Across the Great Rift (Cont.)

Outside Magazine March 2002

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	Newly circumcised boys and girls, identified by their painted faces

ALL GOOD ROAD TRIPS START GIDDILY, and our safari was no exception. We ran through Nakumatt, Kenya's Wal-Mart, stuffing jumbo shopping carts with cookware and jerricans. An hour later we were on the dual carriageway—the freeway— speeding out of Nairobi. Our destination was the west side of the Great Rift Valley, more remote and less developed than eastern Masailand, and the place where Mike grew up. KISS 98 FM was playing a Tupac Shakur song on the radio, and he leaned forward to turn it up.

"Last time I was here, you were listening to Kenny G," I said.

"Tupac's a west-side guy, man," Mike replied. "Like Snoop." He tapped his L.A. Lakers cap. "I like the west side."

Musical tastes notwithstanding, Mike seemed pretty much the same guy I remembered. He was witty, eloquent, and outwardly relaxed. Indeed, he seemed to have an aristocratic calmness about him, as if he came from wealth and nothing could really faze him.

But I got the sense that inside, something had started to gnaw at him. There had, I knew, been one major change in his life. His girlfriend, Vera, had given birth to a baby daughter. They were living with Vera's parents in Nairobi, but they wanted to get married and find a place of their own. The problem was the bride price. Mike was worried that his family, which in fact was not wealthy, wouldn't be able to pay it.

Kenya seemed different, too—slightly more ominous than before. The papers were full of gruesome crime stories, and tension between Africans and the mostly Indian merchant class seemed at an all-time high. The few rural Masai wandering the streets of Nairobi looked more irrelevant than ever. With their beads and red cloaks, they remained the most familiar symbol of Kenya. But thanks to more than 25 years of one-party rule and deeply entrenched corruption, Kenya was increasingly just another strife-torn, debt-bound, quasi dictatorship. The plight of the 377,000 Masai, about 1 percent of the country's 30 million people, hardly qualified as a problem.

An hour out of Nairobi we dropped 3,000 feet down the Laikipia Escarpment to the Great Rift Valley. Ironically, a giant satellite dish marked the entrance to Masai country; alongside it, giraffes bent to graze on the low acacias, while clusters of zebras and gazelles drifted across the landscape, indifferent to the larger herds of cattle.



	The author jacks up the bogged Pajero

We provisioned and spent the night in Narok, the administrative capital of western Masailand and gateway to the Masai Mara National Reserve—Kenya's top tourist attraction, a huge, rolling, animal-rich grassland that lies just north of Tanzania's Serengeti Plain. Narok is a frontier town. By night it swells with young Masai in from the bush looking for a buzz; by day the tourist minibuses roll through, air conditioners roaring. In theory, all the gate receipts and lodging fees from the Masai Mara (which is administered by the Narok County Council) are supposed to flow back to the community, funding roads, schools, and health care. But somehow, year after year, it all disappears. One look at the row of shiny Land Cruisers parked in front of Narok's hostelry of choice, the $10-a-night Princess Hotel, told us where.

"Big shots," Mike said. "The people who matter.

"The problem with Kenyan politics," he went on, "is that no one respects you if you are elected or appointed to office and you don't take the money. The actual saying is, 'If you go to Narok and you come away with nothing in your pocket, you have to be daft.'" He laughed, but I noted a trace of bitterness.

Mike's mood improved when we set off the next morning, the Pajero teetering under a Joad-like pile of sleeping pads, fresh produce, and the inevitable extra passengers—a student on leave, a distant cousin of Mike's, and the deputy civil chief for the Loitas. About 20 miles southwest of Narok, the tarmac came to an end. We turned south off the road to the Masai Mara, then headed east into the Loitas. The track was laughably bad; we bounced along in first gear for miles at a time. As if in compensation, the countryside grew more beautiful, morphing from scrubby flatlands to undulating, gladed ridges carpeted in bright green grass and wildflowers.

At one point, Mike got out of the car and shot a few panoramas with Liz's video camera. He had vague notions of doing a short documentary piece on the Loitas, and I taped him doing a stand-up. "Everyone is happy here," he said. "There's plenty of milk right now. They're wallowing in it."

To the south was Tanzania, not so distant now. We picked out the great volcanoes of the southern Rift, each with its own distinct profile: broad Gelai, broader Kitembene, the zebra-striped Ol Donyo Lengai, and the massive Ngorongoro Crater. Kilimanjaro was farther east, its snowcap lost in the clouds.

We left the road at Murja, about five miles south of the sleepy trading post of Morijo. One of Mike's four sisters, Mercy, had married a man from there, Mokope Ole Nooseli. There was no road, so we climbed over a steep hill in four-wheel drive, pushing slowly through fields of wild mint and hibiscus that grew higher than the vehicle. The boma, or homestead, comprised several large fields of maize, a half-dozen traditional mud-and-dung Masai huts, and a corral of tall cedar stakes, plus a tin-roofed house that belonged to Mokope's older brother, Francis. Mike had not seen his sister for a year, and they shyly shook hands. He and his diminutive brother-in-law warmly embraced. Although Mokope was a bit older than Mike, in his early thirties, both were members of the same "age-set," a brotherhood of men within the tribe who go through coming-of-age ceremonies at the same time.

Francis, Mokope, and another thirtysomething in-law, Lulunken Ole Nkulaai, helped us look for a campsite. We settled on a little grove at the top of the hill we'd just crossed—the Hill of Milk, so named because cows who grazed there always returned with swollen udders. Francis offered us a goat, and Mike enthusiastically assisted in the butchering, eager to show his relatives that he still knew how. Later, as Mokope stretched strips of the meat on sticks and jabbed them into the ground next to the fire, Mike made a pasta sauce of tomatoes, onions, and garlic.

By now a small crowd had gathered—tall, red-robed men with dangling earlobes who'd walked up from the surrounding bomas to see who the newcomers were. They weren't so sure about Mike's spaghetti.

"Are you eating worms?" one man asked. The cucumbers I'd sliced for a salad were greeted with universal revulsion. I made a little speech about the importance of balancing the food groups, but Mike refused to translate it.

"That's a waste of breath and energy," he said.

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