Welcome to my tent for the week

We’ve arrived in Machakos county in Kenya after our journey from Nairobi. We’ve passed one of the largest shanty towns and seen the development to improve the lives of the people here. It’s a relief to have the thought of a comfortable bed and privacy.

Here’s my tent for the week at Muthoki Country Lodge:

It’s perfect.

It has a concrete internal wall for the shower and toilet and a four-poster bed with a mosquito net. There are bedside tables, a smart desk and chair, a clothes hanging system, and a laundry basket. The bedding is top quality. It’s beyond anything I could have expected. I’m so glad I’m in a tent rather than one of the lodge buildings.

Muthoki Country Lodge started as a family run eco-lodge on 40 acres of reclaimed land. Most of the trees had been cut down to service the famous local wood-carving craft industry. It’s now a thriving early forest. The owner, Sandra, greets us warmly. The staff are excellent. The food is plentiful, fresh and delicious. There’s even a cold bottle of local Tusker lager.

It’s time to get to know one another at the dinner table. I’ve brought postcards of my Westray Puffin photographs with me (of course I have) and lay them out on a side-table and ask everyone to pick their Spirit Puffin – the image which ‘speaks’ to them. We have a lovely time around the camp fire saying why we each chose our Puffin. It works well. People share so much more when they have a distraction in their hand to talk about.

Everyone’s already gone to their rooms by 9pm. I can’t go to sleep before midnight, so I have three hours to spend on my own in the dark of an African night.

I look back at the day’s photographs on my laptop.

There’s a photograph I took of this amazing plant.

The leaves look like a banana plant but it reminds me most of a Bird of Paradise plant. In fact, it reminds me of when I decided to grow a Strelitzia, a Bird of Paradise plant from seed. Rather than buying seeds of the familiar orange and purple flowered species, Strelitzia reginae, like any normal person would, I had to go and buy seeds of Strelitzia nicolai, which has black and white flowers. The seeds are large, black, and bean-like with a large orange-red beard. I remember having to sandpaper the seed and then soak it for at least three days to coax it to germinate. It did. I was thrilled with it. That is, until the leaves got to eight-feet high and were crushing against the ceiling.

I had extreme difficulty getting it out of the house.

This one is a Traveler’s Palm, Ravenala madagascariensis, and a garden plant originally from Madagascar. It’s a relative of the Strelitzias. It grows to 30 to 50 feet high. I immediately start thinking about getting some seeds and germinating them. Then I think better of it. I’ve been there already.

I’m not an idiot, at least not an idiot twice.

There’s a photograph of a butterfly:

It’s a Yellow-banded Pansy.

There’s a photograph of an African Pied Wagtail with the wheels of the institution bus.

It’s time to settle down for the night inside my mosquito net. I’m slightly freaked out by discovering there’s a fresh hot water bottle in my bed. It’s a good idea. It gets chilly here at night.

I fall asleep gently, with the sound of frogs croaking from the nearby lake gently lulling me to sleep under Kenyan skies.

Late in the night I wake to the sound of a Bushbaby screaming in the trees outside my tent.

More adventures in Kenya