"Out of Africa" turned up on my teenage teen-age son's school reading list, which seemed a good excuse to go into Africa to the country where Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, wrote the book. We started in the logical place, Nairobi, where Blixen's erstwhile home is now a museum in the center of a neighborhood where everything is named the "Karen This" and "Karen That." We ended at the fabled Mt. Mount Kenya Safari Club, where, one morning, we soared next to mountain peaks and over valleys in the only biplane now in Africa, an aircraft reminiscent of the one Denys Finch-Hatton flew. (And crashed in. But this one is a contemporary recreation, re-creation, manufactured in Michigan under strict regulations, and it felt perfectly safe.)
Between Nairobi and Mt.Mount Kenya, our lodgings included the lovely Kichwa Tembo Safari Camp, near the hills where the 1985 movie version of "Out of Africa" was filmed. The real setting of Blixen's famous first words, "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills," was ineligible as a setting, as it's become part of Nairobi's suburban sprawl.Amazingly enough, my quite sophisticated and experienced Kenyan guide said that until he saw "Out of Africa," he'd never known who "Karen" was, although he'd grown up in Nairobi. The British didn't like Blixen's attitude toward the "natives": She helped the workers on her coffee farm with education and health care, a move the Brits considered the thin edge of the wedge of insurrection. To retaliate, my guide said, the British simply didn't acknowledge her existence in the history books they wrote, books used in Kenyan schools.
The Karen Blixen Museum is a modest compound, a low building with tile roof. African museums in general are not gussied up the way Western ones are: no audio tours, no sophisticated shops. Blixen's house has wistfully European details like linenfold paneling over the fireplace. Her bedroom is white and frilly, surprisingly feminine for this rifle-toting symbol of female independence. A sign in the sitting room says "All Body Out." I assumed it meant "Keep Out" of the room, which was already roped off anyway, but it turns out it meant that the innards of the lion skin lying on the floor had been removed.
My son and I both read "Out of Africa" during our two weeks in Kenya, and we kept relating what we were reading to what we was seeing and experiencing. Blixen lived in Africa during 1914-'31, a different era. Witness her initial lust for shooting, definitely not PC: "I could not live until I had killed a specimen of each kind of African game."
And in Blixen's time, the Masai still thought of themselves as warriors, she writes. "When the Great War first broke out, and the Masai had news of it, the blood of the old fighting tribe was all up. They had visions of splendid battles and massacres, and they saw the glory of the past returning once more."
The English didn't let the Masai fight initially, and by the time they decided they needed the warrior tribe, the Masai had lost interest. They did serve as scouts, though, with enough distinction to be honored at the end of the war.
"A medal is an inconvenient thing to give to a naked man. ..." Blixen notes on the award ceremony. What, I wonder, would she think of the current status of the Masai, who have been turned into a tourist attraction, charging money for taking their picture in the red plaid that is their cloth of choice.
"A generation ago they would have been fatal to us to meet," Blixen wrote of her encounters with the Masai. A generation later, they're harmless and helpless.
But some things about Blixen's "natives" seemed still true. One was their attitude toward time, which nowadays may have something to do with Kenya's 50 percent unemployment rate as well as with spirituality and connection with ancestors. They are, Blixen wrote, "on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives."
The two prettiest places we stayed in Kenya were meant to evoke Blixen's era. The first was Kichwa Tembo - the name means "Elephant's Head" - a camp on the edge of the Masai Mara. This is as elegant as camping gets, the tents furnished as if for an "Architectural Digest" spread, with bamboo furniture, elephant print bedspreads and roomy bathrooms. At dawn, before guests head out on safari, a staff member delivers early morning tea to the tents, a British tradition that is most welcome - particularly at that hour. In the evening, someone tucks a hot-water bottle between the sheets. Along with the civilizing touches is a conscious attempt to leave nature alone. There's a strip of lawn that gets mowed in front of the tents, but that's it for landscaping. So accustomed are animals to having humans in their midst that warthogs come right up to the tents, and small monkeys like to scamper over them.
Kichwa Tembo is reached by light aircraft that land on a nearby strip. Flying is also the preferred way to get to the Mount Kenya Safari Club, a legendary resort with a colorful past: Names associated with it include Hollywood star William Holden, one of the founders of the club, which opened in 1959. But Westerners had been associated with this place decades earlier. A British colonel, E.S. Percy Smith, was attracted to the spot in 1935 by reports that the spiral-horned antelope known as the bongo, the shiest of creatures, had been captured in the Mount Kenya Forest. That was all it took for Percy Smith and a wealthy American lady friend to move to Kenya, where they promptly caught one of the animals and sold it to a European zoo. The colonel was thereafter called "Bongo" Smith.
Bongo died in a drunken brawl with a French sailor, and the lady friend sold the property in the shadow of Mount Kenya to another wealthy American woman and her French lover, on condition that the latter fly to France with Bongo's body, have it cremated and return to Kenya to scatter the ashes. The condition met, the property was transferred, and the new owners built the palatial house they called "Mawingu," after the fluffy little clouds around Mount Kenya.
When Mawingu was converted into a hotel in 1948, guests came to hunt elephant, buffalo, lion - and bongo. Safari was what brought Holden, then the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, to Kenya with a couple of friends in 1959. In love with the place, they bought it and turned it into the Mount Kenya Safari Club.
And, at the beginning, a club it was. You had to be a member to enjoy the facilities. Winston Churchill joined; so did Greek shipping magnates, Indian maharajahs and Lyndon Johnson. They enjoyed not just the hunt but black-tie dinners in the bush, golf in the company of the marabou storks who loiter on the grounds, lawn bowls, riding, bird walks, fishing and more sedentary activities including relaxing on the veranda while traditional Chukka dancers performed on the lawn.
Nowadays, instead of hunting animals, guests are more likely to pet them in the club's on-site animal orphanage, filled with the wounded and/or the rare, including the elusive bongo: All proceeds go to save endangered wildlife. Some aspects of the club haven't changed, though. Gentlemen are still required to wear jacket and tie in the members' dining room, where exotica on the menu include impala, gazelle and tilapia fish. Everything executive chef Philip Carolan serves is local - except for smoked salmon from Scotland. A man who plans ahead, Carolan is currently buying up champagne for the millennium, anticipating the biggest New Year's bash ever.
While the club's location - exactly on the equator - is spectacular, the staff impressed me even more. A young man called David the Fisherman is the Baryshnikov of fly fishing, demonstrating the graceful gestures of his craft as guests manage to hook large trees or, on occasion, themselves.
Then there was Andrew Garratt, an American who got a job cutting grass at his local airport at age 12 and has been involved with flying ever since, winding up as an Air Force dentist. Garratt flew all over the world both for fun and for worthy causes: He coordinated airlifts of food and emergency supplies for the United Nations. Stuck on both flying and Africa, he now flies tourists in the only biplane on the continent, one modeled on those early, legendary aircraft but newly manufactured by a Lansing, Mich., company.
The highlight of our Mount Kenya trip was an hour or so with Garratt in his tiny red plane, which looks like The Little Airplane That Could. It's a theatrical experience, for which you don a costume, supplied by Garratt: leather jacket, long white silk scarf, goggles. Attired like the Red Baron, you climb into the tiny plane, which can accommodate only two passengers at a time and which has no door. You're so squeezed in, though, that falling out seems impossible, even when Garratt tilts at an angle perilously close to 90 degrees.
He sits behind the passengers, which increases their sense of private adventure: The biplane is an intimate alternative to those hot-air balloon flights where a dozen or so people can be packed into a basket. You're connected to the pilot by microphone and headset, should you experience a panic attack, and as you bounce down the grass air strip before takeoff, a soundtrack starts. It's the score from the movie of "Out of Africa," with the slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto in A major its centerpiece.
Zooming around Mount Kenya in Garratt's tiny plane brought me back to the time when flying was still glamorous, a time Dinesen wrote about so eloquently in her descriptions of soaring over Africa in Denys Finch-Hatton's moth.
"When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names."
If You Go....
I went to Kenya on a tour called the Livingstone Safari, organized by Abercrombie & Kent. A & K has a large variety of East African tours; call 1-800-323-7308 for information. Prices for the Livingstone Safari start at $3,730 per person. Other A & K Kenya tours start at $1,400.
Kichwa Tembo is a member of the Conservation Corporation. The Kenyan address is Msapo Close, Off Parklands Rd., P.O. Box 74957, Nairobi, Kenya.
The Mount Kenya Safari Club address is Box 35, Nanyuki, Kenya. Working with a U.S. travel agent is, however, probably a more efficient way of making reservations than trusting the East African mail.