Saturday, August 27, 2022

Day 1 - To Amboseli

tell me that I haven't reached the end
tell me that there's more around the bend
tell me that I have the strength to go on
Treading Water - Emawk

Day 1 in Kenya, gosh, it's happening, I was going to do this safari. It was going to be 7 days spent with someone I didn't know. I won't write about which company I booked with, where I stayed in, even though I think they would love the publicity. It's just, I don't know, I want to keep things private as much as possible. I did write them, dare I say, a glowing review in Tripadvisor (my first one ever) after being asked more than once by my driver / guide, who I will just initial as K here. The person playing this role was one of my worry about this trip and a subject of my many prayers. I have never done anything like this before where I entrusted the whole entire trip that I did alone to a single person. In fact I recalled a conversation with my parents in Taiwan when we saw many other people were renting the cab for the whole day for sightseeing and I told them I would never be able to do that on my own because it would be scary and yet now I was doing it because there's no other choice. Well I could have joined one of those group trips but I am way too anti-social for that. So in my prayers, I prayed for someone whom I could get along and communicate well and I think God delivered :) I also prayed so that God would help me watch my own behaviour :D

Anyways, the sleep the night before was good and I woke up pretty okay in the morning. I have pretty much separated what I was going to bring and what I would have the hotel keep in their storage until my return. Breakfast was okay. I was nervous all around. The anxiety never leaves. Oh one thing that surprised me, all the places I visited in Kenya was chilly in the morning and evening and I found it so unexpected. I googled for information to make sense of this and I think it's just their season and also I think if we take Nairobi for example, it's on a much higher elevation than Jakarta or even Bandung, so I think that's why they get to be cooler. Anyways, so pick up was 07:30 AM, I was there first before K and I was just glad he's there. First impression was that he's tall and giggles easily. I can't really say much about how I felt because it's really like, we're doing this, so let's go. Among the first thing I asked him was that if I needed to wear mask in the car and he was like anything you like and in the end I didn't wear mask at all throughout my time there except for places where somehow the lodge requires you to wear one before taking food in the buffet. Sometime the rule are weird, The staff mostly wore masks but they didn't insist guests to wear one. In my Nairobi hotel, they gave you glove to take food but didn't insist you wear mask. It only occured to me much later that my mask-less time there was what life was like before. A thought did occur to me a few times that perhaps my mom would be concerned about my lax attitude regarding mask, but I also think that wearing a mask in mask-less environment can kinda carry more meaning, like will people think you're sickly, or will people think you think they're not clean and hence you're wearing a mask? Yeah, I think too much. Anyways, K came bearing gift, aawww how nice, the tour agency gave me some goodies. It was really nice. Then off we went. First leg was to Amboseli. Amboseli is where you can see Mount Kilimanjaro, but I didn't see it when I was there because it was covered by cloud, haze, dust.

I forgot if it's within these few conversations that we established that K was younger. It was expected actually. Everyone I meet these days even though they look my age, they're generally younger. He's 9 years younger and the thing about me is, anyone who is my brother's age or younger, I straight away see them as younger from an older sibling point of view. It's like my brother's age is the line, so there's only a small window for people who's born 1 year younger than me in which I won't look at them as so young. I wouldn't say I talked much with K in the first few days, because we're still like strangers and like this is awkward right, but by the end I know some things about him and I do trust him completely and I do look at him as a little brother :D Okay, the drive out of Nairobi was kinda interesting, saw ostrich, zebras in the field by the side of the road. It's funny that they have all this wildlife that in this trip I only saw around 5-7 dogs and 1 cat :D I asked K as we were driving in the highway why at the sides it's just wide open field because comparing this to Indonesia, there would be farms and farms and he said it's too dry to plant things and that was like mind-opening. Amboseli was a bit far, there's one stop at like souvenir / curio shop to use the toilet and the first of my many experience having to fend from people offering me to look at or buy stuff. It's always awkward anywhere and you know you just repeat no thank you and keep it moving. The drive in the highway was like any same highway in other parts of the world, but then to get to my first place, K had to drive on unpaved roads. I seriously do not know how he knew where to go, there's no sign or anything. I wonder how long it will take me to learn it. It was not the most comfortable drive, but this is common in these places I think.

My first accomodation was a camp. Okay let me explain a bit, there's like 2 types of accomodation that I used in this trip, camp and lodge. The one I used in Amboseli is a tented camp where instead of proper walls all around the room, it's more like a sturdy tarp and it's self-enclosed. The neighbour tent is like 3-4 metres away. The lodges I used in this trip on the other hand have proper walls like in a house. In fact all the lodges I stayed in are like little houses which normally house 2 separate rooms. In both these places, there's a mosquito net (kelambu in Indonesian) around the bed that the staff will set up for you when you go for dinner. So this camp in Amboseli has a good review actually, but upon entering I was like what, this is good?!? I just can find fault in anything, I'm sorry. Ask the people who have travelled with me, they will confirm this. They're like it's fine, you're just being difficult. I guess, the darkness is what got me most. I cannot deal with a room that feel dark to me, but once I steeled myself to get used to it, it was actually okay. It would tie to second place of all the places I stayed in in this trip. Toilet and shower were good and I so love the water dispenser in the room. We arrived by lunch and then K said we'd meet at 4 pm. Okay a few things to unpack here. I ate like 3 times a day in this trip which sounds normal but in my daily life, I do not eat that much so I normally came to these meals not eating much. I always made room for desserts though which I know it's bad, but I couldn't let go desserts. Then when K said 4 pm, my head was like what?!?! What was I going to do? It's perhaps the most difficult part about this trip, ceding control to someone else. I wasn't in control and for someone who plan everything, there's a sense of feeling lost about what to do. There's no TV in the room and the Wi-Fi doesn't reach the room. I should be thankful enough there's electricty all the time because some places don't have electricity during the day, but still :( I did prepare for this by bringing a book. Rarely do I bring a book in trips because normally I always have things to do, but this time I brought Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart so I tried to read. Things were running all over my brain that it was hard to focus but it's a good thing that I had the book. I knocked off a few chapters in this trip.

Then it was 4 pm, time for my first game drive. Bumpy ride to the entrance gate and when we arrived, there were many people also waiting to get in and it was quite some time for K and everyone else to sort out our entries. I don't know how the processess are like. I noticed in Kenya, some places still do things very manually like they have an actual book in which they write the visitors' information. Anyways we got in and remember my mood was already kinda down and as we went along, I wasn't feeling it that I did wonder if I was actually making the wrong decision about this trip, I'm not exactly that crazy about animals so I might be way over my head here. You could see animals quite immediately, there were gazelle, zebra, ostrich, giraffe, wildebeest, impala, baboon, but I was like ... okay. Then there's was this swampy area and that was pretty cool, there were some elephants in it which was really cool. There were also hippopotamuses inside the swamp in the distance and my photos also show there's some flamingoes. There was a also a lion by the bank, but it was just sleeping at that time.

I am showing this death hippo here too because it's like a part of life and the part of life that we do not see in a zoo, that animals die too.

On the other side of the swamp, there were elephants too and some zebras. At this point, with the elephants in the swamp and all it was kinda exciting, but what happened next was beyond.

K drove a bit away from the swamp and almost suddenly we saw a group of elephants crossing the road and I was like oh my God, this is amazing! It's one of the thing I wanted to see, perhaps the main thing actually. Someone asked me why elephants, you can see them in the zoo, but seeing baby elephants would be so cool and seeing like a herd, I counted there were 13, it was just beyond. It's like I achieved the one thing that I wanted to see in my first day, almost like we can go home now. Also almost like God is saying, take it easy girl, there are wonderful things to be seen here. It turned the whole day around for me. I'm glad I was there. Truthfully though, sometime when you zoom in and you take a picture of the animal, you may not be able to differentiate if it's taken in the zoo or actual habitat, but things like this group of elephants, you can't see this in a zoo.

Okay, these pictures of mine do not show the whole group, so see below my tweet from that day, picture taken from the phone. It was really something, I was just in awe watching them walk in a single file. K said they're always led by a female.

saw this today and I thought it was just amazing pic.twitter.com/aIE4VsG6dR

— Eka (@ekabuntoro) August 15, 2022

After that we made our way back. Passing the swamp again, the lion was awake now and was eating the dead warthog he seemed to be saving for dinner near it. Looking at my photos, I then realized we saw sleepy hyenas too on that first day. Totally forgot about it.

:) eKa @ 5:39:00 PM •