Brilliant, just brilliant

The conversation around the table at our last supper together centered around how best to describe upon our return the last 6 days when our friends and families would ask us the customary and inevitable question ‘So, how was it?’ Teresa, one of our travel companions, tells us that when her friend went on such a safari, the only answer to that question was ‘Brilliant, just brilliant’. Her friend never seemed to get around to giving any specifics about the experience...it was just brilliant, nothing more, nothing less. Teresa now understood her friend. We all agreed that what we had experienced these past 6 days was...well, brilliant. Putting words to what we saw and did would not do the experience justice. To coin an old phrase, you had to be there. So, knowing full well that any attempt on my part to describe our African safari would be futile, I choose not to even try.

I will not describe my witnessing of that solemn procession of elephants gracefully migrating in deafening silence along the pre-sunset lit savannah, my observation point close enough to appreciate the peaceful and sage twinkle in their eyes and the wrinkled rough texture of their slow moving massive bodies.

I will not attempt to describe the three lions stalking the unwary zebra, crouching and slowly moving towards their prey in the tall savannah grass. I, in the safe haven of my jeep, was part of a chosen audience about to witness the impressive patience and brutal efficiency of these predator kings on the verge of bringing down their dinner.

I will not seek words to describe my arrival at Lake Nukumu, the most densely animal populated wetland national park of Kenya, and even more try to describe my lunch on a terrace overlooking the almost surreal savannah landscape, the vast green grasslands punctuated by a multitude of zebras, gazelles, and wildebeest, in peaceful co-habitation, all watching us munching away watching them munching away.

And, above all, I cannot do justice in describing the spiritual place that I found at Amboselli National Park, as I sat silently at the abandoned fire pit, in full solitude except for the monkeys and mongoose scurrying about in the grass and among the few surrounding acacia trees, the spectacle of the sun setting behind Mount Kilimanjaro having already been played out and giving way to the second act of a star lit savannah sky.

The orchestrated chirping of the crickets infesting the acacia trees around the site soundtracked the spectacle of the starlit sky, bringing back childhood memories of the same night time symphony coming out of les bois à Bimbeau, next to our place. Then, as a young boy, I enjoyed and was fascinated by the magnitude and enormity of what I was watching. Those stars that I was watching now, in the wild African savannah at the foot of Mount Kilmanjaro, were the same stars I watched then, 50 years earlier, in the front yard of my house. Same sky, same stars, same world.

I sat there by myself, thinking, watching the stars, and thinking. Brilliant, just brilliant.