A Country Nurse by Thea Hayes

Author:Thea Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

24

Adventures in Kenya

In 2008, my son-in-law Patrick’s mother Penny Too and I went on a Classic Safari Tour to Kenya. After flying to Johannesburg, where we stayed the night at the Hotel International, we took a flight to Nairobi. While waiting there for our flight, we couldn’t help observing the other travellers around us, wondering who would make up the twelve members of our group. We weren’t to find out until after our two day stay at the ‘House of Waine’, a beautiful boutique hotel in the leafy suburb of Karen, away from the chaos of Nairobi twenty miles away.

The next day we went on a tour to visit the Elephant Orphanage where we saw baby elephants coming out of the bush to get their bottle of milk. We also visited the Giraffe Manor, an amazing hotel where you can dine with the giraffes, which is associated with the Giraffe Centre, a home for endangered giraffes, and also operates a breeding centre.

We had lunch at Karen Blixen’s restaurant, two kilometres from where we were staying. Karen, a Danish writer, is best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while living in Kenya.

The following day we were taken to a light aircraft airport to fly to the Masai Mara. There we met the rest of the group, and sometimes you can’t pick your travelling companions, but we all ended up getting on well—four couples from Lane Cove in Sydney, an elderly couple from America, and ourselves.

Our guides were Hamish Grant, who owned the safari company, and Kerin Barnard, a young tour guide, who picked us up in their two vehicles, and drove us to the safari camp, showing us our tents with their two single beds, access to our own bathroom with bucket shower and toilet.

Every morning at 5.30 a.m., a house-boy would bring us a cup of tea, and by 6.15 we would be in the vehicles on safari, having breakfast—beside a creek with twelve hippopotami wallowing in the water—then up on a lookout 1600 metres high with a 360-degree view of the Masai Mara—or some other ‘Out of Africa’ scene.

At around 2 p.m. we would be taken back to the camp for lunch. The meals were magnificent, with all sorts of different wines and spirits to choose from at lunch and dinner. Then back in the safari vehicles to see more—a lion with four lionesses and six cubs; two lions walking through the grass; lion cubs playing and wrestling with one another; elephants; ten Cape buffalo; hundreds of zebra; giraffes feeding and pruning the trees; a family of hyenas with their black babies; a cheetah hunting and killing a Thomson’s gazelle, and many more. We saw every imaginable animal in Africa.

We were there for the Great Migration or the Wildebeest Migration—the annual event of two million wildebeest, zebras and gazelles moving through Serengeti and the Masai Mara ecosystems. On this particular day, we had driven down to the river to find several hundred zebras waiting to go across but terrified of the crocodiles.

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