Edition 43: Summer 2008

Adventurer, author and philanthropist, Sir Christopher Ondaatje has worn many hats and explored many lands. His latest book, The Glenthorne Cat, focuses on one of his greatest loves – leopards. Here are the five African locales that he holds dear.

The Namib Desert, Namibia
The Namib Desert in Namibia took my breath away. Our isolated camp, 400km north of Swakopmund on the very edge of the desert, is the place I remember and love the most. The combination of huge dunes with the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean to the west was magnificent. There I sighted a solitary oryx – my first-ever glimpse of the legendary beast. The coast was littered with shipwrecks, seal colonies and flocks of flamingos, flying away to settle in a distant lagoon.

The slopes of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
Immortalised by Ernest Hemingway in his The Snows of Kilimanjaro – one of the world’s classic short stories –Kilimanjaro is indeed a sacred mountain. I spent two days with Joshua Mbewe, a Chagga tribesman who lives on the lower slopes, exploring the mountain together. It wasn’t until after six o’clock on the first evening that I had my first full sighting of Kilimanjaro – the sun setting behind us cast a magical orange glow on its majestic snow-covered dome.

The Seronera River, Tanzania
For me the leopard was not just a simple wildlife quest. I know now that I was going on some other personal and emotional search. I had almost given up hope when I saw a tiny speck of a thing hanging down from a branch. I looked through my field glasses. It was indeed our leopard – a female, about five years old – sprawled along the branch. My eyes looked directly into hers in an uncanny moment of communication. It was a sort of love affair. Not just with the leopard but with the beauty of the moment and the place on the banks of the Seronera River – mysteriously beautiful in the evening light, with the recently created pools by the river bank. There are few moments in life when one experiences incredible peace and happiness, and for me this was one of them.

Lewa Downs, Kenya
With two Maasai herdsmen and a Kikuyu elder I tracked a black leopard – a melanistic black panther and one of the rarest animals in the world – on Lewa Downs. I was staying at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, an enormous conservation area designed to protect elephants and other African wildlife from poaching and human encroachment. Interspersed with deep river valleys and enormous rocky outcroppings, most of Lewa is more than 2000m in elevation. It is one of the most beautiful and secluded places in all East Africa.

The Semliki River, Uganda
At the end of a three-month journey tracing the footsteps of the Victorian explorers, I reached Kasese, at the foot of Uganda’s Ruwenzori Mountains. Realising that the secret to the Nile’s source lay in the deep valley on the mountains’ western side, I decided to round the range’s southernmost tip to reach the Semliki River on the Zaire border. We found ourselves in remote equatorial forest, the home of the Bamba and Bakonjo people. After hiking through dense, muggy, luxuriant and mosquito-infested swampland, we eventually reached the Semliki River. I looked up towards the Ruwenzoris, rising to 5000m. In this magical spot Samuel Baker, who discovered nearby Lake Albert, would surely have said: “This has to be the source of The Nile”.