Watch Out For Elephants! A Kenya Map Begins

Nothing could've prepared me for the wonders of Kenya. As I draw this map, I'll be sharing my extensive writings from the adventure. Today is the first entry.

Blank paper stretches before me again. The curtains rise on a new map. Oh, how I’ve missed this…

As I prepare a map of Kenya, tracing lakes and rivers, marking off mountains, I feel giddy with its possibilities. Every corner of the paper is brimming with potential, and memories of Kenya are fresh in my heart.

The basemap with Kenya at an oblique angle, ready for tracing. It’s Google Earth with Natural Earth data overlayed.

This map marks a new direction, and here’s why:

1) I want to make smaller maps. To show restraint. Twice now, I’ve started maps that accidentally took years. I want projects that take months instead. I’ve sized the Kenya map conservatively (A2/16.5 x 23.4in), and aim to finish it by May.

2) I want experience to inform my maps. The month I just spent in Kenya left a profound impact on me. With the experience fresh, I want it to infuse my work. I’ve spent so much time researching the world from my studio, but nothing compares to being there. Research can’t tell you what a place feels like, what it sounds and smells like. What is it to feel awe there? What is it to feel afraid there? What do you learn from locals, from new friendships? How are the trees, air, and sunsets different?

3) The map is stylistically new. Perhaps an amalgam of Wild World and North America: Portrait of a Continent. As with Wild World, nature will probably be the focus – this is East Africa after all! Kenya’s wildlife is extraordinary and I plan to draw hundreds of species. But I will also include some human geography, mainly major cities. It will be subtle – Kenya’s cultural landscape is labyrinthine – but I want it more relatable for us humans.

Wild World (top), North America: Portrait of a Continent (bottom). A few cityscapes & other cultural references may appear on the Kenya map. But wildlife is likely to remain the focus, as with Wild World.

From August 11 to September 10, 2024, I travelled Kenya with my brother Ringo. It was genuinely astonishing, and felt far longer than a month. This is a land of grand beauty and depth, where nature stuns you with its immensity. Some of Earth’s greatest wonders are in East Africa – a region famous not just for its wildlife, but the origins of humankind itself.

I can’t stop thinking about it. And I journaled the entire time, capturing the experience as best I could. Here on Substack I won’t just share the progress on the map, I will share my journal entries straight from Kenya (with amendments for readability). I will also share illustrations from my visual diary, moments I will never forget.

I hope it evokes the awe I felt, teaches you about Kenya, and makes for unique reading. These stories are also windows into the creative genesis of a map.

Lioness Beneath Mt. Kenya – one of many illustrations from my experience.

This is the first journal entry, from before I even landed:

11 August 2024 – Qatar Airways Flight 989, Doha to Nairobi

When I was 21, I fell in love with travel. My world dramatically expanded with a one-way ticket to California. After an upbringing in the isolation of New Zealand, a sudden immersion in the United States had the novelty of a parallel universe.

I’d been obsessed with maps (and thus geography) since childhood. But the world I’d obsessed over had been nothing but a theory. The only places I’d actually confirmed were real were slivers of New Zealand and Australia – the rest were just reports. How can one truly know something is real without seeing it?

And then the San Bernadino mountains appeared in my window, and below sprawled Los Angeles. My life was forever changed. For almost 2 years I wandered the US and Canada, coming of age in a place vastly greater in scale than my home.

In New York City, 2012. The New York metropolitan area has over 4x the population of New Zealand.

I became enamoured with the identity of world traveller. I felt disdain for the life I’d left behind in Wellington, which suddenly seemed so limiting. I lionised the rolling stone, imagining it gathered only the best moss: experience, knowledge, character, stories. I felt endlessly inspired by the rudderless quest I was on.

I was young and naïve and self-centred, spending more time wondering what these adventures could do for me, rather than how I might contribute. But such was the journey of youth. I felt tiny and insignificant in the great American drama – I was just soaking it up sponge-like as a young mind does. Each day was different and I embraced the uncertainty.

I used to love this quote, which now seems quite corny: “travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer”. This is wrong of course – many things can enrich your life. But I still like the broader principle: experiences matter more than stuff.

While travelling North America, its vast geography inspired me to restart a childhood passion: drawing maps. In 2012, I spent 6 weeks drawing this on the fridge in my Montreal sharehouse. I never turned back.

It is important to see the world, if you are so lucky. To leave your comforts, to expand your understanding of life on this Earth. As a cartographer, I often wonder how big the average person thinks the world is. I’m confronted by its grandiosity through my work constantly – maps swirl in my brain every day. River basins and mountain chains snake across my understanding of reality. Geography is my primary reference for almost everything.

This started in childhood when I first fell for cartography’s allure. No wonder North America fired me up at age 21. A lot excited me about those days, but the megawatt change? It was the experience of continental geography after a life on the islands.

13 years later, I’m sitting on a Qatar Airways flight preparing to land in Africa for the first time. Early in this Melbourne-Doha-Nairobi haul, it still feels distant. But it’s imminent and I don’t know what will happen.

My mind drifts to 2011 and that one-way California trip. But it also drifts to 2018, when I spent a month in India with my brother Ringo.

Amidst the surreal landscapes of Leh, Ladakh – looking to the Namgyal Tsemo Monastery from Shanti Stupa. Northern India, 2018.

I’d never been anywhere like India, and within 60 seconds of leaving Delhi airport my world was upended. India shook me to the core: the noise, the smells, the swelling masses of humanity, the animals and chaos, the colours and unpredictability. And, of course, the poverty. The culture shock I once felt between the US and New Zealand seemed immediately ridiculous. I realised the world was far more complex than I knew.

I love to travel, but the odyssean maps of North America: Portrait of a Continent and Wild World held me in Melbourne for years, desperate to finish them. When I did travel it was usually to the US to build my career. But I’ve thought about that India trip every day since 2018, and I vowed to expand my horizons post-Wild World.

I’ve seen so much of the world second-hand through mapmaking, but not enough with my own eyes. And when I visit places I am astonished by them, captivated, obsessed. The unveiling of new geographies fires up my imagination more than anything – I’m a mapmaker after all. When the map becomes real, the emotional floodgates open.

The early days drawing North America: Portrait of a Continent – Melbourne, 2014.

So… why Kenya?

Catherine is a family friend I’m very close with, she grew up with my mother in Papua New Guinea. She just moved to Nairobi for work, and her Kitisuru apartment is currently empty as she visits Australia. Her driver Elijah, a local Kenyan, is waiting to show us around.

My brother Ringo, the most amazing fellow adventurer and hiker-in-arms I could ever hope for, is joining me. He’s en route from London right now, ready for an entire month in Kenya together.

When I heard Catherine was in Nairobi I was intrigued. My pencils traversed every region on Earth during 3 years of Wild World, and East Africa eclipsed everywhere for the majesty and abundance of its wildlife. As I drew it, I dreamed that one day I would see the Great Migration, the Maasai Mara, the colossal peaks of Mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro.

East Africa in Wild World. Choosing species in Africa was especially hard – not only is the biodiversity incredible, but its huge animals take up a lot of space!

Since completing Wild World in 2023, I knew I had to shake things up. I felt a distinct chapter in my life closing – a chapter that began on a Montreal fridge back in 2012. At home in Melbourne I just couldn’t shake a dreadful stasis – I felt my creative motivation was in decline and my passion was waning. I began sinking into a depression.

So, I’m doing what I did in those heady days at 21 when I disappeared to California. I’m shuffling the deck of cards. I’ve never been to Africa, but I’m going to live in Kenya for a month! We will trek Mt. Kenya, the second-highest peak on the continent. We will go on safari many times. We will see elephants beneath Kilimanjaro. I will draw maps and animals, and I will write about it.

At some point, I hope to feel afraid that things might not be okay because of lions. I don’t know what this means, and I may come to regret it. But I want to feel part of the food chain. I want my sense of normalcy, so coddled by the luxury of Australia, completely upended. THAT’S why Kenya. That’s why Africa. I’m stuck in my ways and I want to know this world for real – not just through maps.

My first glimpse of Africa – sunrise over Kenya as we begin the descent to Nairobi.

I’m on this plane without a plan or sense of what we’ll do. I just have faith that it’s the right move. It’s worked before, and it probably will now. But what will actually happen? Only time will tell.

Karibu Kenya!