Report from Kenya

I arrived in Africa as one should, to shed my New York boots and wrap a kikoi around my waist. Only 48 hours ago I'd been walking my cocker spaniel in Riverside Park, with more snow than I saw on Mt. Kenya on my approach. The snowy summits of Kenya's tallest peak and Kilimanjaro are diminished by global warming.

During my layover in England I was whisked away to the medieval home of Mike and Jennifer Shirley-Beavan. The owners of Bushbuck Safaris and impetus behind the revival of the Catalina plane treated me to an update on their favorite places in Africa, a hearty lunch, and most important to diminish jet lag, a bedroom for a good long snooze before beginning the next leg of my journey to Africa. There are two essential things to do when you fly into Kenya.

1) Request a seat on the port side so that you can see the Rift Valley Lakes of Turkana, Baringo, and Naivasha on your approach to Nairobi; it's a good idea to have a map on your knees, but on this, my 29th trip to Africa, I had no trouble recognizing the Crescent Island that distinguishes Lake Navaisha, the dark jagged peak of Mt. Kenya, or the Great Rift Valley, a scar in the earth stretching from the Red Sea to Mozambique, visible from the moon, and widening a few inches every year. This rift is thought to be what separated humans from apes, with savannahs on the eastern side requiring adaptations to a new environment, and western forests harboring our not so distant relatives. Foraging for foods in the savannah grasslands required new skills, or as Richard Leakey once put it while cracking open oysters on the half shell: �All adaptations stem from the gut.�

2) With my feet up, my back relaxing on a reclining seat, my glass filled with cold champagne, I toast the hunters and gatherers who cater for British Airways Club World, serving great meals (breakfast with fresh fruits, dinner with entree choices.)

After I saw the distinctive peak of Mt. Kenya on the horizon, I notice a dramatic gorge. As best I can figure, that is the famous Mukutan Gorge, not so distant from Lake Baringo, where another ancient hominid was recently unearthed. The Leakeys and other paleontologists find so many fossils in this area because the Great Rift lakes attracted them, and exposed them. Nearly two decades ago I helped them unearth the bones of the Turkana Boy, so called because it was a discovered near the great lake that (seen on the map) hangs like a sock on the Ethiopian border with Kenya. After those two decades things are still being learned from this young Homo erectus skeleton; Nature does not impart her secrets easily, whether it�s science, or human nature.

Upon my arrival in Nairobi, I am thrust into a circle that resembles a casting call for Rules of the Wild, Francesca Marciano's novel about Nairobi�s narcissistic young expatriates and third-generation white Africans. Esme, the beautiful twenty-something Italian narrator, goes on safari, seeking to escape a painful past, and like most visitors, becomes captivated by the beauty of the landscape and her new "tribe." She is promptly torn between two dynamic lovers--one a safari guide, the other a cynical journalist obsessed by the carnage of Somalia and Rwanda. Now Aidan Hartley has come out with his own book The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands a memoir describing his experiences as a Reuters stringer covering Somalia and Rwanda. Written with a journalist�s eye, the book becomes passionate when Hartley describes the brutal deaths of Reuters colleagues stoned to death by an angry mob in Mogadishu, enough to send anyone into a mad spin. A love affair during Rwandan genocide, his own abuse of drugs and alcohol, gain little perspective by the author�s attempt to tell the story of Peter Davey, whose diary Hartley discovers in the wooden Zanzibar Chest of the title. The allure of the African continent, despite deadly rifts, the hellish abyss, is better expressed by the novelist from Italy: "I'll tell you what it is about this place.... you are constantly reminded of what it means to be free and to be alive. And then it becomes difficult to settle for anything less than this."