What Others Say About The Magic Of East Africa
Flamingos at Momella Lakes, Tanzania. Photo by Richard G. Beyer
"It is a world, and a life, from which one comes back changed."
---Evelyn Ames, A GLIMPSE OF EDEN
"When I first came to East Africa," Cynthia Moss told us
over a spaghetti lunch, "I had this very strong sensation
that I had come home. I felt that my body belonged here.
It was a heart feeling."
---Aaron Latham, THE FROZEN LEOPARD
"This is where my spirit had always been. Where my body
had never set foot, but where all of me belonged."
---Robert Vavra, A TENT WITH A VIEW
"I have been lonelier in the crowded streets of a city than
in the great open spaces of Africa, with all wild things
for companions." ---H. K. Binks, AFRICAN RAINBOW
"Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno;
it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an
escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands
all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world
or the cradle of a shiny new one."
---Beryl Markham, WEST WITH THE NIGHT
"Now I felt at home, now I belonged, in this place
where I was an alien. I was a stranger, but not in
a strange land, not at all."
---Aaron Latham, THE FROZEN LEOPARD
"In the Ngorongoro area, to the east, where the plains
rise slowly... the time sense in accelerated... Olduvai
Gorge, Ngorongoro Crater... the Serengeti outside... the
western wall of the Gregory (Great) Rift... All this is
packed in together... offering the visitor the eerie sense
that he is being rushed from the Garden of Eden backward
through the first six days of Creation."
--- Harold T. P. Hayes, THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH
"'We were terribly lucky' our guide was to tell us over our
first campfire: 'Fifty years ago we couldn't have done this
without great hardship and danger. Fifty years from now
it will be too late.'"
---Evelyn Ames, A GLIMPSE OF EDEN
"'Genetic memory,' Richard Leakey said succintly. 'That's
your answer. There's no basis in science. But people come
here from China, people come from Japan, people come
from America, and the vast majority of people
who come here feel
something they feel nowhere else.
It's not just the wildlife.
It's the place. If, as I believe,
it is a memory, almost a familiarity, it is very primitive.
It is the capacity homing pigeons have, salmon have,
to recognize, to go back.
You feel it's home.
It feels right to be here.'"
---Aaron Latham, THE FROZEN LEOPARD
"It (East Africa) is indeed an ancient and mysterious land
which has a profound effect on all but the most cynical.
The visitors whom I have the privelege to introduce to the
world of safari, in most cases, come from an affluent envi-
ronment, perhaps having achieved their success by clawing
and scratching their way up through the often sordid, so-
called civilised world. They arrive worried about the state
of affairs in their absence, bravely determined to enjoy the
safari which they have mentally equated perhaps to China
last year or Europe the year before-- one more place to be
ticked off on their check list of 'recommended vacations.'
Within days they are spellbound. At first it is the sheer
profusion of animals but then, as time passes, I watch their
faces and listen to their conversation and know that they
have been hooked. This is no mere vacation, this is a deep
experience for the soul.
Nobody has described the unsettling effect of African
hypnosis more lucidly than the American adventurer,
Negley Farson, who was strangely overwhelmed when he
first witnessed bushmen dance their imitative Dance of
the Kudu, in the Kalahari:
'You were taken back until something
unknown moved inside your soul; you
were plagued by the feeling that
stirred uneasily in your flesh and
bones. Had you, on the long road to
the You of today, ever danced like that?'
This is not fantasy. It is an awareness as real for me, in
Kenya, as it was for him in the Kalahari. I too have
sensations of deja vu, especially when I am alone on the
sweeping plains of the Serengeti, or down in Olduvai
Gorge, where Early Man once lived. It is as if this is not
my first experience of Africa: that I have known these
places somewhere in the past.
It is like coming home."
---Simon Combes, AN AFRICAN EXPERIENCE
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