowning jewel in the splendid crown that is Denali National Park and Preserve, 24,464 square kilometres (9,446 sq miles) of mostly unspoiled wilderness. It’s all mountain and tundra and boreal forest, the latter consisting mainly of skinny Black Spruce. This latter treescape would be monotonous if not for the backdrop of snowy peaks and the pale glaciated waters running through.

The tundra, by contrast, is undulating and varied by grasslands, swamps, mixed forest and thickets of alder and willow – the haunt of bears black and brown and much other wildlife besides. Wolves live here and elk and moose and caribou. Wolverines, too, and squirrels and Snowshoe Hares. Even bison. In Denali the wildlife is plentiful because this land is too harsh and underlaid with permafrost to permit agriculture or horticulture of any other kind of culture. For the indigenous peoples it’s always been a source of bounty in summer but the long, harsh winters are an endurance test.

Today, those Alaskans, indigenous and of European origin, who remain in their small, scruffy, hardship communities all year round have got snowmobiles and wi fi and frozen/tinned food and TV and alcohol and drugs and social services of various kinds to get them through. Planes, too, when the weather permits flying which it often doesn’t. But it’s still an isolated few months.

My first day in Denali was a long bus ride to the little town of Talkeetna (below), where most expeditions to climb Mt. Denali take off. On YouTube it looked like a pretty little town in summer but the reality is less appealing; a rackety tourist trap with dirty toilets. The buildings have an appealingly traditional look and the inhabitants are friendly…well, they would be, wouldn’t they, when there is little except tourism to keep the township going. In the siding was something that interested me more, the Denali Star stop-and-go train that as its name implies runs through from Fairbanks to Anchorage. Many people choose to live off the grid along the route, close to the railroad tracks and when they want to board the train they just flag it down.

My tour group took the Gold Star service which doesn’t stop anywhere but instead offers comfortable seats in bubble-top carriages, a good lunch, clean loos, snacks and cocktails while the hosts in each carriage offer historical and other information. In truth, this route is scenic but the scenery gets monotonous after a while because the boreal forest, its Black Spruce trees dying for long stretches from attack by looper beetles, offer little variety. The rivers are dramatic but they are gone in a glimpse.

That’s not our Gold Star train at top left but me at Talkeetna siding in front of the stop-and-go Denali Star service. Our Gold Star service was much posher, as you can see from the other two pics – including a very talented cocktail bar host. Lower pic shows some of the more spectacular scenery.

Here below you can ride the rails with me a little way. It’s a fun trip but you can see what I mean about the monotony of all those Black Spruces.

Still, there is something rather wonderful about sipping a fine local gin and tonic while watching the world rush by.

After a night at the Grand Denali Lodge, set high on a ledge with great views of mountains and the Nenana River, I was up early for my first full day in the Denali National Park. There is only one road through here so your chances of seeing a lot of wildlife are limited, especially when you are on an old school bus full of people. The guide and driver (both women on my trip) do their best but on a hot day (as it Was, in early June) the animals stay under cover.

The brochures, of course, show bears walking along the road and caribou everywhere but the reality is that, like Denali itself, exciting wildlife is not so easily glimpsed. I remembered younger days when I and my husband would have hiked and camped that country but for most of us it’s a matter of riding that single road, quite busy with tour buses and settling for splendid scenery and the fun of passive “hunting” for wild creatures with binoculars. Mine were the most powerful on this trip (I’m a birdwatcher) and so only I got a reasonably good glimpse of Dall Sheep high up on the crags – for the others on board the sheep might as well have been white boulders. We saw a Snow-shoe Hare and, to my delight, a Willow Ptarmigan by the side of the track. And that was all. But there were other treats, such as the marvellous Athabascan woman, Shirley, who entertained us with stories about the park and her people and showed us, with appealing irony, a tribal dance.

Shirley, who keeps Athabascan history and customs alive for the children of her own people, as well as tourists, picks a member of our tour group to give her the beat while, tongue firmly in cheek I suspect, she performs a native dance. What a character!

Usually I dislike this kind of faux native experience, put on for tourists; us condescending to the locals, them laughing at our gullibility. But Shirley was different and what she had to say was worth hearing. Several times on the journey our driver/guide kept assuring us how much the Alaskans “loved” their native peoples. She said it so many times I wondered why she felt the need to do so. It came across as patronising though I know she didn’t mean it that way.

And it’s simply not true or, rather, wishful thinking. I met a few white Alaskans who felt that the Athabascans, Klingit and other indigenous inhabitants were idle hangers on to the coat tails of American society – getting education, health, plane transport etc for nothing while white Alaskans were doing it tough.

“Easy to say we took away their land and their traditional ways but we have given most of those back, and more,” one man told me when I sat next to him on a park bench in Anchorage. “Every aspect of life is easy for them today – store-bought food, snow machines, aeroplanes, boats with motors, high-powered guns, free health care and education, entertainment. They get everything we get and more – and don’t let anyone tell you differently. And yes, they also get the bad things, like drink and drugs. But, as with our kids, they make their choices. There’s a fair bit of murder and domestic violence and brawling in those so-called native communities.”

This last claim is born out by local media bulletins. And in Anchorage, at least, the homeless street people appear to be mostly indigenous. But then, I ask myself, what is an Alaskan? I met some in Anchorage but the hotel staff consisted of Russians, other Europeans and Asians. Chinese and Indians run most of the shops and eateries. The guides and drivers in Denali are usually students from the lower 48; the wonderful naturalist guide who took me on a long hike through bear country was Bolivian. Hunters and recreational fisherfolk can hire indigenous guides from the interior but I never got to meet one.

Only in the little coastal tourist towns on the fjords do you get to meet boat crews and others who are Alaskans born and raised – and even there the shops, despite their “locally manufactured” signs, are operated by Chinese, Japanese, Indians (from India) and other outlanders.

But…back to Denali. The park tour is still exhilarating but on our tour we were offered two highlights. One was a talk by Jimmy Hendricks (yes, he’s heard all the jokes), a true local who has climbed Mt. Denali. He turned out to be one of the most inspiring speakers I’ve ever heard, yet so simple and down-to-earth in his presentation. Denali, I discovered, can be more dangerous to climb than anything in the Himalayas, mainly because of the unpredictable weather. It’s killed a lot of people over the years. Jimmy and his two companions, one a woman, took a month to reach the summit. A month! Thank goodness they filmed it; I found it quite the most interesting climbing video I’ve ever seen – and I am not usually interested in mountaineering.

It’s been said that the state bird of Alaska is the mosquito! Big as eagles, the locals will tell you, and twice as fierce. They weren’t in plague proportions when I was there in June, and though they hovered around us in the forest, their whine was worse than their bite!

There are plenty of good hikes around the small Denali tourist village and I did a couple of them, one with a guide. No bears but the scenery was great and the plantlife fascinating. We saw half a moose; the front half was stuck in a bush, eating, so all we got was the bum.

The township itself is dusty, hot (on a fine summer’s day) and uninspiring. A tourist trap where I had the worst sushi ever – had to throw it in the bin. To be fair, I then went down the street (it’s not long) and had an excellent crepe. Made and served by students. And all around are the mountains and forest and the river rushes through, milky with snow melt.

All tours of Denali start with an introductory talk in the visitor centre, perched overlooking a lake. Fluffy little Willow catkins are everywhere in June, including around the Grand Denali Lodge, high above the town. We toured the park in this bus.

An evening hike through the forest with guide Adrian revealed all sorts of wonders – squirrels nests and food storage, wildflowers galore, botanical curiosities, a rushing river and a few birds – but no bears or moose.

I left Denali felt that I had not really been able to do it justice. I had expected too much from it and too little from myself. I should have seen it when I was younger and could venture further and experience it all more fully.

But I’m glad to have seen even a small part of it – one of the few really wild places still left in the world.

BIRDS OF THE RAINFOREST

This page is very much a work in progress. I have spent many decades watching birds in my local subtropical rainforest and on this page you’ll meet some of my favourites. I hope to expand the page so that rainforest bird lovers from around the world can post their pictures and descriptions here.

All over the world, jungles or rainforests have always been home to some of our rarest, most colourful and least known bird species.

Ever since Long John Silver and other pirates took to walking around with parrots on their shoulders, we’ve coveted those brilliant and talkative birds, to the point where some species have been driven to extinction in the wild. Parrots, which are not of course limited to jungles (think Australian Budgerigar, think New Zealand Kea) are the poster species for those deep, mysterious places where the trees grow tall and the vines grow thick and the constant heat and moisture fosters rampant vegetative growth. Where the shadowed forest floor conceals furtive creatures and serpents can grow to monstrous size. Where insects buzz and seek blood or scuttle in the litter.

Birds are the true beauties of such an environment and some of the most interesting can be found in the rainforests of Australia, east of the Great Dividing Range.

King Parrot (Alisterus scapularis)

The sweet whistle and chatter of the King Parrot rings out across the rainforest, and the adjacent wet sclerophyll woodland, and you’ll look up to see a flash or red and green as they alight nearby, usually in pairs but sometimes in small flocks.

This bird is as friendly as it is beautiful, with a gentle face and nature that makes it more lovable than many other parrots, which can be rather beady-eyed and spiteful.

The male has a read head, breast and belly with vivid green wings, banded at the top with turquoise, vivid blue feathers on the rump area above the blue-green tail. As is often the case with parrots, the female is a little more muted with greenish head, yellowy-green breast and crimson from breast to belly.

King parrots are sedentary but after breeding in the denser forests and mountains near the coast they wander further afield into drier lowland areas.

Call is a high-pitched one note whistle (males) usually accompanied by harsher chattering sounds when flying. Alarm call is more of a metallic screech, like “aaark”.

Breeding is from about September through to midsummer, and the birds nest high up in deep eucalypt hollows. Some of these holes go right down inside the trunk so the young chicks are pretty secure from predators. The nest is a layer of wood chips chewed or naturally decayed to a soft consistency. The female broods the eggs (usually 4 – 6, lustrous white), for three weeks while the male fetches food for her. When the chicks hatch they are fed by both parents for about five weeks until they are able to look after themselves, though they usually stay with the parents until it’s time for them to mate.

King Parrots have a varied diet of seeds, flower buds nuts, fruit and insects. They are frequent visitors to my garden and, though I do not feed wild birds, are tame enough to come and sit on my veranda chairs and look at me hopefully.

Regent Bowerbird (Sericulus chrysocephalus)

Few rainforest birds are as striking as he Regent Bowerbird, pictured here. This bird is slimmer than most bowerbirds, and while the female, poor thing, is rather a drab the slightly smaller male is a masterwork of black and golden yellow. He is yellow from bill and eye to neck to mantle and then again on the primary and secondary wing feathers. The rest is a dense jet black. On the forehead is a tiny tuft or patch of a bright, sub-irridescent sunrise orange-yellow quite impossible to describe and not seen in any painter’s palette.

Females are dull brown on the back with a few arrowhead-shaped pale spots on the shoulders, a black neckband, crown patch and darker-feathered cheek line. Bill is dull brown too. Breast and belly are off-white, with scalloping on the breast and fain dark wavy lines on belly. Juveniles are like females but without the black neckband and facial markings.

The Regent Bowerbird is a shy, retiring type who, like its nest and bower, is rarely seen. When you do see the male, it’s because of the yellow flash as he dives for cover. The bower is a modest two-sided affair, slightly less “finished” in appearance than its cousin the Satin Bowerbird. He decorates it modestly too, with a few pale petals and sail shells and sometimes blue artifacts placed carefully inside the bower. Rather than depending on this collection to attract his temporary mate the splendid Regent courts her up in the nearby trees and shows her the way to the bower of seduction where, once the deed is done, he goes looking for another. And she goes off to build a nest, lay a couple of eggs and raise the chicks.

The nest is very hard to find, usually (but not invariably) high in thick leaves and branches of tree or thick vine, shallow and made from thin sticks and twigs. Eggs are a delicate greenish or greyish white with darker streaks and blotches. Breeding season is October to January-February, before the usual onset of the subtropical wet season.

The Regent Bowerbird occurs mostly in the coastal and montane rainforests and adjacent wet sclerophyllof northern New South Wales and Southern Queensland, plus Eungella inland from Mackay and some isolated coastal rainforest north of Bundaberg.

The Regent BB is not much of a vocalist: the male communicates alarm calls and warnings to other males (and possibly come-ons to females) with typical harsh, raspy bowerbird calls. Those with keen ears may hear him apparently serenading the females with long, soft, meditative songs that mimic other birds. The female is usually silent.

Food is mostly fruit, with the native tamarind (Diploglottis australis) being a favourite.

Nest is a shallow saucer of long, thin sticks, less robust than that of Satin Bowerbird. Usually well above ground and in thick vines or tree foliage. Eggs: usually 2, Creamy white with faint tinge of grey or green, “painted” with wavy lines and spots and blotches and scribbles, dark brownish, olive and tinges of pale mauve.

Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus)

The Satin Bowerbid is familiar to most people who live on the east coast of Australia from the forests of south eastern Victoria to southern Queensland. This is a handsome, confident bird which boldly sets up bowers in parks and home gardens just as easily as it does in the forest, braving domestic pets, lawn mowers, people and cars to pursue its construction goals.

In fact I know a male Satin Bowerbird who has, for some years, persistently built and rebuilt his bower within ten metres of a house wall on one side and a busy barbecue/entertainment area on the other, right by a path and close to a well-maintained lawn. He prudently hops out of the way when people pass, or flies to a low nearby branch but is quite happy to hop around if you come with an offering of bright blue objects such as clothes pegs or Evolvulus flowers. (NOT ringed bottle tops!).

Male Satin Bowerbirds are chunky and smoothly rounded and always look rather pleased with themselves. They are a rich black all over, with an iridescent bluish sheen and lovely violet eyes. Beak is white. Females are greenish all over with dull brown wings and creamy buff breasts and bellies with a definite but sometimes hard to see greenish band around the chest. Beak is dark grey, appearing black in the field. Juvenile birds are similar but lack the breast band and have brownish foreheads.

The nest is shallow and made of small twigs and dry leaves, well-hidden in upright tree forks in outer foliage of treees, or in clumps of twigs or mistletoe. Casuarina trees are specially favoured. Eggs: 1 – 3. Dark cream or brownish cream with blotches, spots, streaks and wavy lines in dull brown or brownish green or pale mauve.

Wonga Pigeon (Leucosarcia melanoleuca)

These big, plump pigeons can drive people mad! True! In the summer when the males are calling their long, monotonous, medium-pitched call, repeated over and over, causes some folk to shut their windows, curse, and wish for a shotgun! And indeed, in days of yore, they were commonly shot for food though as they are usually solitary birds a single Wonga, however juicy of breast, wouldn’t provide much of a feed/

Wongas are usually found on the edges of rainforests (and inhabit wet schlerophyll forests too) where they can be seen waddling along peacefully, head down, pecking. They are dark grey on the head and back with a grey neck and chest dramatically decorate3d by a long, vee shaped collar. The underparts are white with many markings that from a distance look like spots but are in fact little “u” shaped patches.

Seeds, fruits and berries are their food and they forage for them on the ground rather than in trees and bushes.

They are true love birds, mating for life. The next is quite a large flat arrangement of twigs, on a tree limb or in a fork, very simple and without embellishment. Eggs: 2. White.

Noisy Pitta (Pitta versicolor)

(Photo courtesy of Geoff Eller)

The Noisy Pitta really isn’t all that noisy and in fact is no noisier than any other pitta but its distinctive “Walk to Work” whistle rings through the forest when it is breeding time and the males are proclaiming their territorial boundaries. This is a splendid bird to see as it hops along the rainforest path, poking into the tree litter for grubs. It will also eat small fruits and lizards and is particularly partial to snails, which it cracks open on rocks with workmanlike skill.

This is a truly beautiful bird of brilliant colour with its chestnut cap, black face and throat, vivid green and blue wings, buffy yellow-to-apricot breast and bright orange to scarlet vent.

Though the Pitta is quick to flee at the sight of a human it doesn’t go far on its stubby wings and if you stay still and quiet you will see it alight not too far away, watchful but happy to continue with its eternal search for food. The strong, longish bill is a useful tool for poking and prodding bark and tree roots.

There are two other types of Pitta found in Australia; the rare Red-bellied Pitta, much sought after by birdwatchers, is found in the far north of Cape York and the Rainbow Pitta is limited to the top end from Darwin across to the Kimberley. All have similar habits.

The Noisy Pitta is the most common, ranging from North Queensland down the east coast to south of Sydney. It’s a true rainforest bird but sometimes strays into adjacent wet sclerophyll forest or drier scrub.

Breeding season is shorter in the north of its range, from late spring through February; further south it starts in July. The number of eggs is usually four but can be half that, or as many as five when breeding conditions are good in the south. The southern eggs tend to be larger, too, than those of northern birds. Strange, because the northern rainforests offer better food and the heavier rainfall that brings out the big forest snails.

Nests, built by both sexes, are usually on or very near the ground at the base of roots, rocks or tree stumps. They are made, rather nicely, from locally available materials such as bark, twigs, plant fibres and moss, with feathers woven in for insulation and lined with soft material such as grass and lichen, bound with animal dung. Some birds make a little ramp at the entrance, from sticks and mud or dung. A spacious yet snug “home” is obviously important to parent Pittas who raise their brood together during the height of the wet season.

Pittas that inhabit and breed in montane areas usually migrate to lower, warmer ground in winter. In some areas numbers are believed to be decreasing due to human encroachment and disturbance.

Pale Yellow Robin (Tregellasia capito)

This shy little bird is a true denizen of the deep rainforest (though sometimes found in adjacent woodland) and is very easy to overlook as it flits quietly from tree to tree, often perching sideways on a vertical sapling to check you out. It’s certainly a lot less bold than the better-known Eastern Yellow Robin and in fact the two are not closely related.

The Pale Yellow Robin has a drab greyish green back with a white throat to just above the short, sturdy bill. The belly is pale yellow down to the vent and the legs are an inconspicuous buff. The head is quite large compared to the body; tail is short and squared at the end. The alarm call is a sharpish repeated chah and its other call is a quick, sharp whistle of three to four notes, sometimes more and best heard at dawn. Though a quiet bird, in the mating season the call rings out and may be followed by soft little tweets exchanged between the mated pair.

Range is limited to the forests of the coastal fringe from south east Queensland to norther eastern New South Wales; there is also a population in far north Queensland and, as often is the case, these northern birds are smaller.

This bird stays in the lower shrub layer of the forest and from its perch it can pounce on the small beetles and grubs that make up its diet, pecking at them with its strong little beak.

It nests in the forks of saplings or, more commonly, in the thick, well-protected cover of lawyer vine (Calamus muelleri), using leaves from the vine and other plant debris, including lichen, to build the little cup-shaped nest. It breeds once or twice in the July to December season, producing two pale green eggs with brownish markings.

Human encroachment on its habitat is reducing the numbers of the Pale Yellow Robin.

Sooty Owl

This is one of the most dramatic owls in looks and behaviour. It’s the third largest Australian member of the family though a fully mature female Sooty is close in size to her counterpart the Rufous Owl, found much further north.

The rainforest is not the prime habitat of this big owl; it prefers wet schleropyll coastal forests from south east Queensland to southern Victoria but where rainforest is adjacent it will hunt there, it’s long, descending, harsh whistle sounding like a falling bomb, often startling unsuspecting campers and forest dwellers on hot summer nights.

This is an owl more often heard than seen by humans as it is both stealthy and highly secretive. It’s darkish grey colouring conceals it well among the shadows and the big, mournful eyes set in a wide, pale, heart-shaped face can only easily be detected by torchlight, when they give off a ruby red shine that’s diagnostic.

The grey (with hints of russet) plumage is speckled with small white spots which give the bird a sparkling appearance when looked at by torchlight. The grey breast is also spotted with white. The pale facial disc is rimmed with darker feathers, the legs are thickly feathered like white leggings and the talons are massive, capable of seizing prey up to the size of a rabbit. Rabbits, small gliders and rodents are this bird’s main prey.

The secretive Sooty Owl likes to roost in deep tree hollows and trees that have become hollowed out from the inside. Here it also nests, as well as in caves. Breeding is usually March- June and again in spring. Eggs are large and white, usually two but only one chick survives to fledge – though two surviving chicks have been reported, at least in captivity. They don’t leave the nest until at least six months old.

There is a Lesser Sooty Owl in far north Queensland which is similar in most respects, though smaller and the sexes closer in size.

I used to do a regular walk where the track went right through an old, hollowed out Argyrodendron tree. A few metres up in this tree lived a lone Sooty Owl, or at least I never saw another owl with her. Every time anyone walked under the tree she would scream! Louidly! In fact it was quite fun to sit quietly nearby and watch the shock on the faces of hikers as they triggered this ghostly shriek! Sometimes I’d sit there at dusk and wait for her to emerge and you had to look hard because she would emerge like a silent dark shadow, wingbeats barely audible unless you were listening for them. And then she’d be away through the darkening trunks of the Bunya Pines, off to hunt. I’ve also listened to the Sooty Owls in my nearby forest at night and when their calls give them away I can sometimes catch them in the spotlight, sitting on a branch. It’s the red eyeshine that gives them away.

Tag: travel