A dollar a day and huts made of dung: a Ukrainian woman's extreme trip to Kenya

Our plane lands at 9:00 am. The sun is shining mercilessly at such an early hour, so the only desire is to get through check-in as quickly as possible and find a cool corner.

Stepping on the concrete of Nairobi Airport, the difference with Egypt, Tunisia or other African countries is not immediately obvious.

But after just half an hour, having entered the atmosphere of the bustling multi-million dollar and dangerous city of Nairobi, which is also the largest transport hub in Africa, looking around with admiration, we are sincerely surprised by the technological skyscrapers, traffic jams on 8-lane roads and the number of armed men. While the city is just over 100 years old and in its short history it has already been completely burnt down due to the plague and rebuilt.

Back at the airport, our guide tells us that while in the mainland of Kenya it is mainly animals that we need to be wary of, Nairobi is a classic example of banditry and terrorism.

For example, while we were arranging our safari tour in a secluded office on the outskirts of Nairobi, a shootout took place on the street, with the rapid arrival of loud police, screams from passers-by and, unfortunately, bodies covered in black plastic bags on the road. It's no wonder that in such a city, even a simple trip to the supermarket for groceries is an adventure: a mandatory police search with a metal detector. It seems that the status of one of the most dangerous and criminal cities in the world is fully justified.

After leaving Nairobi, every kilometre takes us away from signs of civilisation. And after a couple of hours, the road turns into a bamperroad (as our guide Peter calls it), and zebras and antelopes walk along the roadside. Our path lies to the very heart of Kenya, and perhaps the whole of Africa - the Masai Mara Conservation Area, named after the local Masai tribes and the Mara River, which divides the reserve between Kenya and Tanzania.

The four-hour drive along the bamperroad ‘motorway’ mixed stomach, kidneys and brains into a cocktail, but it was a sincere delight to see the destination - a tent camp, which in any other circumstances could have been terrifying. Eight tents, enclosed by a low wooden fence, just, apparently, to outline the territory. Each tent has one ‘double bed’ with a mosquito net and a ‘bathroom’ behind a screen. A shower with rusty water and a toilet.

Light and water - 2 hours a day only when the generator is running. During this time, you need to wash and have time to charge all your devices. But in the dining room - a large tent with a long table - the light lasts a little longer, apparently, it is difficult to cook in the dark. And, by the way, no matter how far from civilisation you are, you don't have to worry about food - everything is always fresh and tasty, especially the choice of potato and cabbage dishes in the central part of the country - the vegetables that grow here best, and on the coast - amazing seafood, the octopus alone is available in several types of dishes.

Well, enough about everyday life, Kenya is an exotic world of animals that lives by its own strict rules, close - at a distance of a metre from a safari jeep, and far away - in the endless savannah with rare breadfruit trees. Herds of wildebeest and buffalo, families of giraffes, stately elephants, a mother cheetah with her cubs, slow clumsy hippos, strange ostriches, and, of course, proud prides of lions, including the most famous and numerous pride, called the swamp pride by scientists.

By the way, if you suddenly have an irresistible urge to stretch your legs in the middle of the savannah, think twice, because a family of 8-10 adult and, quite possibly, hungry lions may be resting under a lone bush, escaping the midday heat.

The Mara River divides the reserve into two countries - Kenya and Tanzania. And while in Kenya hunting is forbidden to all but the local Masai, in Tanzania you can get the entire Big Five as a trophy for a lot of money. In this regard, its rarest representative, the black rhino, is on the verge of extinction. In Kenya, the Maasai strictly monitor poaching attempts, but they do not deny themselves the ancient tradition of manhood initiation - to kill a lion and make an amulet of teeth, which can then be sold to tourists.

The Maasai live quite primitively: men, dressed in bright red clothes and sandals made of car tyres, graze goats all day, and women do everything else: they make huts from goat dung and clay, carry multi-litre barrels of water from a nearby stream on their shoulders for cooking, and give birth to many children, as infant mortality is very high.

And, despite the fact that the flow of tourists is increasing every year, the Maasai have not been able to adapt to the modern world and have remained away from the tourist business, continuing their wild and colourful traditions: drinking milk and animal blood, performing circumcision rites for both boys and girls, not burying their dead, but leaving them to be eaten by predators in the savannah. You can't take pictures of the Maasai without their permission, but you can treat Maasai children to sweets.

After the last sleepless night, listening to the sound of rain, barking hyenas and baboons, and angry calls from the Maasai camp guards, we move on to the next point of our journey - Nakuru.

Lake Nakuru, thanks to its salt water and specific algae, attracts thousands of pink flamingos to its shores, covering the water surface with a bright velvet dancing carpet. This beautiful picture - black tropical trees, bright acacia trees, an extinct volcano on the horizon - is fraught with many dangers. There are aggressive baboons trying to snatch a biscuit or a camera from gawking tourists, the rarest of the Big Five African animals - the black rhinoceros, and a giant python suddenly crawling across the road.

Our third point before the ocean coast is the legendary, highest on the continent and part of the Seven Summits, Mount Kilimanjaro. Or rather, not a mountain, but a potentially active stratovolcano, which has recently been of particular concern to researchers, accelerated by the melting of the glaciers that cover the peak.

We arrive at the foot of Kilimanjaro late at night, so only in the morning, with the first rays of the sun, in the clouds that have scattered, which is not often, we see a powerful, almost conical shape, covered with snow and ice peak. And the most striking photographs are of huge elephants slowly walking against the backdrop of the majestic, still dormant, highest African volcano.

Before we plunged into the refined atmosphere of the ocean coast with emerald, always wet grass, centuries-old baobabs, comfortable bungalows and snow-white sand, a hundred metres exposed at low tide, we had to see real life, covered with red Kenyan dust.

A life without electricity, gas or even water. In villages where all water bodies dry up in the dry season, water is brought in every other day in large tanks, and from the very morning children and women line up with plastic jerry cans. A life in which women have their hair cut extremely short due to the lack of water to wash their hair, yet are brightly dressed and decorated with fancy necklaces and bracelets. A life in which a family of 5-7 people lives on one dollar a day in huts made of mud and palm leaves, and sometimes is content with just a palm tree shed. Moreover, such huts may have a separate ‘room’ where a goat lives.

A life in which, despite the highest unemployment, poverty, crime, high mortality, Kenyans are calm and friendly, and children are bright flashes of carefree white-toothed smiles.

And now, when I'm in a bad mood, I always think of Pepe the fisherman, who, wearing two T-shirts and a baseball cap, goes out into the ocean every morning in a small wooden boat, always smiling broadly and repeating: ‘Akuna Matata,’ which means “No problem” in Kenyan!

Irina Mushtina, CEO of CF.Digital

The material was published on Podrobnosti.ua