Kenyan Safari: Lions and Tigers and ... Bow-ties?

When I was 14, I went to Kenya--kind of. By "kind of," I mean I was physically present in the country for two weeks. But please don't ask me what I learned. The Kenya that I saw looked like one big zoo--without bars. And with a very high admission price.

It wasn't the first time I had traveled internationally, but it was the first time I had done so with a tour guide. I was used to meandering foreign city streets with my parents as we sought out affordable hostels and quiet cafes where we could pore over Lonely Planet guidebooks and map out the day's itinerary.

I wasn't in Kenya with my parents, though; this time, I was traveling with my grandmother. In many ways, Grandma was your typical grandmother, regularly treating me to fresh-baked cookies and cobbler, reading stories to me, and letting me use her pink nail polish. But she took the concept of "spoiling" one step further: she also vowed to take each of her four grandchildren on a trip to a country of our choosing.

Being the eldest, I was the first choose, and I wanted to see Africa. Grandma didn't bat an eye. She bought me a tan polo shirt and matching hat, and then booked us on a two-week safari to Kenya. As soon as we arrived at the airport, it dawned on me that this would be a very different type of traveling from what I was accustomed to.

When traveling with my family, it had always been somewhat difficult for us to amble through foreign streets and remain discreet, but as my 35 fellow safari-goers and I were herded out the airport and into the waiting bus, I realized that on this particular trip, discretion was not even on the agenda. And neither, incidentally, was ambling through any streets.  After all, the streets were filled with Kenyans going about their daily lives, and God forbid that we see any of that. No, we were only interested in the pre-packaged Kenyans, the ones that came with bow-ties and daiquiris.

Our tour company wanted to get us out of Nairobi, Kenya's capital, as soon as possible. If they could have gotten away with it, they probably would have blindfolded us on the ride from the airport to the hotel. We were whisked away first thing in the morning to the Serengeti plains, where for two weeks, we would live the life of rugged adventure. Our trip was dubbed an "adventure tour," and we, the proud adventurers.

We arose at the crack of dawn each morning to file into our roofless vans and gawk over wildlife. After this exhausting morning routine, we returned to our manicured hotel grounds for a dazzling breakfast buffet. Then, more animal gawking, and then, back to the hotel for a rugged afternoon by the pool. After a dance performance enlightened us on indigenous Kenyan culture, we rewarded ourselves for our heroic intrepidness by indulging in an extravagant dinner, during which the kids over-indulged in soda and the adults, in authentic Kenyan cocktails.

I spent those two weeks immensely enjoying myself and feeling slightly sick. Maybe both were a result of the mass quantities of soda I was imbibing, which, incidentally, I never got to do when traveling with my parents. But my conflicting feelings of pleasure and nausea also went deeper than that. On the one hand, seeing lions in their natural habitat from a few feet away was pretty cool. On the other hand, something felt off.

It wasn't just the fact that when I looked out on this "untouched" desert landscape, the view was always marred the tourist-carting minivans that scuttled across the plains like big belching beetles. I was also unsettled by each hotel's acres of manicured lawns--in the middle of the desert, mind you, and in the middle of a country where water is a precious commodity.

The list went on and on. Though I enjoyed the company of my fellow safari-goers, I was disgusted by our dinner conversations: comparing the buffet at this hotel to the buffet at that hotel, whining because this hotel's pool didn't have a waterslide, grimacing over the fact that the people in the "authentic village" we had visited earlier that day lived in houses made of cow poop.

And meanwhile, we snapped endless photos and couldn't wait to share all of our exotic adventures with folks back home. But I found that when I returned home, I didn't have that many stories to tell. "I saw lions," I told my friends.

"Cool," they said.

"And cheetahs," I said.

"Cool," they said.

For all of my "rugged adventures," there was nothing to hold onto--no lasting impressions of Kenyan culture, no meaningful interactions with Kenyan people, no glimpses into their daily lives.

I certainly don't begrudge my grandmother for the experience: it was a valuable one, and you can't help but enjoy yourself when every minute of every day is tailored with your enjoyment in mind. I just hope that if I visit the country again, I'll be able to learn more about the Kenya that I glimpsed through the bus windows to and from the airport. I want to see the prettiness laid bare alongside the pain.

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Kerala Goodkin, Travel Correspondent:

Kerala's column, "On The Verge," published every other Tuesday to Gather Essentials: Travel, shares stories and reflections from the less-traveled corners of the world.

Kerala is co-founder and Editor in Chief of the Glimpse Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters cross-cultural understanding and exchange, particularly between the United States and the rest of the world, by providing forums for young adults to share their experiences living abroad. Read their stories at glimpseabroad.org. Kerala has also recently published her first novel, "How Things Break," which won the Elixir Press Inaugural Fiction Award and relates a year in the life of one young woman in small-town Michigan. It is available on Amazon.

You can find all of Kerala's "On The Verge" articles at www.gather.com/OnTheVerge

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