Safari

by Geoffrey Kent

  I pull out my mother’s list of contacts and find the address of her old friend Hope Struben whose husband, Arthur, died and left the family very well bestowed. I find their elegant and comfortable house seated in Rondebosch, a few miles from the center of Cape Town. When I ring the doorbell, I’m caught off guard by a vivaciously beautiful girl, roughly my age. I collect myself quickly. “I’m Geoffrey Kent,” I tell her. “I’ve travelled here from Nairobi, and I believe our parents are friends.”

  “Mummie!” Her voice echoes in the grandness of the foyer. “Well, don’t be silly,” she says with a laugh. “Come in.” She turns inside the house and addresses me over her shoulder: “I’m Hillary.”

  Mrs. Struben makes me welcome and shows me to a room where she says I’m invited to stay as long as I care to remain in Cape Town. I ask her whether she can recommend a mechanic for some work on my bike, and she gives me an address for a reliable shop in town.

  Cape Town is beautiful, and I make no secret that my favorite part is having Hillary as my tour guide. Together we visit a Cape Town art gallery, and for the first time I find myself curious about paintings—funny how a budding romance can make even the least likely thing so interesting to a boy. On my motorcycle, we ride down to Cape Agulhas, where Hillary and I marvel at the monument marking the point that divides the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. “Imagine, Hilly,” I tell her. “To be here, at the most southern point of the African continent.”

  “I know,” she says. “It feels like standing at the end of the earth.”

  The bond between us rises like the ocean, too much like a fantasy to be real, and yet . . . very natural and very real indeed. We make a trip to the Strubens’ weekend cottage on the coast at Betty’s Bay, a bucolic seaside resort on the Western Cape. We spend our mornings there in long walks in the cool of the dawn. During the daytime we swim and lie on the beach, and in the evenings we sit and watch the huge breakers come in from the translucent blue ocean. The days pass so fast I cannot keep track of them.

  However, Mrs. Struben can, and does. “Geoffrey,” she says. “You’ve been in Cape Town four weeks, and on the road for nearly half a year. Don’t you think it’s time you went home?”

  Crushed at the inevitability of leaving Hillary, I brush off her question. “I don’t know how to get there.”

  “Well, how did you get here?”

  “Mrs. Struben, to tell you the truth,” I say, “I don’t awfully fancy another four-thousand-mile bike ride back to Nairobi.”

  “It’s three thousand miles, if you do away with all your side excursions.”

  “All the same.”

  “Can’t you go back by train?”

  “If I had the money, I imagine I could.”

  She thinks for a moment, then says brightly, “I know, why don’t you write a story about it? We’ll say that you used Shell fuel, and sell it to Shell as an advertisement, and you can use the money to get home.”

  I write the piece, and Mrs. Struben makes the edits. The gist is that I’ve been the first person to travel on a motorbike from Nairobi to Cape Town, using—what else?—Shell fuel the whole way down. The advertising folks at Shell are very complimentary about my completing the journey, but they decline to publish the piece.

  {Jennifer Leska}

  Cape Town, called “the mother city of Africa,” with the backdrop of Table Mountain.

  I go through the article and erase every reference to Shell, replacing each one with Caltex. I travel to Caltex’s Cape Town operation and request to see someone in their advertising department. Instantly their response is more promising than Shell’s: they take photos and schedule an interview with me, and within days they pay me a check for a hundred and fifty pounds sterling, which strikes a chord with me. I remember a girl I met on my travels who had recently worked for the Cape Argus newspaper. When I phone her, she puts me in touch with the editor, who, intrigued, agrees to purchase the article and photographs me on my bike.

  I phone my parents from Mrs. Struben’s house. “I’ll be coming home within the next month or so,” I tell my mother, leaving my departure date vague.

  “Well, if you get back in time,” Mummie says, “you could sign up to join the Outward Bound expedition up Mount Kilimanjaro.”

  The prospect of this suddenly lessens the heartache of leaving Hillary. I decide to travel by boat from Cape Town to Mombasa on the Africa, the best ship in the Lloyd Triestino line, Italy’s most luxurious cruise fleet. “Don’t you think the cabins will be cramped?” Hillary says, and it’s clear how badly she wants me to stay.

  “Maybe, Hilly,” I reply. “But less cramped if I book first-class.”

  The morning I’m set to leave, Hillary is crestfallen. Mrs. Struben stands by and gives me a hug.

  I approach the dock with my motorbike. “What are you going to do with this bike?” the steward asks.

  “I’m going to bring it on board.”

  “You can’t do that unless you pay for freight space.”

  I calculate quickly: paying for freight space will leave me without a single penny. At that moment a large car arrives, and out steps an extravagant-looking lady with a high stack of Louis Vuitton suitcases. The bellmen follow her inside, carrying her luggage.

  “She’s taking all that stuff on board,” I point out to the steward.

  “Yes, but she has a suite.”

  “So have I! And I can carry my bike on, on my own.” In no time I strip my bike down, and I make four trips hauling it on board part by part, finally carrying the two wheels in on my head. The staff stand outside my room, eyeing me as I store the entirety of my motorcycle inside the closet. None of them look very pleased, but none of them try to stop me.

  Except for my occasional bouts of seasickness, which I fend off with the staff’s daily servings of ginger biscuits and tea, all fourteen days of the cruise are superb—every minute in the lap of luxury: fresh flowers in my cabin each day; afternoons spent playing poker with new friends in the lounge or in the library recording notes about my journey. The first-class dining room is adorned with marble floors, backlit columns, and bottles of red wine awaiting us on crisp white linen each evening. I conclude that what I love best about travel is all the new people one meets—fast friends with open minds, always eager for a laugh and up for an adventure.

  On the day before we arrive in Mombasa, I take the parts of my motorcycle out of my room and onto the deck to reassemble it. As we approach the dock, I can see my father on the quayside waiting for me.

  From the first-class deck I grin down at him. The expression on his face is genial, but it seems to say something more. When I step onto land, he walks along with my bike and me. “Did you enjoy yourself, then?” he asks.

  “I did indeed.”

  “Good,” he says. “If you savor a challenge, then what I have in mind for you next should be right up your alley.”

  {John Collins}

  Snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro, located in Tanzania, has three volcanic cones: Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira.

  Chapter 3

  Mount Kilimanjaro

  1959

  I start up my bike and follow Dad’s car to the Mombasa Club, where he and Mummie are members. The two of us sit down at an umbrella table on the patio. The breeze blows up from the Indian Ocean, creating a gentle bend in the palms and pine trees. “GJ,” Dad says, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few months.”

  I keep my eyes fixed on the lunch menu. “Really, Dad? About what?”

  “After the episode at school, we really have to sort out your future.”

  “Mm?” My gaze stays down. “What have you got in mind?”

  “It’s something I think we’re finally going to agree on.” This gets my attention. “First of all, I know how much you love polo.”

  It’s true. When I was fourteen, I learned polo from Major Digby Tatham-Warter, a decorated soldier and good friend of my parents’, whom they had asked to train me in three-day eventing. During my first afternoon
on his farm in Eburru, a few hours from the South Kinangop, he told me, “Geoff, the truth is, this three-day eventing business is for girls. You’re excellent in the saddle and you’ve got really quick reflexes. Why don’t we try your hand at polo? It’s a much more exciting sport.”

  Polo excited me wildly; in fact, it proved to be the single interest that trumped girls and elephant hair bracelets and motorcycles and all my other distractions. After that day on Digby’s farm in the countryside near the Ol Doinyo Eburru volcano, I spent hundreds of afternoons riding ponies and hitting the polo ball with a stick in my hand.

  Dad’s mention of polo has me. “Now, if you were to join the British Army’s Household division—”

  “The British Army?”

  “—you could play all the polo you want. Why, they’ve got their own regimental ponies, which no other regiment has. You can ride horses! We all know how you like to ride.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And you can shoot at Bisley. You’re a great shot, Geoff. There’ll be training, and expeditions. You love the life of the bush! And you’re very Kenyan,” he says. “You hate wearing a suit.”

  This is true.

  Well,” he continues, “when you’re commanding a tank in the desert, you won’t have to wear a suit! It just so happens,” my father says, “that I have a few brochures about life in the army. Have a look at these and see if they aren’t attractive.”

  I begin to leaf through the brochures, taking note of how tough the young men look, with their helmets on their heads and machine guns in their hands. “Look at these magnificent chargers,” Dad says, “and these uniforms. And see, there are the polo ponies.”

  There are the polo ponies, good God, looking so athletic and so graceful.

  “And there are tanks racing across the desert, flags flying, aerials. Why, look at this soldier with a beret on! Oh”—Dad sighs—“and the travel, Geoff. By now we all know how you love travel!”

  “Where would I go?”

  “You’ll go off to Cyprus, and Aden; you’ll go all over the Middle East—”

  “But—”

  “And you’ll see Germany, and Italy, and even France. Just look at these photos!”

  I continue to browse through, a strange emotion rising: Could I really be excited about a life of discipline? I suppose I could, if it’s really alluring as all this. “It actually looks quite good,” I muse.

  “Of course it does!” Dad says. “And that’s why you’re going to love the British Army.”

  “Dad—”

  “So in just a month’s time,” he says, “you’ll ship off for training to become an officer at the Royal Military Academy—”

  “Sandhurst?!”

  “Exactly. I would have given my eye teeth to have gone to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. But first you’ll take a course at the Outward Bound program here in Kenya.”

  “To climb Kilimanjaro, like Mummie promised?”

  “Yes, GJ.”

  I’ve studied that mountain to the inch: it stands just south of the equator, across the Kenyan border in Tanzania. There’s a history of debate suggesting that the mountain once actually belonged to Kenya, and Queen Victoria of England gave it to the Germans in the late nineteenth century as a response to a somewhat uncivil letter from her cousin, Wilhelm I, the emperor of Germany. The Kaiser’s letter to Queen Victoria is said to have stated how unfair it was that England held possession of Kilimanjaro when the great majority of the mountain lay in what was then German East Africa. In response, Queen Victoria is said to have acquiesced and granted Kilimanjaro to her German relatives by giving it to her eldest grandson, Wilhelm II, on his wedding day.

  Mount Kilimanjaro has two main peaks, Kibo and Mawenzi, which are connected by a saddle. Kibo is the taller of the two at 19,341 feet. Mawenzi is nearly half a mile shorter, at 16,896 feet. The saddle is about 16,000 feet up; altogether, Kilimanjaro covers 995 square miles of land.

  I focus my excitement for the climb by selling off the last of my elephant hair bracelets—lucratively worthwhile—and stripping down my motorbike. I splay out the parts in the farm’s garage, cleaning and oiling each one with care. I reassemble the bike and take it to the local garage in the South Kinangop. They spray it with fresh paint, matching the original color perfectly. I polish and repolish the bike until it looks brand-new.

  When I’d left the dealer’s shop six months earlier, the bike had had almost exactly five hundred miles on the clock. Now there are nearly seven thousand. If I’d never travelled to Cape Town, I might have put on about a thousand. I pop out the glass that covers the odometer, and I tinker with the digits, winding them to read 1,497.

  I drive the bike to River Road, Nairobi, where at the sales lot stands the dealer Sohan Singh. He’s a handsome, smooth-talking Sikh, his head covered in a black turban, his face covered in a black beard, his city trousers covered to the knee with a clean white smock. “Ah, Mr. Geoffrey! I have not been seeing you for a very long time. What has been keeping you from me?”

  “These last six months I have been on safari.”

  “Your motorbike is looking very fine, Geoffrey.”

  “I’m glad you say that, Sohan, because I was thinking that I would sell it back to you.”

  “But why would you want to sell such a splendid motorbike back to me, Mr. Geoffrey?”

  “I need to sell it back because my father is packing me off to Sandhurst at short notice, and I cannot have a motorbike there. I’m leaving in a few weeks. I want to sell it as soon as I can.”

  “I see,” says Sohan Singh. “How many miles do you have on the bike, Mr. Geoffrey?”

  “About fifteen hundred.”

  “Fifteen hundred! Where did you ride, all the way to Cairo? Let me think . . .” He drums his fingers on his upper lip, and then says, “I tell you what, Geoffrey. Because I like you so much, I will give you for the motorbike twenty-five percent of what you paid for it.”

  “Twenty-five percent, Sohan Singh? Not a chance.” We negotiate back and forth, until I get him to pay me 70 percent of what I paid.

  A week later when the local newspaper runs an article about my ride to Cape Town, Sohan Singh calls my house. “How could you do this to your good friend, Mr. Geoffrey?” he cries. “Don’t you know I read the news? Please return at once so we can discuss a refund!”

  “Sohan, to date I’ve bought three bikes from you and you’ve overcharged me every time because I wanted them so badly. You’re well ahead of me in this game, and I’m not about to discuss any refund.”

  This self-assurance comes in handy again a few days later, when I meet our leader for the Kilimanjaro climb. Major Stroud is a former marine with a pronounced limp, which he explains to us in a pitiless tone is due to a wound from the Second World War. He’s decades older than all of us young men, and he possesses an intensity that none of us questions.

  The twenty of us take a small bus from Nairobi. The morning’s ride is largely quiet, with Major Stroud in the front seat. “Any of you know what ‘Kilimanjaro’ means?” he says.

  I wait a beat, and then raise my hand. “I believe I do.”

  “Kent?”

  “It translates to ‘impossible for the traveller.’”

  “That’s right. It comes from three words in Chagga, which is a local Tanzanian tongue, and it suggests that the mountain is so great that any man should be warned against even trying it. Most people climb this mountain from the Tanzanian side, but you’re about to learn the hard way. We’re going to take this thing from the Kenyan side.”

  {Graham Wood}

  A stunning view of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest freestanding mountain in the world.

  “Why?” says one of the guys.

  “Because the leopards and monkeys on the Tanzanian slopes would rip us to bits!” pipes up another.

  I ignore them in the same manner Major Stroud does—though I do take note that he does not confirm or deny this rumor.


  We exit the bus in a place called Loitokitok in Kenya, a shanty village located three hours south of Nairobi, right at the border of Tanzania in the low ridges of Kilimanjaro. “This is it,” Major Stroud says. “Toward that hill in the distance is our home for the next two weeks.” From these foothills, one beholds the mountain with awe: its ridges appearing in clayish hues of pink and brown in the combination of morning light and fog, the vista framed by trees so beautiful that at first sight, the image haunts me.

  To train, Major Stroud says, we’ll rise at five every morning for a five-mile run. Then we’ll return to camp, strip down, and dive into a pool made by a natural waterfall—“Just above freezing point, naturally,” he says. “We’ve got to break you in.” At the beginning of our training, our days are spent on exercises and activities that build our strength and stamina—because, as our leader reminds us, once you’re on Kili, there’s no easy way off.

  He pairs us each with a partner with whom we’ll spend three days on the lower slopes of the mountain, tasked together with building our own shelter out of giant bladed ferns and a tarpaulin sheet. My partner is none other than a boxing champion in Kenya—a lean, muscular African named Festus. Festus is six feet one inch tall, every ounce of him pure sincerity.

  Major Stroud doles out field rations of canned goods, coffee, biscuits, and three wooden matches each. “Lose your matches or get them wet,” he says, “and that means breakfast from a tin can and no coffee or tea.”

  Before we start up the hill, I flag Festus into my tent. “Give me your matches,” I whisper. Without question he digs them from his pack and hands them over. Using my razor blade, I slice each match into two halves lengthwise. Then I wrap them up in the cellophane that had been housing the spoon in my pack rations. “Twelve matches,” Festus says with a smile.

  “That’s right,” I assure him, “instead of six.” I zip my pack. We head off up the hill.

  In order to build our stamina, our ascent is divided into four sections over the course of four weeks. The first week we spend mastering the saddle. Major Stroud leads us up and then back down again, four days in a row. His energy and able navigation of the mountain astound me. “Your biggest enemy on this leg isn’t the mountain or the conditions,” he explains. “On these lower slopes, it’s the elephant and the buffalo you’d better watch out for. Any of you know where you’d shoot a buffalo if you came face to face with one?”