Tsavo Expedition

I survived. I survived man-eaters while camping in Tsavo West National Park.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I feel that “survived” is a bit of an extreme term, since the week was pretty great. And sure, I needed to be accompanied by a Kenya Wildlife Service guard with an A-K 101 or an askari from our staff with an A-K 2009 (i.e. their spears) to the bathroom, which was a pretty smelly pit latrine, and sure, we had no running water so no showers, and sure, we had to shake out the stuff in our tents every time we got into them to check for scorpions and snakes (they really scare me here—I mean, one bite and 45 minutes to live? They could be literally anywhere), but while we were game driving through this fantastic national park at 7am viewing lesser Kudu and hartebeest and rock hyraxes, Dik Diks and water buck and elephants and giraffes, everyone back at home was probably studying late into the night at that very same time for school. I’m in Africa!

The enormity of that park was almost unfathomable for me, a person who has grown up surrounded by tall buildings that break up the landscape. Tsavo West is over 7,000 square kilometers, and adjacent to it is Tsavo East, which covers 13,000 square kilometers. What a change from Amboseli! Here you have to work to see wildlife, though their tracks (footprints and dung) were everywhere. Grassland was sparse, and most of the dirt roads were surrounded by shrubs between 2-6m in height, rising up from the alternating deep red and dark grey soil. When we first drove into the park, so much dust was kicked up from the car in front of us that as I stood out of my hatch, my face literally turned grey, and when I put on chap stick, even more got stuck to my lips so that by the time we stopped for lunch, they were actually black and everyone who saw me either laughed or told me to go wash my face.

At night I was serenaded to sleep by the sounds of lions roaring and elephants trumpeting within 200 feet of our camp. On our first day, as we game drove through the park in the evening as the colors of the sky were softening, I saw a light grey, misty sun shower move across the plain over the tops of vegetation, a rainbow flowing down the right side of the wide column of water. Later than night we were deluged with that rain, a welcome friend given the long drought here. The sounds of rain falling on our tent was so different from that of it falling on the roof of a building that even though I awoke in the middle of the night to find the bottom of the tent was wet, I didn’t make the connection until the morning that it was because of rain.

We walked across the Shetani Lava Flow, and up to the top of the volcanic-rock hill that overlooks it. We traveled through the tall, brown-green grasses of Chyulu as elands grazed and hartebeest leapt and bounded in herds across the hills--it was the Africa I had always imagined, the one brimming with life and vitality and wind and wild. We went to Mzima Springs, a water-filled oasis, to see hippos and crocodiles, and as I walked on the path I caught sight of a red snake in the rocks that lined it--a red spitting cobra (it can make you go blind with its venom)!

After nightfall we would just all gather around the campfire, no internet, no phones, no homework to distract us from that moment, and under the cover of a sky full of stars either just chat with each other, sing along to Will playing guitar, or listen to stories. And let me tell you, some of the staff especially had some crazy stories.

Kiringe, our Wildlife Ecology professor, told us how at that very campsite seven years ago, a bunch of students were preparing to walk over the choo (toilet) as part of a choo party before the askaris had arrived at the camp. In the darkness of the night no one was aware of the fact that a pride of about ten lions was standing in the camp just before the choo preparing to attack. By a complete stroke of luck, the car bringing the askaris pulled into camp just as the students were beginning to walk over (the choo is about 400 feet from the campfire, so those lions were close) and revealed the lions in the headlights. While they drove the lions away and everyone was safe, five of the students refused to sleep in tents the rest of the week, and instead slept in the White Rhino, our big white truck in which we put all of our luggage, food, water, etc. when we go on expedition.

But his next story was even worse. The next year, he had been sleeping in his tent and had a dream that an elephant was sleeping on him. He woke from the dream in the middle of the night, and realized that something actually was sleeping on him through the thin wall of his tent. By the breathing, he realized that it was a lion. He knew that he had to keep it together if he didn’t want to be eaten, so he lay perfectly still, preparing to “take his tent and fly with it” should the lion start to do anything else.

Well, the lion did start to do something else. It got up and grabbed a corner of the tent and began to drag it off into the tall grass surrounding the camp. Just before Kiringe took action, the KWS guards shot off some warning shots into the air, which caused the lion to give up and go running.

Now, just in case you weren’t concerned enough, let me tell you of the Ghost and the Darkness, a story that was actually made into a film that we were not permitted to see before we went on expedition. The Ghost and the Darkness were two male lions who 111 years ago killed and ate 135 people over the course of 9 months in Tsavo West National Park. These were basically super lions, males without huge manes, which is actually a result of greater testosterone levels in the body. They were each about nine feet long in length, and virtually invincible.

As a result of serious disease in the area at the time, these two lions turned to the workers of the Kenya-Uganda railway as their main source of food. And once they realized how tender and satisfying human meat was, they never turned back. They would enter silently into the camps of these workers at night, grab them as they slept from their tents, drag them off into the grass, and eat them as they were still alive as the rest of the camp had to listen to the sounds of screams and ripping flesh.

When these lions were finally killed (two weeks apart), the first took five bullets to kill and the second took eight, and died still crawling towards the gunman. They are now on display at a museum in Chicago.

The kicker to all of this is that not only are we in a serious drought (which is a problem because once again food for lions is scarce), but also that no one knows for sure whether all of the offspring of these man-eaters were killed, so the descendents of these alpha lions likely still roam the plains of Tsavo.

Oh, did I mention that we found a lion sleeping on the road into our camp one of the nights we were there?