Peter and I have just returned from five weeks in East Africa. Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar to finish, travelling with The Safari Company (https://www.thesafaricompany.co.nz/).
I want to get the plug out of the way early. If you are thinking about a trip like this, use them. Their knowledge of Africa, the countries, the people, the politics, was streets ahead of anything we could have organised ourselves, and it changed the trip completely.
There were 16 other people in our group, and after nearly 30 years of watching how people make decisions about money, I found I could not switch that off just because I was on holiday.
A good number of them had saved hard for years to be there. For some this was the trip, the one thing they had been building toward for a decade.
One couple stood out. Late 70s, and the husband had been a marathon runner most of his life. 6 years ago he was told he had a heart condition, and since then the two of them have made a habit of getting the big trips done while they still can.
Nobody had told them how much time they had left. But somebody had told them time was not unlimited, and that seemed to be enough. This is a lesson that I am taking on board, so will be travelling as much as is realistic while Peter and I are fit and healthy.
The rest of us, us included, were there for less dramatic reasons. It just looked like a great trip. I do not think that makes it any less worth doing, but it was a useful reminder that the people who move fastest on their plans are often the ones who have already had a scare.
The moment that has stuck with me hardest had nothing to do with animals at all.
After white water rafting on the Nile, we spent an hour on the back of an open truck along a back road. Brick houses, small and dusty. No vehicles attached to peoples homes that we could see anywhere.
Coffee beans and maize, spread out on cloths in the dirt to dry. That was the business model.
During the trip, we stopped at several homes. The guide knew the families, it wasn’t a set-up for tourists. (We also visited the Maasai and the Chogga people villages, which were tourist visits).
Being a safari guide is a genuine career goal for a lot of young people across this part of Africa, not a fallback job. In Kenya, guides work through a formal Bronze, Silver and Gold certification system that can take years to reach the top tier, and in Tanzania people train through dedicated wildlife colleges or university tourism programmes to get there.
English fluency is close to a condition of entry, since guides are expected to interpret for international clients as much as drive and spot animals.
Nico, our cook for the five weeks, had done the same thing from the kitchen side. He trained formally to cook and has been Andy's right hand man for 16 years, which is not a casual arrangement. It is a profession people study for and build an actual career inside.
Inside, there was almost nothing. A few beds, some wooden couches in what they called the salon, which is a generous word for it. No locks on any doors.
One family told us their food had been taken while they were out, not long before we arrived. They said it the way you or I would mention a parking ticket.
A number of the houses had no power at all.
Nearly everyone had a mobile phone, though not for the internet and not for photos. The phone is how money moves. You pay with it and you get paid with it, and that was the whole use case.
Kenya in particular runs on this. M-Pesa started there in 2007 and now has over 51 million users across 7 countries. Most of that part of Africa never built a branch network the way we did. They skipped straight past the bank branch and went to the phone.
And through all of that, the people were happy. Properly happy. Singing, dancing, hugging us hello and hugging us goodbye.
I have thought about that more than I have thought about any lion or gorilla we saw. We spend our working lives helping people work out how much money is enough, and here were people with almost none of it by our standard, who seemed to have already worked out an answer we are still chasing.
I am not romanticising poverty. Nobody in that village would choose no electricity or an unlocked door if they had a real alternative. But it did make me look sideways at how much manufactured pressure we carry here, to have more, look better, keep up, when the roof was not the thing making people happy in the first place.
Then there is the corruption, which nobody pretends is anything other than normal life.
Police stand on the roads, and they are never thin. Instead of a ticket, they ask for lunch. That is the actual word used, and everyone in the vehicle knows exactly what it means.
Our driver paid it without comment, the way you would pay for parking. It was not even mildly awkward. That, more than the amount, told me how embedded it is.
Higher up, it gets worse rather than better. In Kenya, the cut politicians expect on a deal has moved from something like 10-15% historically to something closer to half now.
That shift is the reason The Safari Company is not running this trip in July/August 2027. Kenya goes to the polls on 10 August 2027, and the expectation locally is protests, unrest, and probably worse before it is done.
Rwanda deserves its own paragraph, because it runs almost nothing like Kenya.
No plastic bags anywhere, and I mean none. The country banned them years ago and actually enforces it, so there is none of the plastic drift building up along the roadsides the way there is almost everywhere else in the region.
Once a month, the entire country stops for a few hours on a Saturday morning for a nationwide clean up. Everyone takes part, streets, footpaths and drains, and businesses stay closed until it is done.
Rwanda is genuinely beautiful, and remarkably clean for a country carrying that much pressure. It packs something like 14.9 million people into an area roughly the size of Manawatu-Whanganui, which tells you a fair amount about how tightly the place has to be run just to keep functioning.
We did our gorilla trekking in Uganda rather than Rwanda. One hour, uphill, and then we were metres from them. Completely accessible for what it is, one of the best hours either of us has had, and at roughly half of what Rwanda charges for the same encounter, US$850 against US$1,500.
The parks themselves are younger than most people assume, ourselves included before this trip.
The Serengeti started as a partial game reserve in 1921 and was not properly gazetted as a national park until 1951. The Maasai Mara in Kenya followed in 1961. Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda came in 1954.
None of that is ancient history. It is the 20th century, and in most cases it came at the direct expense of the Maasai and other groups who had been using that land long before anyone thought to protect it from them.
Plenty of Maasai still live the traditional, nomadic way. But near the Serengeti a newer trade has grown up alongside it, tourists paying cash for photographs with Maasai in full traditional dress and jewellery, something the authorities actively try to stop.
That one bothers me a little, and I suspect it should. But not far away, around the Maasai Mara, there is a version of the same idea done properly. Maasai landowners lease land to conservation trusts and safari operators under formal agreements, and get a monthly payment out of it, commonly around $350 US per family, which is roughly a graduate salary in Kenya.
That is the better version of the transaction. Land and culture paid for on a regular basis under an actual agreement, rather than a few dollars for a photo and no say in the arrangement at all.
We came home with thousands of photographs of lions, gorillas, elephants, the wildebeest migration, all of it spectacular.
But it is the people I keep going back to. The ones with almost nothing by our measure who seemed entirely at ease with their lives, and the ones working a system that runs on bribery because that is simply what getting through the week requires.
Good trip. Better thinking time. I am still working out what I make of it, and I suspect I will be for a while yet.
