More Folk

(double click on image to enlarge)

watching the boats

on the waterfront: Shela, Lamu

Kenyan cowboy & Indian

girls sunbathing

fishing story

What Not To Wear

the silver surfers go on safari

(click on sketch to enlarge)

Merry Christmas

a favourite poem by Walter De La Mare

December Flowers

Merry Christmas!

Still Morning

It could almost be Japan.

These tiny boats take up position on the lake at dawn, fishing until late afternoon for tilapia and black bass.

Occasionally, if there is wind in the right direction, they hoist a small lateen sail.

Folk

(click on sketch to enlarge)

staying on

white hunter

weeding

performing in The Mall

business lunch

rocking on down to Kongoni

the Mrs Singhs go Christmas shopping

A Visit to the Metropolis

Thursday, and we arrive at the Westgate Mall in time for lunch. (It takes a while to register – what with the heat beating outside in an iris blue sky  – that the mall is in festive mode: trees twinkle at every corner, scarlet nylon swags along the entire length of every balcony, fairy lights dangle from truly dizzy heights). A bit of a united nations sort of place, as usual the Artcaffé is packed with all sorts – scoffing away, chatting & joking, flirting & admonishing, wheeling and dealing, mobiles ringing, laptops vying for space amongst cutlery and glasses on tables. The interior is cool and dim, sparkling with ‘brasserie-chic’, but we choose a table on the terrace overlooking the street, beneath vast umbrellas, where the music is subdued. I gaze out into the buzzing sunlight and think about my daughters, the younger of whom is twenty-two today. We try to phone but as usual she does not pick up.

Nairobi being the place to get things done and pick things up, one’s list of jobs may have grown over many days, even weeks, to become extensive and diverse. It’s wise, therefore, before launching into the traffic, to make a plan. We duly consult today’s list of jobs, finding that as well as the bank, Safari.com, Nakumatt and the pharmacy, we need to pay a visit to Kapu Wazir, mechanics and purveyors of automobile parts. I’m quite pleased. There is something about driving across town, deep into the maze of unmade roads (often with kerbstones abutting packed red earth – no pavements) many with Asian names, the muddle of warehouses with rundown fronts (through which one may catch a glimpse of state-of-the art-machinery), interspersed with swanky showrooms displaying the latest in Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Suzuki: trucks with massive wheels and dust-caked windscreens, parked perilously alongside high-end saloon cars. We pass an elderly gentleman in embroidered fez and immaculate white robe, leaving his brand new Mercedes (perhaps paying a visit, unannounced, to his business premises) and trailed by a little princess of a girl not more than three years old, exquisitely got up in bejewelled fuschia silk, her birdlike arms stacked to the elbow with gold bangles. “Top drawer!” says David, admiringly.

There is also something in the meeting of smells – heat and grease and chemicals, and in the hive of industriousness, with everyone cheerfully engaged (for Africans often seem to possess a keen aptitude for taking cars to bits and putting them together again), the never-missing-a-trick overseeing of the Indian proprietors in the background, polite and efficient customer service in the true & sensible sense of that term. Here, even the smallest requirement (in our case, just a few hundred shillings worth of spare lamps for the vehicle) can be met, and that peculiar blend of chaos and languor (some call it malaise) is conspicuous by its absence.

After that, its westward bound to look at the Muthaiga mini-market, quite close to the famous Muthaiga Club of Happy Valley renown, blah blah – though judging by the flash vehicles number-plated in red, the place is now patronised by NGOs and UN wives – indeed we spot a few of them in designer frocks and shades, indulging their offspring in the pizzeria, where a dozen waiters die of boredom as they wait about for lunchtime trade.

We are staying in a flat kindly lent by a friend who has gone up-country on safari. It is situated on the first floor of a small original block in the centre of the city close to the arboretum, which was set up in colonial times and planted with rare specimen trees from all over the Pacific. (We walk through it, but sadly it has somewhat gone down in the world). I can’t work out why this flat feels so familiar until it dawns on me that the leafy views through crittal windows, parquet floors and art deco style door furniture remind me of the 1930s maisonette where I lived in north London as a child: and at night, when lights from surrounding modern apartment blocks shine through the trees, bamboo & palms and cars come & go through security gates, it reminds me of where I lived, not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris in the 1970s.

The next afternoon, we raid the bookshelves and discover a treasure trove of ‘old Africa’ books – early pioneers and settlers, colonialism, wildlife, hunting and safari – including a parchment coloured copy of something called,  ‘Colony and Protectorate of Kenya: The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: An Historical Survey’. This is a Mr Corfield’s report, on behalf of the government of the day, on the origins and growth of Mau Mau. My avid friend devours it over the course of the late afternoon and evening, following me around and imparting large portions of it to me as I lay the table, prepare the food, cook the supper, set it down on the table, eat, clear away, and so on. It is riveting, if harrowing, listening. I resolve to read some modern African history.

On Saturday, I’m woken by the caretakers’ cockerel crowing at dawn, can’t get back to sleep and decide to make coffee. The milk is in the frig outside on the terrazzo landing, which means unlocking of bolts & padlocks. Outside on the staircase, the scents of red earth, (which seems to stain the very building, almost like Marrakech) and vegetation, compounded by a drumming sudden rain, rise up to meet me: and the clinks from a kitchen, an infant’s cry, a tinny radio, the distant hum of traffic reach me. Kate does not come in today, so we can make our own breakfast and enjoy it on the balcony, amid the red-billed fire finches and the red-cheeked cordon bleu birds tweeting and clowning for seed. It’s so soothing & reassuring here, and there is so much nagging away to be read; we decide to stay for one more day.

At lunchtime, we need to eat so drive out to Westlands again, where we find the shopping mall in a very different ‘Saturday mode’.  All the parents of teenage children in Nairobi must have dumped them there for the afternoon – every level is seething with adolescents engaged in showing out and showing off their labels. The rooftop parking lot is glittering with expensive cars, and every café and restaurant packed: it’s the start of the Christmas holiday and the mood is contagious, everyone seems relaxed, including me. I find a great bookshop, hitherto overlooked, called Savani’s – and over-indulge, but only one is non-fiction.

More Lion Pictures

I am not a lion! I’m an eland.

Flora, Fauna and Birdlife

Random images taken around here, in the Abedares and on the Mara. Once again, credit to Mathew Wyatt and D.

hyrax in the garden

hadada ibis

coypu, on the lake foreshore

sacred ibis

pelican

blue, white bearded wildebeest on the Mara

jackal

klipspringer

ostrich, on the Mara

Cokes hartebeest (Kongoni)

secretary bird

cornbill

another secretary bird

crocodile

impala

a fupi

a mango AND a fupi

sharing the job with the hyenas, cleaning up at the end

And A Little Night Drive

One evening we drive over to Crater Lake for sundowners. At the entrance, I’m vaguely aware of  a large group gathered beneath the tree but only one other vehicle in the car-park. As we set out on our walk one of the staff approaches us with a general warning about buffalo coming out of the bushes around the lake. By the time we’ve completed our circuit of the lake (me, somewhat more gingerly than usual), admired the flamingoes, finished our drinks at the bar above a roaring outdoor fire, and climbed back up the many steps (so many more on the return journey!) it’s dark.

Standing by his vehicle, surrounded by askaris including Rakwa carrying a rifle, is our landlord. A buffalo has attacked a local woman herding goats – tossing her around the bush and stamping on her ribcage or stomach, in so doing breaking several bones. Thought to be a lone bull still nearby in the bush, it needs to be found urgently. (Apparently, although unprovoked attacks on humans are relatively rare,  belligerence is a character trait that can become a habit or that may be passed on genetically, therefore exceptionally aggressive animals are best culled).

We’re invited to tag along. Tony drives and organizes, David sits in the passenger seat, while I climb into the back with Rakwa (although I don’t see much of him because his top half is out through the roof in order to direct the searchlight).

We head out into the dark, pushing through dense scrub. For a while, nothing we illuminate in our torch beams, is significant. Until finally, that black, primitive, cave-painting shape is spotted lurking in bush, on my side and slightly to the rear of the vehicle. We might so easily have missed him and truthfully a part of me (the silly townie part) has been hoping we would. The vehicle stops, the creature lowers his massive head, we stare at him for a moment as he stares back (I am thinking, as I’m sure is everyone else – but is it HIM?), the dull but deafening shot, (I look into my lap), the buffalo bellows and turns to blunder his last 30 metres into the dark. We leave as it is too dangerous to search on foot in the dark.

In the morning, I have a feint lingering unease about the buff but on our way back from our morning walk we run into Tony with Rakwa coming back, having found the buffalo dead in the bush, just a few metres from where he was shot.  They have already skinned and filleted part of him ready for the pot and distributed  the meat among the locals guys who live and work locally : clearly, they have no such hang-ups as I!