Kenya: Sarara Treehouses, Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy

Namunyak Conservancy is a small reserve in northern Kenya. Sarara Treehouses are built in the trees downhill from the main lodge. Access to the Treehouse level required hiking down 83 steps … and back up those 83 steps for meals and activities. Needless to say we were careful to bring what we needed with us on each trip to avoid running back to the room.

The accommodations were pretty cool. We enjoyed the outdoor shower, Pat did not. however, appreciate the poor lighting in the bathroom, nor the lack of any convenient place to use a hairdryer. Dave & Shelly were quite forgiving of Pat's hair though, so all was fine. 

The activities here included game drives and a game walk complemented with lots of cultural visits focused on the local Samburu People. Here we had some great elephant (with several young including a 1 week old), and giraffe sightings. 

We spent a morning at the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, a rescue center for orphaned baby elephants. The youngest being only a few months old. They keep the elephants until they are around seven years old and able to care for themselves and then release them into the wild. There is also a small herd of other orphans (giraffes, an oryx, ostrich.mand elan......) who seem to think they are a family of like species. There are roughly 35 elephants all fed on a goat milk based diet until shortly before being released to the wild. They are fed every 3 hours. The daytime feedings are a popular event. 

The Samburu seem to be related to the Masai, a better known people. The Samburu consider themselves one of the lost tribes of the Israelites. They have some notable customs:

- They are oblivious to actual age Instead they note the phases of life with the notable first stage being when young men (probably 12-14 years old) are circumcised and become warriors. At this stage they can no longer live at home and must learn to live as a group. Stages for males are child, junior warrior, warrior, senior warrior,  junior elder, elder, senior elder, and wise ones. The early stages all roughly span 8-10 years. As you may guess, the wisdom of age is well respected here. 

- We visited a village fenced in with piles of scraggly branches. The people are still nomadic and the village has no solid walls, The village is protected by a huge somewhat circular shaped 4-5 foot high fence made of piles of spiny brush. We experienced the evening activities with the goats returning to the compound first with the larger animals (cattle and camels) returning later to provide a protective buffer for the more vulnerable goats. Animals are separated by family ownership with baby goats separate from adult goats. Views from our flight into the area show several of the "fenced-in" areas.

- You can tell a lot about a Samburu by their jewelry. Everybody wears lots of beads, especially the young warriors. Beadwork and other jewelry tell a person's history. Young warriors are the flashiest. Women's earrings tell you if she is married or not. But we can share only a few photos because they feel that pictures of them or their domesticated animals steals their souls.  Note: The Samburu who work in the tourist industry do allow photos so we got a few.  Below: Our tracker, (an elder) and our guide (either a senior warrior or a junior elder).

- One very interesting activity is the "singing wells". During the Dry Seasons, warriors dig wells into dry riverbeds on a daily basis to access hidden water sources for their livestock. The Warriors sing individual, recognizable chants to call their specific cows and camels, which come to their  designated troughs for drinking water. For the lucky families, wells are quite shallow and one warrior can scoop up the water into a trough. But wells cam be 30 feet deep or so requiring a chain of warriors to pass the water buckets up. 

- The well area is also targeted at night by the local elephants. Some get lucky and find one of the shallow areas with water. And the rest must get some moisture because they keep coming back.

- One evening we enjoyed a Ngoma, a cherished cultural practice among the Samburu peopler, with sacred ritualistic singing and dancing. We enjoyed a nighttime performance of a dozen or so dancers. Their dance includes a lot of hopping around and well harmonized chanting.  The performance followed a full days work so started at sunset. The sky was nice but it was hard to see the dancers.

Our most common sightings here were elephants, giraffes and the much smaller dik-diks, plus cattle and camels (no photos of the latter because they are domesticated.)

We said Good-bye to the staff and were off the the Masai Mara.