by Simon Reeve
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Open Prison
We flew east to Uganda, and then travelled on overland to Kenya, the most stable African country on the equator, where my guide Michael Kaloki has since become a firm favourite on repeated trips. Keep your ears open for his name, because he often pops up on the radio. Tall, thoughtful, and the sort of bloke who keeps a pen in his pocket, partly to chew and partly to make notes on anything that interests him, Michael is also one of Kenya’s (unsurprisingly few) ice-carving champions.
‘How on earth did you discover ice-carving?’ I asked him when another colleague mentioned his slightly eccentric skill. Michael remains much too modest to brag.
‘I was a journalism student in Canada,’ he said, ‘and I happened to see the winter carnival in Toronto.’ Michael was captivated by enormous, glistening, almost transparent sculptures. Back in Kenya he persuaded a friend who sculpted more traditionally in stone and wood to turn to ice and they found tools to use on small blocks they produced from home freezers. Eventually they were allowed to use a walk-in freezer at a hotel in Nairobi to practise, and Michael has since represented Kenya at ice festivals in Canada, Finland and in a competition on the sidelines of the Turin Winter Olympics.
With Michael leading us, we set off across Kenya, keeping our eyes peeled for anything odd or interesting that might be happening. We didn’t have to go far. Michael heard about a village close to the equator that was holding a weekend festival. Some traditional circumcisers would be attending. The rite was performed in Kenya on some boys aged around twelve as part of their transition to manhood. I wasn’t sure if I was looking forward to it or not, but we tracked along the equator until we were driving through the outskirts of the community, and we found huge bulls being marshalled through the streets by groups of men wielding sticks, clubs and long spears. Obviously Brian, as an intrepid war cameraman, was out of our vehicle in a shot, racing towards the action. He was carrying a 14-kilogram camera on his shoulder, but I still struggled to keep up. We managed to get in front of the bulls and I asked Michael what on earth was going on.
‘It’s a bull fight,’ he said.
We made our way beyond a series of broken-down buildings to a spacious patch of grass that seemed to form the bull-fighting arena. The animals looked confused and not even slightly itching for a fight. One guy appeared to be baiting his bull with a pair of hand-held bells that resembled maracas.
‘He’s psyching him up,’ Michael said as my eyes took in the scene. Another bull was half hidden in a crowd of chanting men.
At that point a man wearing a long pink dress and a gorilla mask pulled me into the throng, past another bloke who had what appeared to be a dead rat on his head.
‘Can someone explain what the hell is going on?’ I said somewhat plaintively.
Michael came puffing towards me and said that it was the local tradition for people at bull fights to wear animal skins: their costumes were supposed to protect them. I raised a cynical eyebrow, but then the gorilla-man drew me towards two bulls that were being pushed closer together to lock horns.
‘How do you know who wins?’ I shouted over the chaos to gorilla-man.
‘Eh?’ He could barely hear me.
‘How do you know who wins?’
‘When one of the bulls runs off.’
As he was speaking the contest came to an abrupt end. A giant black-and-white bull saw off a brown bull, which turned tail and ran with everyone whooping and chasing after it. It was, I should point out, nothing like a Spanish bull fight where razor-sharp spears are thrust into an agitated beast. The Kenyan version is nothing to celebrate, in my view, but was still a much less violent affair. Two bulls would push and shove at each other for a moment or two, and then one would run away. That was it. The crowd, many of whom were drunk or at least jolly, seemed much more at risk.
I watched as the owner of the winning bull was hoisted onto shoulders and carried around the arena and onto the road. A few minutes later we had a quick chat. He was clearly delighted at the prospect of a victory payout.
‘The loser gets a little too,’ he said. ‘In the old days the winner would get a sheep and the loser would still get a cockerel.’
‘It’s just a bit of country fun really,’ said Michael with a smile. So long as nobody gets seriously hurt.
Amid all the chaos Michael spotted one of the circumcisers we were supposed to be meeting – a young guy wearing a brown shirt, an animal skin and a massive wig, with his face and arms painted with leopard spots.
‘Seriously, Michael?’
‘That’s him.
‘Would you trust him with your todger?’ I said to Brian. ‘I wouldn’t.’
Just a moment later another of the bulls turned during a fight and raced off through the crowd, catching a young man on his leg. Chaos turned to bedlam.
People were attempting to drive off the bull with shouts and chants as another man with a megaphone tried to marshal the crowd.
‘Can someone please put the boy into a vehicle and take him to hospital?’ he begged. The boy was bleeding from a loosely tied bandage.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked one of the men carrying him.
‘He’s broken his leg.’
We had the only suitable car, a large four-wheel-drive vehicle used for game-spotting on safaris, so Michael intervened and volunteered our transport.
And that is how, ten minutes later, I found myself in the surreal situation of sitting in the back of a makeshift ambulance with a lad called Magnus who had been injured by a rampaging bull, a Kenyan ice-carving champion, a South African war cameraman and two knife-wielding traditional circumcisers dressed in animal skins.
Michael had dragged the circumcisers along with us on the way to the hospital, and they helped us lift the lad out onto a hospital gurney. Rather ironically, he was the son of the chairman of the bullfighting association. Nurses in starched uniforms took him away, and we went for a chat in a bar with the circumcisers. The older of the two was called Thomas and he brandished a rusty-looking blade as he explained the procedure. I listened intently, sitting with my hands fisted in my lap and a grimace on my face.
‘Thomas, that sounds really painful.’
‘That’s how he becomes a man,’ the circumciser assured me. ‘Then he can sit with the other men.’
‘Are you very busy?’ I said. ‘Do you do the procedure a lot?’
He nodded. ‘We can circumcise a hundred boys an hour.’
‘A hundred?’ I said. ‘Don’t they mind you working so quickly?’
‘That’s the way it’s done. You can become crazy.’
Now I was really mind-blown. ‘What do you mean?’ I said, shaking my head with a strained smile. ‘What do you mean, you can become crazy?’
‘There is singing, it’s frantic.’ Thomas was wild-eyed. ‘It gets into your head. You’re in a frenzy and just continue to cut, cut, cut.’
Legs crossed, I’d heard enough. We gave the circumcisers a lift home, then drove on along the equator towards Kenya’s Lake Nakuru National Park. It was said to be home to the most fabulous bird spectacle in the world. How could we resist?
The lake itself is relatively small and shallow, but that helps to keep the water warm all year round, which feeds the growth of algae, which in turn is the major draw for a vast population of flamingos.
As we hopped out of our vehicles we were met with an almost perfect filming moment. Brian was thrilled. I was in raptures. In the foreground were buffalo and rhino, even a hyena trotting along with a bird in its mouth for breakfast. Behind them, around them, above them and almost everywhere, in fact, were perhaps a million flamingos which had gathered in huge numbers at the lake edge but then seemed to reach right across the water like a scattering of pink petals.
This was the Kenya travellers wanted to see; this was wildlife and landscape in all its splendour.
We drove up to a vantage point over the lake called Baboon Cliff, which gifted a panoramic view o
f the lake, but also gave me a series of understandings and insights that inform me to this day.
Thousands of photographs have been taken from Baboon Cliff, almost all of them showing the wildlife of the park. Documentaries have been shot in Nakuru showing animals roaming majestically free. Indeed, down below I watched a giraffe out for a stroll around the edge of the lake, its stilt-length legs looking as though they were moving in slow motion.
But turn eyes and cameras just slightly to the north, and there in clear sight is the busy town of Nakuru, a home to more than 300,000 people.
I was stunned at the proximity of park and people. And at that moment I saw through the fantasies and illusions of advertisers and documentary makers, who for years with their careful shots and photographs have peddled an idea that Lake Nakuru and much of the planet is still properly wild. A bubble suddenly popped in my head.
At first glance Lake Nakuru might appear to be a wilderness, but in reality it was a managed park, controlled by humans and at risk from humans, who were right at its borders.
It was another moment where the journey became an education. I was learning every hour of every day on the road. Even here, while watching a giraffe out for a morning amble.
Countless times in the years since I have been confronted by the reality that we have been lied to for decades. By advertisers? Well, that’s hardly surprising. But documentary makers have also gone to extraordinary lengths to create wildlife porn that bears no relation to reality.
While filming in Madagascar a few years after travelling around the equator I visited Berenty, a tiny wildlife reserve that has featured in numerous nature documentaries and become synonymous with iconic lemurs. Unique to Madagascar, lemurs are the descendants of primates that travelled across the Indian Ocean from the mainland millions of years ago on rafts or logs. They are stunning and delightful creatures loved by all. Documentaries about them are hugely successful and sold around the world. Chances are, if you have seen a documentary about lemurs filmed in Madagascar, then it was at least part-shot in Berenty, even right around the offices, bungalows and restaurant of the reserve, with cameramen straining to keep the buildings out of shot.
The founders of Berenty cleared huge areas of forest and left just a token sanctuary that now provides habitat for a small number of lemurs. The reserve is only the size of a London park, and is surrounded by a huge expanse of agricultural land. When I visited, tens of thousands of acres around Berenty were being used to grow sisal, some of it apparently destined to become environmentally friendly packaging for Europe.
Yet often TV programmes about places like Berenty or Nakuru completely fail to show that reality, or the truth about what we humans have done and are doing to our world. The producer of one wildlife film on Madagascar told my colleague their team had been given explicit instructions to just make their programmes look good and avoid mention of deforestation and destruction. Partly as a result, I fear, many viewers do not fully understand just how humans are transforming and ravaging Planet Earth.
Because my brief from the outset has been to mix elements of both beauty and darkness, light and shade, we haven’t needed to follow the same rulebook. Sitting up there on Baboon Cliff after wallowing in the beauty of the lake we were able to pan our cameras across to point at Nakuru town. We mentioned the proximity of the buildings, and then later went into the urban centre to film and hammer home the point that humans are right on the borders of wild areas, nibbling away at their edges, and posing a fundamental threat to the wildlife within.
Steve, a senior ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service, then gifted me more understanding. He explained that Nakuru was being surrounded by a 50-mile-long electric fence, not to keep the wildlife in, but to keep the humans out. Farmers had tried to encroach on the park looking for more land, and poachers were a constant threat.
‘This is our Ark,’ said the ranger, holding his arms out as if he wanted to hug it. It was a light-hearted comment, but he was so right. The national parks of Africa and marine reserves around the world, which are basically national parks in the sea, have indeed become wildlife Arks. They are our last chance of protecting iconic life.
I was mulling all this over on Baboon Cliff, as good a place as any for moments of revelation, when Steve pointed towards the park entrance.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here come the guests.’
It was early in the morning. Three car-loads of tourists were arriving at the park on a game drive. They headed straight for the edge of the lake, then hopped out to start snapping away at the glorious scene.
Steve was smiling.
‘You think of them as guests?’ I said. ‘That’s very positive.’
‘Of course. They pay our wages,’ he said with a laugh.
It was another light-bulb moment. Of course, tourism can be a powerful force for good. This is what I love about these journeys, I thought. This is the reason to go back on the road after a brush with malaria, and to keep on travelling as long as I possibly can. From the comfort of home, I used to imagine that tourism could only be a disaster for the environment. But up there on Baboon Cliff I realised national parks and marine protected areas are incredibly dependent on money from travellers. Entrance fees from tourists pay for guides, guards, patrol boats, salaries, uniforms and electric fences. If we don’t visit national parks and marine protected areas around the world, and pay our entrance fees, those wildlife Arks will be poached to annihilation, turned into palm-oil plantations, or fished to death, or logged.
When I talk to guides and rangers in places like Nakuru I invariably discover either they or their parents were poachers or hunters before they started working in the park. By creating a park, and then providing jobs and salaries to local communities, we give economic incentives to people to protect what all of us surely want to preserve. It is something absolutely critical that travellers can do to help protect iconic life.
If you doubt the role you can play, take a look at the small-print ‘About’ section on the Kenya Wildlife Service website. Their mission statement, as daft as those things sometimes are, is profound: ‘To save the last great species and places on earth for humanity’. And how do they do that? They collect fees and charges in parks, money from filming and hotels, then they plough that back into parks and for ‘benefit sharing with communities living in wildlife areas’.
I am, of course, completely aware of the environmental consequences of travel. All our holidays and adventures, whether for hedonism or political enlightenment, have a deep impact on the planet. Forests are logged and marshes are drained to provide land or materials for more hotels and resorts. Planting trees to offset carbon emissions from our long-haul flights just legitimises our unsustainable lifestyles. But almost everything about our Western lifestyles is environmentally catastrophic. I remember paling when I read one study that estimated each and every Google search uses the energy it would take to boil two cups of water.
Just to be absolutely clear, I believe we are in a struggle for the future that I would liken to the Second World War for importance. The human and environmental challenges that I see around the globe are urgent and critical. We absolutely have to give a damn, and campaign, fight, demonstrate and agitate for profound change and immediate and dramatic environmental protections.
Yet tourism doesn’t just have to be about exploiting and ruining. When it is managed sustainably and meaningfully it can really help to protect and preserve a place. So get up, get out there, and experience the best this world has to offer. Seek out authentic and immersive holiday experiences, something you will be able to look back on and remember forever. And pay your entrance fee for a park or a day pass for a marine park and know that you are helping to preserve some of the greatest wildlife on the planet.
My time in Kenya was supposed to be coming to an end. I was due to travel on along the equator to the coast of southern Somalia, where the African leg of the adventure would finish. In the distance ahead were journeys following the equator acro
ss southern Asia, and then from the Galapagos across South America to the mouth of the Amazon.
But at dawn on the morning of our flight to Somalia we were told heavy fighting had broken out in the very area we were due to visit. The BBC High Risk team said they were sorry but there was no way they could authorise our trip.
So instead I decided to fly along the equator as far as I could, to get as close as possible to the border with Somalia. It was to be a decision that, in a positive way, has deeply affected my life, shaping my travels in the years since.
Right on the equator in eastern Kenya are the Dadaab refugee camps. We pottered through the skies in a tiny plane, flying above endless rusty-coloured desert scrub and low brush, then dropped down towards a landing strip in the middle of nowhere.
All around the land was flat, arid, and devoid of obvious features save for a dusty road, and a vast encampment of myriad huts, tents and makeshift shelters. This, at the time, was the largest refugee camp in the world, a home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from the relentless fighting across the border in Somalia.
We landed, met up with UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, who ran the camp and were very used to flighty television crews passing through their world, and then went to find new arrivals who had just made a long trek to the camp and were waiting to be processed by the UN.
It was tragic and pitiful. There were families with absolutely nothing to their names, squatting in the dirt waiting for someone to help them. I spoke to a woman who had fled fresh fighting in Mogadishu.
‘Why did you come here?’ I asked her.
She spread her palms in a hopeless gesture. ‘The fighting was very bad. The worst I’ve ever seen.’
‘Are you here with your family?’
‘Some of them.’ Her face masked immense pain. ‘I had to leave two of my children behind.’
I was stunned, trying to imagine how appalling that must have been.
‘I could not bring them,’ she told me. ‘I don’t know what’s become of them.’
