The Secret to surviving lions in the Masai Mara

Here is the first winner of a $50 travel voucher with Aussie Escape in our travel story competition. This week's winner is Bradley Wheaton from Australia. Click on the link at the top of this page for more details.

The secret to surviving lions in the Masai Mara is a combination of a little luck and a lot of local knowledge. The thought of traversing the plains of Kenya seemed an impossible dream from a lounge room in Tamworth. So once I was within flying distance of Nairobi, and discovered that the wildebeest migration was crossing the Mara river, i was willing to put anything on the line to see a croc snap a cow off the river bank. However, that enthusiasm didn't help the tyres of the Corolla hire car on the lanes of rubble that were marked on my map as a secondary road en route the Mara Nature Reserve at 11pm on a Saturday night.

Whilst researching the logistics of getting around Kenya Google kept pointing me to articles on armed car jackings in the middle of the bush and tourist warnings. The Thomas Cook guide book didn't help either with its notes of strong caution. After 5 months in Sth Africa and watching Blood Diamond a few times i felt reasonably Africa-wise. I was only mildly scared when groups of tall black men wrapped in red bed sheets seemingly started to jump out in front of me and wave me down in the middle of nowhere.

That was until i got a flat 5 kms from the Mara Reserve after hitting a rock the size of a paw paw. First thoughts were that I was about to be picked off by a lion as I was changing the tyre. My next concern were the machete-wielding Rwandan refugees that Thomas Cook wrote about. As one car sped past at 80 clicks I was quite relieved- still stranded but arms intact. I eventually pulled out the spare and as destiny was bound to have it- it was flat. The good people at Budget rent-a-car Nairobi thought it funny to inflate a punctured tyre just before the car was checked out from the airport...

After a while a small blue rust bucket ute pulls up. 5 young guys all pile out of the cab- two of them in the Masai kit- red sheets, beads, weapons, the lot- i thought they must have been at some contrived 'Traditional Masai Tribal Dance' performed for Japanese tourists at some swish lodge. It turns out one of the non- Masai guys worked for the local mechanic. By paraffin lamp light they patched the tyre and his boss rented me a new wheel for the equivalent of the junior mechanic's annual wage.

With the car on the road again i still had absolutely no idea where i was going. A question to the lads landed me two Masai guides. Jonathan and James were brothers- i wasn't convinced these were Masai names but i ran with it- they were born in the local area and still had only a rough idea where this Acacia camp was. An hour to drive 12km and we made it.

A short sleep later I hired a 4WD with 'Tony' a local Masai as the driver. His wife had given birth the day before but a couple of hundred USD were too hard to say no to. My new Masai mates came along too. The safari was amazing. Tony was a legend. He had absolutely no respect for nature conservation. Before i could wake up properly we were burning after lionesses trying to drink from a waterhole. Having chased them away we went chasing the wildebeest. Then we chased the cheetah that was chasing the wildebeest. Then we chased the wildebeest on foot. We had at least a million animals running for their lives that day.

It was a great chance to chat to three guys who grew up in a mud hut living on nothing but what their cows milk and meat could be traded for. It naturally led to a debate on spear throwing and James promised to teach me later.

After a long day terrorising animals we headed back to the village to drop the boys off.

The Masai village was a ring of huts around a big cattle yard. The boys hut had two beds-they shared one and one for their Mum, Dad spread himself between his many wives residences, a fireplace and a room for the young calves. The cattle were brought in each night to keep them safe from their marauding Masai neighbours. Everyone was young- life was short as a Masai obviously. Young kids everywhere with snotty noses. Clearly a man's world too, the women get the water from the wells, build the huts, cook the steaks and the man gets to pick another wife as soon as he acquires enough cattle to justify it.

After the men show off their arm brandings and their trick of lighting a fire with two sticks they gave me a Masai hot stick tattoo of my own. Then out came the Masai knives and red sheets to trade for some currency- i guess even the Masai cant live on meat, cows blood and milk alone!

James then starts to throw a spear around the yard full of kids and dogs and one of the older guys moves him on to outside the wall. This naturally culminated in a spear throwing competition for all the men, i was foolish enough to wager 20USD for the local primary school for a Masai mask they were trying to flog to me.

After a shoulder strain and humiliation at the hands of a guy half my size, the school's coffers were 20 bucks better off.

The whole experience felt not dissimilar to hanging out with a bunch of new mates you might make at home. Unfortunately, I cant help but think that as much we all enjoyed the things that young men universally love to do there is always the enormous opportunity gap between Tony, Jon and James who are really Sumare, Mepakury and Roore and us privileged whiteys. I guess that's why Kenyans- along with most Africans- have a special name for the white man, a Mzungu.

If you ever get a day in August to see the cows cross the river- do it. Don't believe anything that Thomas Cook writes and fear not the lion or the skinny men in red with pierced and enlarged earlobes.

Live the dream

Bradley Wheaton

bradleywheaton@gmail.com

Have you been to Kenya as well? Do you have a brush with lions to share? Let us know. Everyone that comments on our blog entries goes into the draw to win an Ocean and Earth 65 litre Travel Backpack valued at over $120. Please include your email address in your comment to go into the draw.

Can of worms: the world's worst toilets

by Ben Groundwater

Trust me, I've seen much, much more disgusting ones but, for pure comedy value, my favourite "bad" toilet would have to be in Thailand.

Having talked my erstwhile travel buddy, the Hilton Hippy, into slumming it for a while, we spent a week in a beachside bungalow on Kho Phangan (just us, and a few thousand other tourists).

Our little party pad was budget at best, with two bare beds, a concrete floor and a bathroom with one of those toilets I've only ever seen in Thailand - the half Western, if you will ...

I call it the half Western because the bottom bit is like a Western-style toilet, but there's no top bit, meaning to flush it you have to fill up a bucket of water and pour it into the dunny. You see them everywhere in Thailand.

But what was so great about our little bungalow's bathroom was the doorway, which was built about three centimetres lower than the Hilton Hippy and I. While this wouldn't seem like much of a hassle, when you wake up every morning with a bucket-of-vodka-Red-Bull induced hangover, you tend to forget your bathroom doorway's little idiosyncrasy.

So for seven days straight we would struggle out of bed, stumble towards the bathroom, and, crack! - smash our foreheads on the doorway. We'd then briefly writhe around on the ground in pain, get up, go to the toilet, pour the bucket of water in, and wait to watch the other one do exactly the same thing.

Toilets are the great leveller when it comes to travel. No matter what your travel habits are, it's the one place everyone has to visit. And they range from the spotlessly clean and technologically savvy (Japan) to the faeces-coated hell holes (ah, name your country).

And in the peculiar world that is life on the road, the humble crapper is the topic of constant conversation. For some reason, there's no taboos on talking about poos. Number twos become the number one thing to chat about.

I travelled through Africa for three months on an overland truck, and we'd find ourselves talking toilets as much as we would our other favourite topic: what we were going to eat when we got to Cape Town. A typical conversation would go something like this:

"Hey, where'd you go?"
"Oh, just went to the toilet."
"Really? How'd you go?"
"Yeah, not bad, pretty solid."
"Oh, nice one."

Having travelled a bit now, I've seen my fair share of disgusting dunnies - a fair few of them in camp sites in Europe. But hey, I was even shocked the first time I saw a squat. Travelling to Hanoi, I'd stopped over at KL International, and went for a quick toilet stop. There, to my surprise, was a bare hole in the ground and a hose. "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" I thought.

And that one was clean! Now I'm no expert on this, but seeing as most Asians use squat toilets ever single day of their lives, you'd think they'd have better aim. It's ridiculous the amount of squats I've walked into which look like the guy in there before me had had a fit while he was on the can. What's wrong with using the hose?

I saw a whole new spin on the squat in the train I took from Hanoi to Hue in Vietnam, where the toilets were literally holes cut in the metal floor of the train, with the tracks flashing away below.

In places like India, you've also got the dilemma of how to clean up. Do you wander around all day carrying an annoying roll of dunny paper, or do you go Indian and use the jug of water? Or, for guys, do you just adopt a "when in Rome" mentality and disregard the use of toilets altogether?

I've got to say, I'm no fan of the long-drop either. While there are a few in national parks around Australia that have made me want to grab the bog roll and head for the nearest bush, the worst I've ever seen was in a tiny place called Sipi Falls in Uganda.

The long-drops, housed in a little wooden shack, were all covered with wooden hatches. You'd walk in there, gingerly lift the hatch, and be enveloped in a swarm of flies and an almighty stench coming from the pit.

That was only a little bit worse than the combo I found in a little makeshift camp in the Serengeti, though: a long-drop squat, with the threat of being mauled by a lion while walking over to it. But hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Then there are always those times when you can't make it to a toilet at all. It's back to nature time in the bush. While that might seem all rustic and manly, the actual act is not much fun, particularly if, like me, you miss the little hole you've just dug for yourself.

For the girls on our Africa trip, particularly when we were in Tanzania and Malawi, things were even worse. A few minutes after our truck pulled up by the side of the road, hordes of locals would inevitably appear out of nowhere, and follow the girls around to check things out, probably out of pure curiosity more than anything else.

Once, in Tanzania, I was squatting behind a bush, trying to get finished as quickly as possible, when a women and her son casually walked past about two metres away from me. Little did I know, I'd squatted right next to a walking path. I made a hasty retreat. I assume the woman and her son did, too ...

Hope you're enjoying the Backpacker blog. There'll be a new one up on smh.com.au every Wednesday, for a bit of light relief to remind you of why you went to work in the first place: to save up enough money to get the hell out of here! If there are any good travel topics you think I've missed, drop me a line at bgroundwater@fairfax.com.au.

Got a dodgy dunny story? What's the worst you've ever seen? Are some countries worse than others? Let us know. Everyone that comments on our blog entries goes into the draw to win an Ocean and Earth 65 litre Travel Backpack valued at over $120. Please include your email address in your comment to go into the draw.