Safari

by Geoffrey Kent

  “Tony, what’s wrong? Everything was perfect when we spoke a few hours ago.”

  “Well,” he says, “let me tell you what’s happened since then. We all get on board, we’re sitting around the pool. Then the engines are started. Geoffrey . . . have you actually been on this ship?”

  “Have I been on the ship, of course I’ve been on the ship!”

  “Have you ever been on it when it was moving?”

  “Well, come to think of it . . . I can’t say that I have.”

  “Well, I don’t think anyone’s started this thing for about fifty years. The engine started up, and this black puff went up in the sky from the funnel, just like a mushroom cloud in Hiroshima. It dropped on them all! It was like a minstrel show! All you could see were their eyes. Everyone was black, Geoff! Completely black!”

  I set the phone down on my desk and wrung my forehead.

  “Geoffrey! Geoffrey, are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “We’re all covered in this horrible oily soot that sticks to you—”

  “Get everyone cleaned up and off the ship—”

  “That would be an excellent strategy,” he says, “except there’s a problem with the plumbing on the ship.”

  “What kind of problem with the plumbing?”

  “Well, just for example, none of the loos work.”

  “What do you mean none of the loos work?”

  “I mean, Geoffrey, that the toilets don’t flush.”

  “So what have you done?”

  “The only thing I could do! In the kitchen, the chef had these old empty cans for sliced pineapple, so I set them next to every loo, and I made a little sign: ‘Please could you place your toilet paper in these tins?’ It’s a disgrace, Geoffrey.”

  More wringing of the forehead, a sigh. “I’ll think of a solution.”

  “The only solution is to fly all these people back to New York, right now, and figure out something else. Trust me: this is a disaster.”

  Scrambling, my staff in the Unites States hurries to book flights home for the Big Apple Billionaire and all his friends, and we process their refunds immediately. “When Abercrombie & Kent build our own river cruise ship on the Nile,” I write to them, “we pledge that you’ll be the first guests to depart on it.”

  We will build our own ship, I vow, because we’d sold out the Memnon cruise in one go. I’d hit on an idea people wanted, and I had to improve upon my original plan before any of my competitors did.

  I hire a native Egyptian boat maker to design a ship I’ll name the Sun Boat—an homage to the Sun God, Ra, and a boat that will be superior to any other boat that’s ever touched the Nile. We design the rooms to provide panoramic views of the riverbank and its palm trees, and the common areas of the ship will contain gorgeous marble detailing. And it will be the first-ever small ship on the Nile with a swimming pool.

  The Managing Director of A&K Egypt flies to my home in Florida with a made-to-measure model of the Sun Boat. “Let’s go outside,” I tell him, leading the way. “We’ll test it out in my swimming pool.”

  Down he crouches over the shallow end, setting the model Sun Boat into the gently lapping blue. He rises and stands next to me, both of us with our arms crossed to admire our vision—and then suddenly:

  Glug, glug, glug, glug.

  We turn to each other, dumbfounded. In approximately six seconds, the model Sun Boat sinks to the bottom of the pool. “Oh, no . . .” I moan, my face buried in my hands. We both burst out laughing.

  The day comes when we get the Sun Boat right, and instantly it’s booked to full capacity. I bring in Tim Somerset Webb, who proved himself to the company in a Saudi Arabia endeavor, to oversee our Egypt office and to staff the boat with the best hospitality workers that we can find in that country.

  Our premiere cruise, of course, is for the Big Apple Banker and his forgiving group of friends, who are the first to experience Egypt as no one ever has. Clients from the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe book cruises as well, knowing they have just one short flight from their metropolitan area to Cairo before we pick them up on our own buses and drive them to the ship for four days on board and sightseeing on land.

  Sun Boat I is such a success that we go on to build an award-winning fleet of luxury cruise ships on the Nile, Sun Boat II, III, and IV. The start of A&K Egypt was more perplexing than the construction of the Pyramids, but soon grows to eight offices throughout Egypt and quickly becomes our most profitable division.

  {A&K staff}

  One of my campsites in the southern Sudan on the way to Juba.

  Chapter 7

  Southern Sudan

  1975

  In the late 1970s, when Heath Manning, my friend through polo from North Carolina, plans a honeymoon with his delightful bride, Bootsie, the game changes for our business.

  Heath asks me to accompany him and Bootsie to a place in Africa that is home to wildlife unlike anywhere else. With its vast virgin plains of high grass and its unspoiled habitat for big game of many kinds, southern Sudan is one of the best places in the world.

  Sudan has a complicated history of conflict. Heath and Bootsie will almost certainly risk running into complications from civil unrest in the country, and I agree to go as their companion to ensure their safe journey. I bring along Liam Lyn, who trained for nearly a decade to track wildlife in East Africa. Liam served as a guide for such figures as Henry Ford and Roy Chapin of American Motors, and he knows every animal in East Africa. He knows where every water hole is and how to approach every elephant, buffalo, lion, and antelope. He knows every bird and every plant in Southern Sudan, as well as those in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Botswana.

  When we arrive at our destination, I learn that the company that previously brought in most of southern Sudan’s travellers has had complications with its license, and Michael Wal, the governor of the Southern Sudanese Regional Development Corporation, says that I can bring my friends in if my company takes over the license. Intent on satisfying Heath and Bootsie’s travel plans, I work fast. Then I quickly issue permits to my two newlywed guests.

  Unfortunately, this is the last easy transaction ever to happen between the Sudanese government and me. Although we are the first safari company to host an Off the Beaten Track Safari in Sudan—that is, a safari minus hunting—and I want to build tourism by encouraging travellers to “shoot with a camera, not with a gun,” it is I who am nearly shot down.

  On January 4, 1975, our two Land Rovers set out on the dusty road that runs north out of Nairobi, then passes the length of Uganda to the west and enters southern Sudan. We drive six hundred miles through a spectacular landscape of desert, dry riverbeds, acacia trees, and seas of thick blond grass. Unfortunately, the glorious scenery makes for no easy passage: Our road is no more than a track, with two furrows running along it made by the rare set of tires that come this way. Occasionally the track disappears altogether, obliterated by cattle winding their way to nearby water holes. In some places we have to drive across riverbeds—sometimes sloshing through water, sometimes forging over the hard, dried mud made from the ridiculous heat of this place.

  We lose the track at several points, then manage to regain it. Eventually we cross the border from northwest Kenya at Lokichoggio into southern Sudan, in Turkana country. The officer at the drive-through customs checkpoint in Kapoeta is young and intense. I step out of my Land Rover to communicate my authority and greet him in Swahili.

  In his long fingers he accepts my passport, then Heath’s, looks them over briefly, nods, and returns each to its owner. When he receives Bootsie’s passport, he glances it over and moves a step closer to the truck. Through the rear passenger window, he stares into her face carefully. When Bootsie shoots me an unsettled look, I ask him, “Is there a problem?”

  He keeps his eyes on Bootsie. “She’s wearing a ring and sitting with a man named Manning, but her name here is different. How do I know this woman is not a spy for the CIA?”


  I explain that she’s not a spy, she’s a newlywed wife carrying an old passport. The officer apologizes and shrugs, telling me he’s just doing his job. He hands Bootsie her passport and permits us to go onward.

  A few hours on as night falls, Liam tells me he’s concerned. “Slow down here, Geoff,” he says. “I think somewhere we took a wrong turn.”

  “We’ve gone a hundred miles since Kapoeta. When did that happen?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’d prefer to work it out before the night is black.”

  Suddenly the headlights of my Land Rover light up a band of human figures walking ahead of us in the same direction. “Bloody hell,” I whisper, knowing what we’ve encountered. “Dinka warriors.”

  “Oh dear,” Liam says quietly. “In full battle gear.” He’s right: these warriors are carrying spears, machetes, and knives, and are wearing nothing but armlets and white paint from knee to thigh. Extremely tall and thin, and with distinctive features, the Dinka are a tribe of pastoral nomads who inhabit the region along the White Nile River in Sudan.

  “How many do you reckon there are?” Liam asks.

  “There’ve got to be about fifty of them.”

  “Jesus.” Just then one of them emerges from somewhere ahead of the phalanx. He presents himself in the headlights. “Talk to him,” Liam says.

  “I don’t know what they speak,” I tell him.

  “Try Swahili!” he says. “Try anything!”

  I pull the Land Rover next to the men and greet their leader in Swahili. Right away it’s clear he doesn’t understand, but I continue, using hand gestures to try to express that we’ve somehow gotten turned around.

  “Come,” he says.

  “What do we do?” mumbles Liam.

  “We have no choice.”

  The leader instructs his band to move on through the high grass. We follow slowly, very slowly, the way ahead obstructed by high grass, thornbushes, and the limbs of fallen trees. In the dark, I shift my gaze frequently to my rearview mirror, checking constantly to make sure our two succeeding vehicles stay with us.

  We proceed for an hour—an hour so intense that I barely breathe. Finally, we find that the Dinka have led us back to the main track. I pull up next to them and thank them, presenting the leader with something my father taught me always to carry when travelling in the wilder parts of Africa: a tin of tobacco. He accepts it, very well pleased.

  I put the truck back in first gear and move onward, again ensuring our group is on my tail. Just as I sense Liam relaxing for the first time since daylight, there’s a thud at the back of our vehicle. The Dinka are back around us, very aggressive, trying to force their way into our trucks. Some of them have out their knives, and some are ripping the canvas canopies of our trucks with their spears. We lock all the doors, rev up the engines, and speed off up the track. Some of the Dinka stay clinging to the roof and sides of the trucks, and some are still trying to get in at the back. Liam forces them off with the butt of his gun as I plow through the ones who have made a human barrier at my bumper. Our trucks roar up through the jungle, crashing over bushes and into trees and bushes overhanging the main track. We go a good ten miles, finally stopping and circling the trucks around a flat space where we put our sleeping bags and build a fire. “Hot dog, Heathy!” Bootsie whispers. “This is some honeymoon!”

  Actually no one sleeps that night, or for much of the trip thereafter. Bootsie comes down with food poisoning so severe that her lips turn purple—I never tell Heath, but I’m afraid she might die. We cover her with ice, which seems to help a good deal. We leave and drive farther into Sudan, but the journey only gets worse. The grasslands give way to the dried-up, rutted swampland that the local tribes call the sudd. This unpleasant terrain gives off an even more unpleasant smell, fetid and pervasive. By the time we finally return to Nairobi a week later, I realize that the nearly two thousand miles we’ve travelled have caused my eyes to close up from constant exposure to dust, wind, and sun.

  But with a little refining, the trip evolves into a proper adventure. I develop my own camp at Rajef under a big fig tree on a rise about fifteen feet high overlooking the Nile. Michael Wal and his government officials come around for meetings frequently, and the success of the Abercrombie & Kent safari catches the national Sudanese government’s attention.

  Unfortunately, however, the attention is not all good. In 1979, I’m in Las Vegas at a travel convention when suddenly one of the convention workers approaches me. “Mr. Kent,” she says. “I had instructions to deliver this telex to you urgently.”

  I flip open the envelope and unfold the letter inside.

  {John Wollwerth/Shutterstock.com}

  A traditional village in southern Sudan, with dwellings made of thatch and mud just as the inhabitants’ forefathers had built for centuries.

  To: Geoffrey Kent

  From: Michael Wal, Southern Sudanese

  Regional Development Corporation—Governor

  Mr. Geoffrey Kent:

  We have imprisoned and put under camp arrest all of your twenty-seven clients which include Lee Radziwill, the Dupont family and others. We demand your personal presence here immediately. Do not send anybody to negotiate on your behalf.

  I take off to my hotel room and call my lawyer in Nairobi. “My God, what’s this about?” I ask him.

  “Don’t go, Geoff,” he says.

  “Don’t go?!”

  “Geoff, if you go, you’re finished.”

  “I have to go,” I tell him. I phone my pilot, Jim Stewart, in Kenya. “Jim, I’m coming home from Vegas. I’ve got to get to the Sudan. Get my Piper Aztec ready and get permission to land in Juba.”

  “Word’s out, Geoff,” he says. “Everywhere. They’ve surrounded all the camps with soldiers from the Sudanese army . . . and they want you. Geoff,” he says, “I wouldn’t go.”

  “I’ve got twenty-seven clients from all around the world surrounded by weapons. I have to go!”

  “Then let me put it to you this way,” he says. “I’m not going.”

  “You work for me!”

  “I resign.”

  “Jesus!”

  I fly to Nairobi and charter a plane and land a day later in southern Sudan. When I reach the bottom of the plane stairs, I’m surrounded by soldiers, and suddenly I remember an old African saying: When two bull elephants fight, the only thing that gets hurt is the grass under their feet. It means that when two powerful people argue, they put the well-being of others on the line. I take a deep breath and vow to resolve this whole thing with as much poise as I possibly can. “I received a telex from Michael Wal,” I tell the soldiers, my hair and jacket thrashing about in the wind. They stare at me, motionless, as though there’s further need for me to explain what I’m doing. “He told me to come here on my own.”

  They frisk me, lifting my passport from my inside jacket pocket. Then escort me to a jail compound in Juba, surrounded by a troop of soldiers in our truck holding rifles across their knees. I spend the night in a stale, dank cell, wondering how on earth I’ll fix this when I haven’t even got a phone.

  I am unshaven and shaken up—utterly disheveled—when Michael Wal appears in the doorway of my cell the next morning. A guide slides open the gate and Michael leans his body against it. “Geoffrey,” he says with a sigh. He searches the floor weakly for an answer. “This is very bad, Geoffrey.”

  “Michael,” I start . . . but we both know it’s useless.

  “For twenty-two years,” he says, “before you took over the safari licenses, there was a man in Khartoum—”

  “Mohammed Osman.” I know where this is going—he’s referring to the man in Khartoum who held the permits for safari-goers, who received all the revenues from those permits.

  “Osman, that’s right,” Michael says. “Osman has created a bit of a mess with the government. They want more money.”

  “It’s not his money—”

  “There’s more, Geoff. The radios. You knew bringing radios into y
our camp was against the law. Now the government here believes you’re with the CIA.”

  I knew bringing radios in was against Sudanese regulations, but I decided to risk it because we couldn’t operate the camps without them. “There’s no way to communicate without the radios,” I explain.

  “I’m not the one you have to convince.”

  “Michael, it’s got to be more than the radios . . . this has got to be about money.”

  He sighs. “Yeah, Geoff, it’s about money. Everything’s about money.”

  “Well? What’s this going to cost?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know, Geoff,” he says. “I’ll find out.” With his hands in his pockets, he pushes off from against the sliding gate of my cell. He turns and walks out, his footsteps on the concrete my only farewell.

  The next morning, I glance up at the entrance of my cell when a figure casts a shadow across the floor. “Four hundred thousand dollars for the Regional Development Corporation [RDC],” he tells me.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “Okay.” I stand, energized by the prospect of a solution. “First of all, I want to be released from this jail. I want to go to my camp on the Nile, and I want to sit under my big fig tree and sort all this out.”

  “We’ll put soldiers around you.”

  “Put the whole army around me if you have to!”

  He stuffs his hands inside his pockets. He’s growing impatient.

  “Then here’s what I want next: I want you to let each client out one by one—all twenty-seven. For each one I’ll get a cashier’s check given to you. I’ll send my plane back and forth carrying a cashier’s check to pay the RDC for each camp. Now: In the main camp there’s a guy called Charles McConnell—he works for me. Let Charlie go before you let me go.”

  “Fine.”

  Over the next few days, they release my guests. One by one, they step out the front door, squinting in the blaring sunlight. The pilot gives me a cashier’s check, which I hand to Michael Wal. Then the guests board the plane and fly to Nairobi, from where they connect to flights home.