NYLON - August 2008 - (Page 138) OUT OF AFRICA Holy shit, I think as my caravan of Americans leaves the Nairobi airport for the city proper: not so much because we are in Africa, which I know chiefly through aid-relief sing-alongs and Hotel Rwanda and other entertainments inspired by mass deaths, but because there are giraffes walking alongside the highway. Maybe Kenyans would feel equally disconcerted by herds of, say, Texas longhorns drifting by I-35, I think, struggling for context. This will not be the last time on this trip that I fail to align the First and Third worlds, and in the end I give up and raise my camera like everyone else. The African safari is, of course, one of the great clichés of travel— especially in Kenya, a poor country that regularly hosts the world’s wealthiest travelers at luxurious lodges. (My trip, airfare excluded, would cost about 25 times the average Kenyan’s yearly salary.) Consequently, there is no small amount of acquiescence involved with it: The conflicted white liberal traveling squeamishly through Africa is an even bigger, and more annoying, cliché, and there is, after all, so much to see. Our first stop, after a stop at Karen Blixen’s farm, the failed coffee plantation she writes about in Out of Africa, and an obligatory night in Nairobi, is the Maasai Mara, a national reserve named for the Mara After the violence that killed hundreds last winter, Kenya needs tourism dollars more than ever. Here’s why there’s never been a better time to visit this beautiful country. By Diane Vadino River, which transects it, and the Maasai tribe, some of whose members inhabit it. The Maasai drink blood and hunt lions and a troupe greet our plane with a group song and dance that despite the unimpeachably legitimate setting feels a bit Epcot-style World Showcase. We each have a Mara Safari Club cabin, outfitted with a mosquito-net-enclosed bed and a pillow-top mattress, with a porch overlooking the river and the hippopotami sunning themselves on it. To understand it intellectually is one thing, but to experience it is another: It is all so beautiful and indulgent and disconcerting, a five-star hotel room in one of the poorest countries on earth, that at a certain point I begin thinking of the scene in The Matrix where Joe Pantoliano, eating his matrix-fueled steak dinner at a fancy restaurant, declares his contentment with what is a fundamentally inauthentic experience. In any case: What is the authentic Kenyan experience? A per-capita annual salary of $390 and an average life expectancy of 55 and more than two million people infected with HIV? Tourism remains Kenya’s top-producing industry; low wages in the service industry are amply supported by Westerners’ tips. Number two is the exportation of flowers. Location: East Africa Population: 31 million (approximately) Official language: Swahili Currency: Kenyan Shilling photographed by diane vadino
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