Chogela Camp.

My first trip into the park was with 10 villagers from a village called Mapogoro. I was slightly nervous. But everything went well and Rowland helped me. It was so amazing seeing the looks on their faces when they saw their first giraffes or elephants or lions. They were clicking away with the cameras we had provided them. That ofcourse was one of the main highlights of the day (for them). What really touched me was when they requested to take pictures with me. They would carry these memories for a long long time. This was the first time they had ever been in the park inspite of being so close to its boundary.

There were times in the beginning when I wasn't so cheerful. Chogela was a lovely, shady property and the tents were quite nice. We cooked our own food and did our own dishes. Lack of electricity meant sunset was the last opportunity to really do anything. We ate all our meals in a dark dining area illuminated with the soft glow of candles. The kitchen was a large open area covered by a thatched banda and the piles of mattresses and mats in a corner made a cozy refuge for everything from rats, Giant spiders to venomous snakes. Sometimes they even hid in the iron-meshed cupboards where we stored our food and utensils. And it could be quite heart-breaking to know the last potato or carrot had been munched on by a hardly famished rat in the night and that would mean that you couldn't have the noodles or curry you had been craving for since the longest time. Im sure little unidentified bugs made great sacrifices by enriching our meals with much needed protein. A little bulb hanging from the roof on the rare occasion or the candle in the kitchen was a magnet for all sorts of bugs and beetles and the bats and lizards came for them. There was always usually one of the masai askaris (guards) and camp staff who hung around as we prepared our meals, sometimes helping us chop and stir. So the kitchen was always an area of much much excitement with all sorts of beings and bugs who grew to develop a choiceless camaraderie. And to consider that most of the meals were cooked in such dismal light, they turned out quite good.

Washing was something i didn't particularly enjoy (to put it politely). So I preferred to cook while Michelle and Sondra usually shared washing duties. Mind you everything was done under the cover of absolute darkness. Well, head lamps assisted us. So i'm not really sure what really went into our food and what was not cleaned right.

The beauty of this was the simple things I took for granted back home became a task. To begin with, you must ration everything from rice to vegetables to cooking oil. And drinking water. The water you use to wash your food and cook is rain-harvested water because treated water is too much of an effort and packaged water is too expensive to use for such purposes. Washing of dishes sometimes meant scrubbing it with a sponge or metal wire loofah (minus any soap when we ran out) dipping it in one bucket of cloudy water and then rinsing it in another filled with hot water (collected from the tin barrel with coals burning under it 24/7). This is when you miss plumbing and warm water that flows out of a tap labelled "warm". When you go to the toilets you must always check the dark corners for reptiles of the poisonous kind. And who knows what creepies crawl out of the shower drain when you're soaping. And this was Chogela, the more equipped of the two camps I would alternate between for the next two months. But all this aside I cannot tell you how much I grew to love this little oasis. The bushbaby screams at night, the monitor lizards crossing our paths, the beautiful birds, the hyena crackles, the most absurd looking beetles and bugs and ofcourse the staff!