Elephant

Take Me For An

The Outspan Hotel, Nyeri, Kenya.

Probably one of the most surprising things that this tourist nket—pardon me, safari —through Kenya has taught us is that •/- {E.A. or Stg .) will keep an elephant in water for a year.

>SER amounts will keep lesser inimals, so that though elephant ino may be for the high income :ets, you will have no difficulty iding one to suit your pocket— lions through buck and wilde , down to warthogs and baboons.

I all part of Kenya’s current i Our Wild Animals” campaign, i is the result of a couple of ns when the rains have partially I. In the more arid game re s, such as Tsavo and Amboseli, rild animals are dying in hun i for lack of water. The money :ted goes to finance reticulation ater into some reserves and just carting it into others, t last night there was no need tnyone to shout an elephant a - This is part of the so-called e Highlands, getting up towards foothills of Mt. Kenya, and it ill green and lush with corn, £ and acres of sisal. We spent right in a tree about 11 miles here, and from midnight it in torrents. The elephants, have more sense than tourists, d out of it, wherever elephants on such occasions and we saw er hide nor hair of even one.

Tree With a Trick to It The business of spending the night in a tree has a trick to it. The tree is the excuse for Tree Tops, an establishment constructed of rickety timber, malthoid and papyrus stalks in two stories and a roof deck, 30 to 40 feet above the ground. The tree hasn’t much part in keeping it up— long spindly timber poles do that— but the branches of the tree stick through the structure at all points, willy-nilly, and give colour to the notion that it is a tree-house.

Slightly over 20 persons can be stacked into it and we had our full complement. It has bedrooms of a sort, a big living-dining room, an ob servation deck and balcony; and even a “Ladies” and “Gents” with flushing toilets and H & C.

It is not, of course, the original T.T. This is a second edition, opened in 1957; the first was created in the mid-1930’5. It had only three rooms and was the brain child of a Lady Betty Walker, a sprig of the aristo cracy with a fully developed financial flair. She charged £Stglo per person per night, a fee that, then as now,

included dinner and the services of a White Hunter.

It was this T.T. that the Queen was visiting on the night in February, 1952, when King George VI died.

Over two years later it was burned down by Mau Mau at the height of the “Emergency”, and only the stump of the tree in which it was built now remains about 100 yards away from the present establishment.

The present T.T. is run as an ad junct of the Outspan and—let’s face it—it is pretty touristy. If you want to see African animals and hunt with your camera, you would probably be better served by the more arid game reserves where you are unrestricted in movement as long as you don’t get out of your car. Once into Tree Tops you must put up with the game that elects to come and wander by the swampy pool and take the salt lick.

Many of the small animals—-wart hogs, buck and the like—live in the near-by bush; but the rhino and elephant live in the Aberdare Ranges

and since the beginning of At time they have periodically down to the vicinity of T.T. to the soil that contains a naturall The large swampy pond, at r visitors to T.T. gaze so fixedly, in fact, been created by the lai tongues of countless generatioi these wild animals.

But when I had the choice c way I was to spend this day night of our short time in Kem was probably the promised T Hunter that tipped the seal* favour of Tree Tops.

White Hunter! It seemed toi jure up notions of Livingstone Stanley and all the lesser H who have come after. Men who: shot elephants and traded their down to the coast to exotic ] like Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam Lorenzo Marques. Defended selves from wild Zulus and Mau; or, single handed, bea hungry lions and rogue elepi not shooting till they saw the T of their eyes. It all seemed to piece with white topees and E Builders and the dear, dead da] yond recall. God knows there’s of it left, and this was for ir We drove the 80 miles or s from Nairobi to Nyeri in the noon and checked in here for It would, the customers wen formed, be unnecessary, in fao possible, to take even a small case to Tree Tops. Everyone herded into an elongated cupl presented with an aircraft cab( and told that only “wash t were vital. We’d sleep in our cl so that if any interesting game along during the night the se: could wake us immediately.

Many of that party had not in their clothes since kinder days, but they rose to the oc; with only minor whinges.

We were then ushered intoi open-sided vehicles called safar and were joined by the capit capital H, White Hunter.

A White Hunter, I Presume I’m not an authority on thii ject but this one looked just s= more self-conscious about the adventure than we did, alti dressed for the part. He wore shorts of the variety known in tralia as Bombay Bloomers; a jacket; a beat-up old hat and ■ boots. He was equipped with aj sized rifle done up and fastened: in an elaborate canvas contain It was a sobering thought ths he and it stood between us an off-chance of being gored by aE

ampled by an elephant. I hoped he was quicker on the draw than ed likely, and that he wouldn’t ogged down and fumble with all i buckles and fastenings, bund out later that he earns an st extra buck as a White Hunter lore than on two days and nights iek; and that on the other five i a coffee planter. In fact, this ing after the night in the tree, ouldn’t get rid of us quickly gh as this is the beginning of lush coffee picking season, ere are about 1,000 yards be i where we were decanted from ars and the steps into Tree Tops. f second tree along the path has igh bush ladder up it and there mall circular brush “hides”, at gic points. Should the occasion the Hunter lurks therein, de ag us to the death, while we tall timber. ce inside the house, the hours gil begin. This is, as near as i it, on the equator. But the 0 ft Mt. Kenya is ahead, the iares behind and we seem to a sort of wind-tunnel between, es, we now are at 6,500 ft [ion and the atmosphere is Arc- Jp on the observation deck, the whistles through my cotton 1 and I hastily add a thick er I’ve brought and then a et provided by the establish ring mid-afternoon several ies of wart-hogs appear to w in the mud of the swamp and base one another around the and their foolish, stringy tails the bob at the end, are the neter of their passing feelings, [ling limp in the lower registers, rise to a stiff 90 deg. above their at the peak of their various ions. e wart-hogs were joined by •hogs, by buck and wildebeest, la and baboon, all but the last ing around underneath the s, licking up the salt, rolling in mud, oblivious of the gawking, Ta-clicking humans 40 feet above heads. The baboons—horrible s with their obscene, bald •ms —came up the fire escape were fed biscuits by Mr. and White Hunter; and at dusk • a herd of 70 buffalo and one white rhinoceros that looked, a Tree Tops-eye view, like an ■stuffed slightly grubby sofa, idering around below away from infuriating scent of humans, fer dinner, the White Hunter, se bonhomie with tourists was a veneer at the best of times, had one idea—to get everyone off to

bed as soon as possible. He said persuasively that we would be wakened for three rhinos, or for one elephant, and most people took the bait and faded off, secreting themsalves in the recesses of that strange budding like rolled up stockings slipped into the pockets of a hold-all.

My cubby-hole was just large enough for a folding camp bed and two large tree branches. The walls were of papyrus stems and it all smelled like a hay-stack (or a Fijian bure or a New Guinea kunai house).

I removed only my shoes, as instructed, and got under the blankets preparatory to sleep—but that was as far as that idea went. As things turned out, I haven’t had so much free nocturnal entertainment since the days of Mrs. Stewart’s temporary post-war hotel in the old AW AS camp at Lae, NG, when we all slept in a “long-house” with sisalkraft partitions between.

Papyrus stalks and sisalkraft have this in common they provide privacy of a sort but no sound-proofmg and my sleeping habits have never been equal to four accomphshed snorers and a chronl ' cougher. I spent a big slice of the night back m the upper storey with a large African in green shirt and shorts, a red fez and a pink blanket who, after the rain began at 1 a.m., got progressively more miserable.

This was the watchmen who was sup-

posed to be watching for those three rhinos or one elephant, The night might have been more profitable for both of us if we could have met somewhere along the lan guage front. We could have dis cussed the current political situation j n Kenya, or the future of colonial iSm generally. As it was I sat and looked at a magazine and he sat and looked at me, obviously wondering why in creation anyone who had the chance to lie down and sleep should prefer to sit up; while he, who was practically out to it on his feet, should be compelled to do it.

Take-off time from T.T. is 7 a.m., and it was stin ra i n i ng as we were convoyed by White Hunter in parties of six down to the safari cars . j t j s said hereabo ut, of course, that the Royal Eij za beth climbed into Tree Tops that f ate ful afternoon of Feb ruary> 1952, a Princess; and de scended therefrom the next morning a Q ueen so to report tha t no such mm h ' sis occ P urre d in my case, climbed to T.T. last afternoon reasonably pressed and n eat. I de scended this morning looking like X n, at Pd s i ept j n my clothes, • . • Tops ® X f P u nt once ; n probably tempted to W c v a nev a lifetime-so. here: is your Sydney sider, C ?J. Darkest Kenva White Highlands Y