Safari

by Geoffrey Kent

  Finally, after a few days, there’s only me. With one hundred thousand dollars left to pay, Michael takes notes as I explain the logistics for the final tradeoff.

  “I’ll have my plane fly in. Somewhere in that plane will be the final cashier’s check—but it will be hidden. Even if you go in there, Michael, you won’t be able to find it. Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Good. I will stand at the end of the runway, by the big eucalyptus trees—my pilot won’t taxi in. You’re going to drive me out, with my passport. Then I’m going to get in the plane, I’m going to open the door, pass you the check, and you’re going to hand me my passport. And then I’m going to go as fast as I can.”

  “That simple, eh, Geoff?”

  “If you shoot me down,” I say, standing down his tongue-in-cheekness, “I’ve briefed the whole world about this, you understand? It wouldn’t be good for you or your country. What do you think?”

  “Fine,” he says. “Done.”

  Two days later, the Piper Aztec flies in and stops at the end of the runway. I sit in a truck surrounded by six soldiers, and a driver takes me out. Four soldiers and Michael Wal accompany me as I climb on board the plane. My pilot stares straight ahead, white as a sheet.

  I open the window hatch to chat to Michael. “So this is it,” Michael says. “Where’s the money?”

  Fast, the pilot leans over with an old-fashioned razor and cuts open the upholstery of the passenger’s seat. He pulls out an envelope and hands it to me, and I pass it through the small window to Michael. “We’re all square,” I tell him.

  “What?”

  Then I shut the window of the Piper Aztec so fast it nearly clips his hand. I turn to the pilot. “Balls to the firewall!”

  The pilot takes off, right over the eucalyptus trees. I hold my breath and then heave a massive sigh of relief.

  That was a near one.

  {Hugo Brizard/Shutterstock.com}

  Nabatean Tomb in Mada’in Saleh, Saudi Arabia. The tombs are beautifully adorned with intricate designs along entryways and in the curves of the rock.

  Chapter 8

  Saudi Arabia

  1975

  Following the shakedown in Juba, I decide that it’s high time I broaden my business beyond safaris—but doing so to the scale I want will require some serious cash.

  Louis Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind, and by the late 1970s, it’s Saudi Arabia, not some tropical vacation destination, that changes the course for Abercrombie & Kent. Companies related to the oil industry are moving in, and their thousands of workers need someone to make the experience there livable.

  That’s where I come in: Geoffrey Kent, travel entrepreneur and soon-to-be premier purveyor of desert housing, ice cream, and mobile latrines. When the opportunity comes, I have to recognize the truth: my goal in life is to build a successful company—not just a successful safari company. By the time we’re completely up and running in Riyadh, we’re highly successful indeed.

  I’m sipping coffee at KenCo, the Kenyan coffee shop just down the street from my office in Nairobi, where I always take a morning break. In Time magazine, there’s an article about a mass of ships stretching out miles into the Red Sea, waiting to dock at Jeddah. They are sitting idle and full of materials that international companies need to come in, to build up and get in on the impending oil boom.

  All these companies—run by Americans, British, and Europeans—have won their contracts but are paying hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for nonperformance because they can’t start work; all their equipment is stuck at sea. The port city of Jeddah is developing swiftly, but Riyadh, the capital, has only a small commercial airport and one five-star hotel, the InterContinental, that costs five hundred dollars per night for a room.

  Some companies have shipped portable cabin-type housing, which is, of course, stuck at sea, and for hundreds of expatriates who are simply looking to make a good living, the prospect of getting up and running, let alone living comfortably, looks pretty dire.

  While I was generating business at my safari camp Rajef in Sudan, I’d made a nice sum of side money when I provided Chevron with a custom-designed version of my safari tents to house their helicopter pilots working on an operation in south Sudan. Now I get thinking: Why don’t I develop air-conditioned tents that these companies could fly in? Then they could start work right away, and they wouldn’t have all these long shipping delays.

  From Nairobi I fly to the United States and set up a meeting with John Daus at Anchor Industries, a tent maker in Evansville, Indiana. We spend a week designing a tent made of heavy material that can be air-conditioned, with the gauze on its windows covered with a white, flexible Perspex acrylic sheet that can be rolled down and up.

  Inside we put a proper toilet, an electric-powered shower, and an air conditioner that converts to a heater for use in the cold desert winters. After a month, we put the tent up in our garden in Oak Brook, just outside Chicago: simply beautiful, all lovely light sky-blue on the inside and white on the outside to deflect the sun. Jorie helps move my things into the yard for me to live in the tent, and after a month, I’m sold: I’ve got to get this to Saudi Arabia. Lord William Coleridge, an old friend who was a very tough paratrooper in our British Army days, flies with me to Riyadh. Immediately we buy a GMC truck and drive into the desert, away from the highways, into an area that’s completely isolated. “What about here?”

  Bill scans around. “Looks good to me.”

  We sleep in the tent, waking at five o’clock every morning to dress in our distinguished army blazers and drive an hour into Riyadh for breakfast at the InterContinental hotel—a prime networking opportunity. One morning during our first week there, we get to chatting with an American from Bechtel Corporation, one of the biggest construction companies in the United States. Bill shoots me a look to urge me on. This is our chance. “What do you think of the hotel?” I ask him. “Do you like your room here?”

  “It’s all right,” he says, “but it’s really expensive!”

  “Come have a coffee with us,” Bill says. “We’ll treat you to breakfast.”

  “You’re having problems with your laborers, right?” I ask.

  “These guys can’t even start, their housing is stuck at sea!”

  Bill and I exchange another glance. “You know what,” I tell him casually, “we might have a solution for you. Would you come out with us?”

  Within seconds we pay for our breakfast and head toward the door. “Let’s go.” We trundle out into the desert and when we reach our makeshift camp, he gets out of our truck and marvels at the sight. “Go on,” I tell him. “Have a look around.”

  “If you like,” Bill says, “you’re welcome to spend a night or two.”

  “I don’t need to spend a night,” he says. “I can already tell, this is just what we need. Can you guys do us a spec for a one-thousand-man camp?”

  Bill looks at me.

  “Sure,” I tell him. “Give us a couple of days.”

  We give him a quote for the tents, for us to hire staff to erect them, for the furniture fitting, and for us to manage the operation with laborers and catering. Within days, we have a deal for one and a half million dollars—as well as a lot of work on our hands.

  I run a job advertisement in the Times of London and hire a guy named Tim Somerset Webb to be the operations manager, reporting to Bill Coleridge, since I’ll now be constantly flying between Nairobi, London, Chicago, and Saudi Arabia. Tim is sharp and likeable, and he and Bill work like dogs in the 115-degree desert heat to erect the tents for Bechtel. With our first payment, Tim and Bill rent a villa in Riyadh—a humble sort of thing, with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting area, and a space out front to park our trucks.

  One day Tim takes off for a weekend at Layla Lakes, a two-hour drive south of Riyadh where the waterskiing and camping are excellent. He’s pulled over by the police on his way, and when they discover a bottle of homemade w
ine in his possession, he’s jailed and sentenced to a flogging. It costs us twenty thousand dollars to bail him out.

  One night back at our villa in Riyadh, we’re sweating; Bill and I are preparing for meetings in London while Tim takes a break to sit back and watch the ceiling fan spin. Then he looks at us and says, “This place is like an oven. You know something?”

  I keep working. “Hm?”

  “I miss home.”

  In my peripheral vision, I see Bill lift his head for my reaction. My eyes stay on my work.

  “Here, there’s no women, no drink . . . for God’s sake, Geoff almost got arrested for bringing a bloody ham sandwich through immigration—”

  I sit back, finally in for the ride.

  “You know what I really miss?” Tim says.

  “Hm?”

  “Ice cream.”

  “Ice cream . . .” Bill sighs.

  “Think about it: they’re about to become one of the richest countries in the world, and they haven’t even got ice cream. Why isn’t there ice cream?”

  We all three stare at the ceiling fan, caught in the fantasy.

  Finally, Bill breaks the silence. “I suppose you can’t get ice cream in on ships that are stuck in the middle of the bloody ocean.”

  The next day when I land at Heathrow, the answer hits me just a few minutes away from my office in Sloane Square. As my taxi rolls along, I spot a Bedford van stopped just outside the gates of Hyde Park. “Stop the taxi,” I tell my driver.

  “Pardon?”

  “Please. Stop the taxi.” I climb out and jog across the street, digging a pound out of my pocket. “I sure would love an ice cream,” I tell the man in the van.

  “Certainly.” He pumps me a cone, turns to me out the window. “Fifteen pence, please.”

  “How does this ice cream work, anyway?”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s not frozen blocks of ice cream. How does it work?”

  “No, sir,” he says, “this is a special type of ice cream made just for the vans. We buy the liquid, and we freeze it here in the van.”

  “You buy the liquid . . .” My plan is beginning to gel.

  “It comes in a Tetra Pak, but it’s a liquid, like milk. Then it’s frozen through the machine, and we squeeze it onto the cones.”

  “Can you ship this stuff?”

  “I can’t imagine why not.”

  “What’s the name of the company that makes it?”

  “Comelle.”

  I fly into my office and call Bill in Riyadh. “I want to buy ten Bedford vans.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And rent the flat next door to the villa, just to park all the vans. Let’s get this moving right away.” I contact Comelle and place an order for the ice cream, and, after some discussion, they agree to grant me a fifteen-year exclusive license to sell Comelle ice cream in Saudi Arabia.

  I hire an ice cream van driver from London and pay him three times his salary. We open with just three trucks in Riyadh’s city squares, just to test the market, but by the first week, the lines at all of the trucks wind around the corners and down the streets, and all the locals are reaching into their abayas and thobes to pay three riyals—one dollar—for a cone that costs us just twenty-five cents to produce.

  When all ten vans are in operation, we buy fifteen more, and when they’re all turning a profit, we buy twenty-five more to open up shop in Jeddah. The mayor of Riyadh phones me. “I want to buy these ice cream trucks from you,” he says.

  “Not a chance,” I tell him. This is my most lucrative cash business to date.

  But then, within days, the police of Riyadh are tracking us, pinning us with fines that put a significant pinch on profits. I call the mayor. “You want to buy these trucks?” I ask him.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’ll do this my way.” I sell him the business, making a good profit off the vans, and I maintain my license as the sole distributor of Comelle in Saudi Arabia. That is, if the mayor of Riyadh wants to continue selling ice cream, then he has to continue to buy the ice cream—from me.

  By 1977, Bill, Tim, and I have been supplying housing and running camps for three years. Saudi Arabia is building up like mad, and we’re known around the camps as the good ol’ boys. One day, the three of us are inside our truck, and Bill looks out the window. “Everybody’s working now, but look at these laborers. They’re going to the toilet in the middle of the streets.”

  “You know,” I tell him, “I’ve been reading. There’s something new that’s come out—they’re actually going to have mobile latrines.”

  “A mobile loo?!”

  “That’s right.”

  “That would be fantastic out here,” Tim says. “We’d make a fortune selling those!”

  I work fast to book a flight to Chicago. When my plane lands at O’Hare, I book a taxi, and again, I spot exactly what I’m looking for on the way to my office. “Stop the taxi.”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “I said stop here. Please.”

  I jump out and run to a construction site that has an aqua-blue pillbox standing tall on its perimeter. “Excuse me!” I call to the foreman. “I’ve just landed and drank far too much coffee on the flight. Could I possibly use your toilet?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Help yourself.”

  I slam the door and look around frantically—there has to be a manufacturer listed somewhere. Then, I spot it: Satellite Industries, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I write it on my pad, with the number.

  I test the toilet: When I flush, the chemical whirls down. A little lock flips up, I walk out, job done. “How does this work?” I call to the foreman.

  He jogs over. “There’s a holding tank. We have a contract with the company, we lease these, and then three times a week they come and pump out the sewage.”

  “Genius,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, a real relief, right?”

  I call Satellite Industries and ask for the owner. “Al Hilde’s my name!” he says. “You say you’ve just come from Saudi Arabia?”

  “Indeed I have—”

  “Wowee! What’s it like—I heard they cut off people’s heads there!”

  “Yeah, they do,” I tell him. “Every Friday.”

  “I heard they cut your arms off too, is that true?”

  “Yes, also on Fridays.”

  “Wow! I don’t think I want to go near that place! No way!”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to, but there’s a need for these portaloos, and I want to license them from you.”

  “Let’s talk about it, but you’ve gotta understand: these are my babies! I wouldn’t license these to just any old cowboy, Mr. Kent. I have to train you. You’ve gotta learn how to pump them right!”

  Bill Coleridge, Tim Somerset Webb, and I sign up for a three-day training course. There we are, graduates of the finest schools in England and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, wearing little round smiley-face buttons that read: Satellite Industries: Give Us a Whirl!

  “Yeah man, give it a whirl!” says one of our comrades—a farmer and a Harley Davidson enthusiast from Boise, Idaho.

  “Tim, how did your whirl go?” I ask in my most educated English accent. “I’m afraid I didn’t whirl very well.”

  “What’s wrong with you lot?” Bill says. “Why aren’t you just whirling like everybody else is whirling? Go on, guys, give it another whirl!”

  The exam is a written one, and it is actually very difficult, but when all three of us pass, Al Hilde tells us to saddle up in high rubber boots and gloves. “Okay, fellas,” he says. “Today we’re gonna learn how to understand the product!”

  “Product?” Bill Coleridge says. “Hell, it’s crap.”

  “Don’t you ever say that word again!” Al Hilde says.

  “What, ‘hell’?”

  “No! ‘Crap’! I don’t ever want to hear ‘crap’ or ‘shit,’ or ‘shyte’ or even ‘porta-potty’ outta your mouth again! Do you understand?”

  Bill pl
aces his hands on his hips. “So what do we call it then?”

  “You call it”—Al Hilde primes his lips for perfect pronunciation—“‘effluent.’”

  “‘Effluent.’”

  “Effluent.”

  Bill gives me the look of death. “Fine,” he says. “Effluent.”

  We pass the final stage of training, purchase one hundred units, and buy three pump trucks to ship to Saudi Arabia. “Enough with your city streets being filled with people’s waste,” I tell the mayor. “We’ll supply all job sites with these loos, and we’ll be the ones responsible for cleaning up after them.”

  “I won’t allow any company to come in and build unless they’ve signed a contract to host one of your loos on their site,” he says. “It’s perfect.”

  The next year, it becomes even more perfect: Waste Management, a company based in Oak Brook, Illinois, buys our mobile latrine business for enough money to do what I really want to do next: enlarge our travel business in the United States.

  There’s no question that Saudi Arabia remains a very important location for the world’s economy, culture, and religion, among other concerns—not the least of them, travel. In 2004, three decades after my first, shall we say, “enterprise” there, His Royal Highness Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, the head of Saudi Arabia’s tourism authority, contacts me to see how I might bring travel there. I fly in for meetings, and meet my guide, Keith Sproule.

  We travel all the way to the north of the country, where Saudi Arabia borders with Jordan, to explore the caves of Madain Saleh—and on the way there, we drive through the holy city of Medina which is one of the holiest sites in the world for Muslims, second only to Mecca. We’re surrounded by security. “This site is virtually off-limits to infidels,” Keith explains, “but His Royal Highness Prince Sultan has arranged for us to have access to it.

  Remembering that Prince Charles is enamored with Islamic architecture, I call him from inside the courtyard of the mosque. “You’ll never believe where I am, sir,” I tell him, and when I reveal my location, immediately he knows it, recalling that the original was designed by the Prophet Muhammad.