Summertime Blues

It’s not easy getting back into the swing of things after being on holiday. It’s made harder returning from a couple of weeks in Africa, Kenya to be precise. Although this was by far my shortest summer ever it felt much more like a holiday than most of my previous ones have. You see, when two weeks is all you get you really make the most of it.

Strangely enough Africa is one of those places in the world I feel drawn towards most. I feel an urge to go back over and over again and to explore more and more. It is not that I necessarily feel I belong there but rather that being in Africa makes me feel I have finally arrived. I travelled quite extensively throughout Asia in my delayed gap year and was very much taken by several of its countries namely Burma, Cambodia and India. The difference is that I do not feel an urge to go back to these countries, at least not as strongly as I feel an urge to travel to Africa each year. So when a friend who just moved out to Nairobi sent me an email describing her first few days there I knew that I needed to drop all my other plans and spend a few weeks on the black continent instead. I spontaneously decided to pull the rip cord on Europe. I had various lovely invitations to Ibiza, Panarea and our house by the lake in Germany (where the rest of my family had congregated) but somehow I felt a strong desire to go, well, back to the land I suppose.

What is it about Kenya that attracts me so, I wonder? For one its people, with their smiley faces and abundance of humour make it special. Rarely have I come across a nation I find it easier to laugh with. I love Kenya’s dry dusty air and its red sandy earth, which sticks to your skin so resiliently. I love watching the slow rhythmic walk of the locals wandering along the narrow roads weighed down with heavy bunches of firewood or simply crouching along the path as if sunken in deepest meditation. I love the fact that time means nothing there, as annoying as it can be when you are waiting for your driver to take you to the airport. However there is something ever so refreshing about Kenya’s timeless serenity. After all, does it really matter whether you arrive somewhere at 2 or at 4?

Maybe it’s an irresistible cornucopia of all those images that exhilarates my senses?

Africa is a place of extreme contrasts and endless possibilities. My original plan was to fly out to Nairobi to see my friend and use Kenya’s capital as a base for further adventures. I loosely had planned to shoot off to Rwanda on a trek into the bush in search of the infamous silverback gorillas. Unfortunately, due to my unwillingness to make any concrete commitments, there were no permits immediately available. Getting such a permit, which allows you to trek after the gorillas, is harder than getting a table at the Waverly in New York. To me that makes perfect sense – after all the gorillas in Rwanda are much rarer than the gorillas at the Waverly.

So, I was back to last minute planning, which from significant first hand experience I recognise involves a certain amount of flexibility to resort to a plan B (sometimes even C or D). Luckily all of my options sounded equally fun so my disappointment was moderate. I found a ranch called Sosian (or maybe it found me?) close to Mount Kenya on an open and vast sandy land. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a ranch but the landscape reminded me somewhat of Argentina. The main differences were lions, stripy hyenas, wild dogs, elephants – pretty much all you hope to see on safari and many more unusual creatures wandering the grounds. It was simply fabulous. I went on game rides rather than game drives – much more entertaining as you can gallop along the plains when bored of looking around. We even saw a lion whilst riding which Charlotte the lovely English trainer said she had never seen before on horseback. I went on a couple of walking safaris accompanied by Steve the Zimbabwean hunk, who runs the camp together with his lovely Scottish wife. He knew pretty much everything there is to know from tracking animals to animal babble, a right old Dr Doolittle in fact. So there I was living it up in Kenya’s Northern splendour diving off waterfalls and gone was all the regret for not having made it into the arms of the gorillas.

I have been to Kenya countless times as my mother has a house by the ocean where we often spend Christmas. I spent my second week there perfecting my sun tan (getting burnt really) doing little more than kite surfing, reading and sleeping. Walking around barefoot all day, the salty seawater on my skin, my hair tussled by the water and the air. Oh yes, and eating copious amounts of fruit. I basically had breakfast three times a day. It was heaven. I felt a little bit like Pippi Longstocking in this big house, no grown-ups in sight to tell to me to go to bed or to brush my hair. It was very different to the perfectly organised household I encounter when my mother is around. Proper cooked meals were replaced by picnics. The food was not served on porcelain plates but taken straight from the fridge and put on the table still in its tupperware. I left our home a little heavy hearted but filled with certainty that I would be back in a few months time, albeit the household then under the firm directions of my mother. This will mean a little less chaos and washed feet but having a good slice of grilled tuna every now and again makes up somehow.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.