In 1998 my friend and writer Ilija  Trojanow helped me to organize my first foray into Swahili East Africa, to Kenya and Tanzania. Ilija and Til, another buddy and my most serious travel competitor, had the privilege to spend their high school years in Nairobi. A time when you encountered wild animals right after leaving the airport, 20 years later, my own African dream came true, and Nairobi became my residence.  We all come from Africa, and now I was finally back. And felt immediately at home.  In all Africa Nairobi is, as long as you have money, simply the best city to live. Estates as big as farms take turns with farm-to-table eateries, weekend trips go to Lamu or to Leopards. And in which other city can you ask your Uber driver after a full night out to do a sobering-up-tour at sunrise to have breakfast in the bush while a male lion is defending his own  breakfast against a pack of hyenas? 

On no other continent I have met such special rafikis:

Peter my long-time taxi driver who fulfilled his dream to better feed his family and to explore the world as a carpenter on a Carnival cruise ship, Jean-Avis representing my great cool hakuna matata colleagues who can all  work hard and partly hard, Kennedy the soft-spoken night guard who loves Spàtzle and who knew the results of my favorite German football club every time I entered the compound, Penninah the lawyer who explained Kenyan tribalism to me and who loves Nuremberg, Peter the Second, a former German civil servant who build a safari camp on the most beautiful spot high above the Masai Mara, Kui the fashion lady who is a great entertainer and who rose from the ashes almost to Ivy League, Chui, the Lamu dhow captain and wheeler-dealer who made it three times to the Formula-One-Grand-Prix in Monaco, Pink Lady who bbqs the best Nyama Choma on the planet, Joachim the retired road builder who flew me over Africa with an airplane without doors, Lucy in the Sky, the great music journalist who gave us a full-night-tour Through all kinds of African music, the chief bodyguard of the H.E. the Kenyan President who drank me under the table, Bangkok, bad-guy-turned boxing coach and my privat bodyguard and who guaranteed my survival in Africa’s biggest slum, Grace the travel agent who booked my trips faster than I could conceive them, Amanal Petris the German marathon record whom I could only follow on a motor cycle, Stefan who converted his Landcruiser nightly into a luxury safari camp, Kristin who builds football pitches for Africa, Tony Onyango alias Leopard Man whose music turned our SAPEUR (= Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People”) party into dance orgy around the pool, Tabu Osusa the famous Kenyan music producer with whom I shared the dream of once sailing down the mighty Congo River, and finally,  my great friend Isaya Mutekhele who designed this website at the Learning Lions IT center (LINK) at one of the modest beautiful and remotest places on earth – Turkana.

Kenya is blessed with many great landscapes. I ascended the 5000m Mount Kenya and experienced snow at the Equator. I descended into the Great African Rift Valley.and slept in our roof tent on the inner crater of the dormant Suswa volcano.  However, in a world where human-wildlife conflicts increase by the day and most wild places are about to die, one wild place reigns supreme: the cross border Mara Serengeti, only a couple of hours away from Nairobi. No other form of travel, nothing beats a safari in the bush. If you go to Paris you are likely to see the Eifel tower, if you go to Sydney you are likely to see the Opera. If you go to the bush you are never sure what you see and who watches you before you see it, if you  ever see it.

Navigating through the bush, finding an elusive animal by reading the signs of the nature, is unique. When vultures were circling above us in numbers we knew we must be close to some new prey. When all animals were wiped off the face of the earth we could assume that a predator must be close. We went to the Mara Serengeti in all seasons of the year, in the south we saw wildebeasts calving, their young ones afoot after a few minutes and running. Better so, since predators were always close We saw young zebras growing and bathing in the dust, we saw them migrating west towards Lake Victoria and north versus the Mara River, we saw leopards and cheetahs chasing them, we saw wildebeest crossing the Mara River in thousands, we saw elephants trumpeting when they saw water. We saw lion cubs born a few days ago, we saw crocodiles waiting months for a kill, we saw the eternal cycle of life. At night we went to the river, put up our roof tents, a hundred hippos offered a concert, we drank milliliters of Jaegermeister instead of liters of beer, to avoid the need to go to the dark bushes to pee, we heard the penetrating roar of a male lion closeby, searching for his pride, we slept under the stars.

Karen Blixen said in “Out of Africa”:

You are only alive if you are living among lions. It’s true.