Scrambling up on the rocky outcrop was not easy. The stones were loose and crumbling, the bushes thick and unyielding. Most of all, I was alone. I kept telling myself that: I'm alone on a 4,000m mountain plateau in the heart of Africa, and I have wandered off the path.
At the top, I sat down on a flat rock and enjoyed the spectacular view across the Aberdare national park. The sky was a miraculous deep blue, broken only by the silhouette of an Augur buzzard cruising along some invisible air current. I scanned the grasslands below: no elephants or lions to be seen.
For many years, most tourism in Africa has had a very simple arc: you drive in a 4x4, bouncing up a track, then sit and watch a group of animals. Then you do it again. It is a model that evolved out of the colonial-era hunting experience, the guns being replaced with cameras (though not entirely – big game hunting is still going on).
But Africa is changing, and fast. Old ways are being dropped. And nowhere more so than in Kenya, a country with double-digit economic growth and an expanding population with rising economic expectations. Change has also come to the Aberdares, a mountain massif 50 miles north of Nairobi. In particular there are new campsites and nature trails that allow visitors to do what was previously unthinkable: walk for several days across a reserve where lions, elephants and buffalo roam. For anyone who has known the sheltered world of guides and 4x4s, this is a revolution.
I was in the Aberdares as part of a team making a film about urgent botanical work going on in Kenya, but I was determined to sample the delights of walking through the bush. Fortunately, in the higher altitudes of the range, the more dangerous animals are very rarely seen; they prefer to stay in the forests below. I had left the team rhapsodising over some strange tiny plants in a mountain stream and taken off along the ridge, heading south. There was a clear path, but I had found the lookout hill irresistible.
Although the primary draw of Kenya is almost always its wildlife, in the Aberdares the plant life runs it a close second. East Africa has a handful of isolated high-altitude ranges, including Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and Mount Eldoret. On each of these a unique vegetation has evolved to cope with blistering daytime sun and freezing night-time temperatures.
That evolutionary challenge has resulted in some bizarre and wonderful creations: four-metre-tall groundsel trees whose leaves ooze an anti-freeze solution, and shaggy lobelia trees standing like Easter Island statues in the grassy slopes. With global temperatures rising, these giants are retreating up the mountains and are now on the very tops, with nowhere to go. Only the previous day we had stopped our Land Rover a short distance below the summit to collect seed from a type of wild tomato, a species only discovered a year before but already endangered. With an estimated one-in-four plant species now threatened with extinction, this environment is at the front line of the battle to save genetic material that could be vital to agriculture and medicine.
I left my secluded mountaintop and clambered back down to the path, then wandered on into a sunny dell where the giant groundsels were clustered together. In Europe, the plant is a common weed and these trees had an oddly familiar look. It was like walking through my own untended allotment after eating the wrong kind of mushrooms.
The path reached a ridge line and for the next hour I had magnificent views all the way to Mount Kenya, 50 miles away. When Europeans first saw this peak it was a snow-capped wonder, but now there was no sign of ice at all.
That night I rejoined the film team to sleep at Fisherman's Lodge, one of only two lodges within the Aberdares. It's a pair of sturdy cottages with broad verandas, a living room with large fireplace, a couple of spacious bedrooms and a caretaker-cum-cook, Francis. You can book these places independently and drive yourself through the park, though you'll need room for an armed wildlife scout to accompany you through the lower forested areas, where elephant and leopard roam. Having said that, dealing with the Kenya Wildlife Service can be like negotiating with the Ottoman Empire on a bank holiday. Phones and emails are, in my experience, answered only very patchily. We organised our trip at the local KWS office in Nyeri, the nearest town to the Aberdares. Another possibility is to use a trekking company in Nairobi.
At sunset, a small group of reedbuck came gently towards the cabins to drink from the dripping outside tap and to pass the night close to humans, who offer a modicum of protection from predators. There is also a campsite nearby. When I checked it out the reedbuck were there too, grazing quietly, and a grey duiker, a small, secretive deer, bolted away.
As night fell, we marvelled at the tranquility and the stars, listened to a distant lion roar, then the yelping cry of a hyena. Then, as the fire crackled and the whisky went down, our botanists, Paul Kirika and Tim Pearce, together with deputy game warden Mwangi, who had come up to see us, reminisced about close encounters in the bush. Apparently there's nothing tranquil about being a botanist in Kenya: elephants charging, snakes suddenly appearing, and always the big danger, the rogue male buffalo, most feared of the animals because of his irascible, short-sighted aggression.
One of the scouts up on the Aberdares had been chased, had fallen over, and the buffalo had charged right over him: he miraculously survived with no more than cuts and bruises. As Mwangi reminded us, however, it is the humans who represent the real threat. With its populations of rhinos and elephants, the park is a draw for professional poaching gangs, a resurgent menace all over Africa.
Next morning I walked with Tim, taking the trail out of Fisherman's Lodge down through some bushes and across the stream. The air was cold and there were crusts of shining ice in the shadows. Once you are on foot in Africa, animals become far more elusive and difficult to spot, though any encounter you do manage is far more exciting than from a vehicle.
A brace of white-faced vultures flapped away from the rosewood trees; a pair of waterbuck snorted and trotted off. Misty green light came dancing through the lichens that festooned the trees. Tim had his head down, magnifying lens in hand, absorbed in the tiny worlds of seed and leaf. In the mud behind him, very clear and large, was a fresh leopard print.
Mwangi came up the track after us with a scout carrying a rifle.
We made a steep descent to a stream and searched for the simple footbridge. "When the Britishers came, they put trout in these rivers and built the lodge."
"Can you still fish here?"
"There are places to fish – people do eat the trout."
Much of these upland Kenyan areas must have reminded those old colonials of northern Britain: the moorland and the dark rushing streams. At Embu, a small town on the slopes of Mount Kenya, there's even a lovely hotel called the Izaak Walton, after the 17th-century English pioneer of angling writing.
We dropped down to a stretch of moorland, stopping to watch some distant buffalo. "Isn't it dangerous?" I asked Mwangi, "to let hikers wander around?"
He shook his head. "The trail is marked and carefully designed to keep to safe areas."
For the rest of the day, however, Mwangi complained about our bad luck at not seeing elephants.
"It's great to see them when you are on foot, but of course you must be very careful and never approach too close."
We spotted giant forest hogs, rare animals only discovered in 1904. This is surprising since they are so huge: males weigh in at a quarter of a tonne. There were warthogs, buffalo and monkeys, too, but no elephants. Reluctantly, on our last night, we had to pack our bags in the Land Rover and descend from the clouds to the world below.
The Aberdares, however, had one more surprise for us. Rattling along the track, we slowed to let a bush hare cross. There was a wild swishing in the trees, a brief and sudden trumpeting, then a group of five elephants were dashing across too, their trunks high and waving wildly. For once, I had to admit, it was good to be inside a vehicle.
