The dawn was charged with excitement. The entire makings of base camp, with supplies for the next three days, had been loaded into straw panniers on the donkeys. Our caravan not only looked impressive but felt romantic. Not for us the protective comfort of the modern safari — the well-padded 4×4 with two-way radio and quality blankets.
We were travelling into the past after the fashion of the past: with a baggage train of 20 donkeys and three mules, an escort of 12 Samburu, Ndorobo and Turkana warriors, and a great white hunter (retired) hefting his favourite game rifle.
Our party of six European trekkers was impatient to start the adventure. But first, there was a solemn moment: Lekermogo, guide and tribal elder from the nearby village of Baua, leant on his spear and lifted his arm to command our attention. His grave speech was also a prayer.
“We are going into the forest, where there are risky animals. We must always be wary. So tighten your hearts and ask for God’s blessing.”
Lekermogo’s words were translated by Peter Faull who, with his wife Rosalie, runs Samburu Trails, a trekking operation that brings new meaning to the overworked tag “exclusive”. On the Faulls’ safaris, you don’t get Victorian baths or replica Out-of-Africana, but you do get the landscape, the game and some of the best wilderness views in East Africa to yourselves.
In this lonely region of northern Kenya, we also got an enchanted wood to ourselves: a pristine mix of African olive, cedar, Cape chestnut and towering podocarpus trees, each occupying its niche in the remnant of indigenous forest that drapes the Leroghi mountains. This was the homeland of the Samburu — the Nilotic people who share with their more famous kin, the Masai, a taste for brilliant beadwork, scarlet shukas, braided hair and ochre face paint. Unlike the Masai, their remote villages and way of life have scarcely been touched by tourism.
The Leroghi forest is a national reserve, which doesn’t stop the Samburu nibbling at its edges for firewood. It lies between the eastern edge of the Great Rift Valley and the wild Matthews range. The frontier town of Maralal, which was the last African home of the veteran travel writer Wilfred Thesiger, is only a few kilometres away, but the forest has rarely been visited by Europeans since the Victorian explorer-hunter Arthur Henry Neumann plundered it for ivory.
The memoirs of Neumann — and the ancestral memories of the local Ndorobo people, who have been largely assimilated by the Samburu — put Peter on the trail of the elephant-hunter and led to the discovery of his main camp, El Bogoi where, 100 years after Neumann’s expedition, Peter unearthed the remains of cooking fires and the near-calcified bones of giraffe and rhino.
“I’d been thinking of taking safaris into the hills but the forest is very dense,” he said. “Then, when I was looking for El Bogoi, the Samburu showed me a network of paths and tracks, some made by elephant, some by their own cattle. Ideal for donkey treks.”
Over four nights and three days we met only a posse of Samburu grazing their cattle in glades. Beyond the circle of our own campfires, we saw no signs of life other than the airy scrambling of baboons and Hartlaub’s turacos, the flash of bushbuck and the tracks and droppings of “risky animals”.
At night, zipped into our tents, we heard the wails of tree hyrax and the alarmed bark of a baboon who had spotted a leopard; and — lifting the hairs on my scalp — the sawing rasp of the leopard itself.
This is the kind of walking safari where you might meet an elephant on a path or flush a buffalo from a thicket, or see no game at all. For that reason, it usually begins or ends at Mugie, two hours’ drive south on the Laikipia plateau. There, game-hungry visitors can feast their eyes on the Big Five and a mixed population of plains game that shares the grazing with Boran cattle and red Masai sheep.
This working ranch is also a private game reserve, and its A-list celebrities are lions. Mugie is one of the core study areas for the Laikipia Predator Project, which is researching the interaction of people, livestock and big cats with a view to helping them co-exist. It has a population of 28 lions.
Trekkers can either camp at Mugie or stay at magnificent Mutamaiyu House, which stands on a ridge super-vising a view that reaches to distant Mount Kenya. Mutamaiyu’s public rooms and four guest cottages are not only stocked with spectacular African art but are equipped with huge fireplaces; at 1 800m, the nights are cool enough to make fires welcome.
On the walking safari, our pace was leisurely, interrupted by regular pit-stops to enjoy Rosalie’s home baking: pumpkin soup, followed by red snapper casserole and tree tomato tart, served with unlimited measures of Tusker beer and wine. The trek was graded easy and no leg took longer than four hours; although sometimes, just for fun, we took turns on Mabel the mule, who was saddled for riding.
Each camp had its own allure but Tilia had the most breathtaking site. There, on our second day, we burst suddenly from the forest on to a giddy clifftop. It was the highest point of the climb which, from the 1 800m base of the hills, had lifted us to a 2 400m ridge.
Far below, we saw the site of Neumann’s old camp, and the coils of the Seiya river. At eye level, the view stretched east to the Matthews range and north to the “dream mountains” of Ndoto. The only human imprint on the landscape was the tiny circle of a Samburu village.
Each day there was plenty of time to relax or enjoy small side-adventures with our warrior escorts. At Nangaro camp Lentaiya and Tipatayo took us looking for elephant, and we came so close that we heard the lone bull’s sighs before he slipped away. At Tilia camp, Lekermogo “called out” a honey guide, and the little bird, returning the calls, led us to bees swarming in the fork of a tree.
At Naibolo Rock, round our last campfire, the Samburu danced, leaping high in the air like springboard athletes as they sang of women and cattle, and cattle and women, and battles for both.
On our fourth morning we completed the circuit down to Baua, where Lekermogo offered another prayer. “Go well, people of the planes and cars. May the metal of your cars and planes be strong and keep you safe. If God wills, we shall meet again. Meanwhile, will the last person out of the forest please close the gate?” —Â Â