In the Bush: A Most-Excellent East African Adventure
Elephant photo by Paul Renner; Hyena and buzzard photo by Tom Gorman
One in a series
I awoke in the dark on my first night in the East African bush, sprawled atop a king-sized bed with gauzy mosquito netting in a lavish five-star glamping tent that sat along the bank of a muddy, slow-moving river.
I was hearing animal noises. And they were close, way too close.
Grunts. Woofs. Heavy-breathing. Exhalations.
My traveling buddy, Tom, (a.k.a. Homer Simpson) was asleep nearby. I listened. Nope, these definitely weren’t Homer reports, though, earlier, after a big meal that evening, he’d been emitting his own series of guttural and intestinal sounds.
This cacophony was coming from right outside.
We’d arrived the previous afternoon, our light plane scudding along a dirt runway near our camp in the Masai Mara National Reserve in southern Kenya. The landscape seemed vaguely familiar, yet at the same time strange — an expanse of largely treeless grasslands, with just a few lonely acacia trees punctuating the far horizon.
It felt like the growing fields of the American midwest.
But this was definitely not Kansas.
There were no fields of corn, no cattle, no fences.
Killers lurked here, entire prides of them, stalkers which could spring from anywhere .
As we jostled along a benign dirt road toward camp in our dark green range vehicle, I asked Julius Kimani, our veteran Kenyan guide, what would happen if I took a stroll down this road at, say, 2 a.m.
He eyed me like I’d just asked about the results of a jump off the Empire State Building.
“You’d be dead,” he said.
Inside this sprawling 580-square-mile park live tens of thousands of animals, both predator and prey, including an estimated 900 lions, one of the finest collection of wild animals anywhere in the world. Most people come to see the the Big 5 — lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards and African buffalo. The Big 9 includes cheetahs, giraffes, hippos and zebras.
In the coming days, we would spy all of these creatures, and more.
As I lay there in the dark, I shuddered to think of myself out there in the wild, on that road near the airstrip, a knee knocking, Barney Fife snack for some ravenous beast.
Out here in the Masai Mara, the threat was real.
We’d already been told that we required an escort if we moved about the camp after dark, along a series of shaded trails that connected the tents and public areas.
Masai tribal men carrying spears and flashlights ferried us to and fro because, in the past, lions and other man-eaters had leapt out of the brush.
While thankfully not roars, the eerie fanfare outside our tent was menacing nonetheless.
I couldn’t sleep. Wakeup call for our first full day in the bush was 5:30 a.m.
Amid Homer’s scratching and snores, the thing, or things, continued to rustle in the bushes.
And they sounded big.
Before I left for East Africa, I jokingly asked my older sister, Peg, how many of our safari party of 13 I would end up alienating.
“How many new enemies will I make?” I asked.
“Oh, probably a few,” she said, knowing me.
“At least one,” I added. “Because I’m usually my own worst enemy.”
My over-under call came into play the first day we all gathered in the lobby of the Nairobi hotel.
Even though I was a two-bit comic with bad material, I had to be me. There was no one else to be.
The previous night, over dinner, Homer and I had been introduced to our group -- which included an entrepreneur, a retired nurse, a banker and a Glendale clinical psychologist, among others.
They were mostly from Orange County, Calif., where they’d met our tour leader, photographer Paul Renner, at a Laguna Beach arts festival where he regularly displayed his work.
Laying in our shared room that morning, I created pneumonic devices to remember all those new names.
One was easy.
To recall a woman named Becky, I drilled into my brain the image of a waitress of the same name who was dismembered, her body thrown into a field in a single suitcase, at the end of the classic 1980s flick, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.”
“That’s terrible,” Homer said.
“Well, I’m not going to tell her,” I said.
An hour later, in the hotel lobby, another safariite named Debbie looked up and said she’d had a dream about me last night.
I glanced over at her husband.
“Wayne,” I announced, “it’s only been one day and your wife is already dreaming about me.”
Actually, it was more of a nightmare.
As it turned out, in Debbie’s dream, the whole venture had been held up because of me.
And it had something to do with my colostomy bag.
I stared blankly down at Debbie.
“It must have been something you said at dinner last night,” she offered.
Well, now the gloves were off. Two could play this game.
I looked over and there was Becky, innocent Becky, waiting to begin the trip of a lifetime.
I sidled over, and asked if she wanted to know how I remembered her name.
I told her.
The look in her eyes was one of fear and revulsion.
If there was such a thing as a Renner Safari jail, I would have already been dispatched there.
“But what about Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farms,” she asked.
“Nope,” I said. “I could never remember that.”
She must have told her sister, Jeannie, also on the trip because, after that, she gave me a wide birth.
In response to a few insider comments tossed her way, like when I called a small bush plane we were boarding, the “Buddy Holly Special,” she gasped.
“That’s just terrible,” she said.
Pretty soon, her husband, Doug, the psychologist, wandered over to me.
“Any other dark thoughts you’d care to share?”
“Yeah, plenty,” I laughed.
From that point on, Doug seemed to take an interest in me, like a mental hospital clinician delving into a mass murderer’s telltale past.
Later, somebody joked that Doug was even writing a clinical paper about me.
While I feared the wild animals out there, my safari mates were wincing over another predator.
Me.
Typical for a couple of numbskulls, Homer and I made some blunders on our first foray into the bush, misplays that played straight out of a Simpsons episode.
It was late in the the afternoon of the day of our arrival as our land cruisers, each carrying between three and four people, headed out into the savanna to capture animal activity at dusk.
Typically, an African safari involves jaunts across open fields but most often the veteran guides stick to a series of rutted roads that are actually just glorified paths.
Days of rain prior to our arrival had turned these tracks into a muddy mess that latched onto tires, making our truck swerve and spin in the muck. Safari vehicles typically feature retractable roofs so photographers can lean out in all directions to capture their shots.
When you’re not shooting, the prevailing wisdom is that you sit your photo-snapping ass into one of the seats, belts attached, holding on for dear life.
Well, Homer and I must have missed that memo.
As we jounced along one track, we paused at a river, waiting our turn to inch across a current that didn’t seem to pose a threat. We were both standing, facing forward, leaning over the truck cab, anxious to capture this first water fording.
Homer had brandished one of his long lenses and I readied the viewfinder of my smartphone camera. As we pulled slowly into the water, I made a joke about the alligators that no doubt awaited us in the mud, with an old saw newspaper reporters use to highlight deadly mishaps.
“Two journalists were killed Monday, devoured by alligators when their bush vehicle capsized in a muddy East African river,” I recited.
We laughed.
Then the truck’s wheels struck a submerged rock, then another, swinging us back and forth like were were on some crazy unbelted carnival ride at the county fair.
“Oh, Jesus,” Homer said.
Hands on our recording devices, there was nothing to grasp to right ourselves.
My smartphone kept recording, as we jostled against one another, our heads nearly clunking like two hairy coconuts.
“My back!” Homer grunted.
The shaky video then went blurry, the last image showing my truck mate, upside-down, holding onto his camera like it was a pacifier, looking a bit seasick.
And it was only Day One in East Africa.
There would be more hi jinks to come.
