Kenya 2023: Chapter 4 - Out of Africa
Our jetlag produced some odd sleeping hours, so we were up in the middle of the night at 1:00. We went to the rooftop pool for sunrise photos at 6:30 and were cautioned against taking any pictures as we were in a secured compound near the airport. We shot some pictures of pie-faced wagtails, superb starlings, and an ibis from the roof before heading to breakfast downstairs. We requested a driver for a trek out to the Karen Blixen house in western Nairobi. If you’re not familiar with the 1980’s Meryll Streep/Robert Redford movie Out of Africa, the film is based on a true story by Danish author Karen Blixen, who, with her estranged husband and another lover, attempted to run a coffee farm near the Ngong Hills. The estate, known to Karen as Bogani (a house in the woods), was gifted to the Kenyan government in 1964 in honor of the country's independence. After the film debuted, the house became a national museum.
Our driver Paul and I conversed in Swahili on the drive over (with better results than the market the day before). We paid 1,200 KES to enter the estate grounds and our guide, Lena, gave us the history of the house on the lawn. It was cloudy but warm, the kind of thick atmosphere on the East Coast that would imply storms are coming, but it never rained while we were there. There were two-dozen Chinese tourists at the house, otherwise it was empty and quiet. Guards armed with AK-74u’s and AK-47’s sat in the backyard.
The inside of the house is small with tall vaulted ceilings and massive beams. It smells like old books and humid wood. Photographs are not permitted inside, which was a bummer for us. The tour ends at the reamins of a large, rusty coffee grinder. A fire here led to the collapse of the coffee enterprise and Karen’s eventual retreat from Kenya. A family of hyraxes watched us cautiously from atop the grinder. A nature trail winds its way around the edge of the property and we spotted white-starred robins, an African goshawk, and some vervet monkeys in the trees. While sipping fresh coffee at the cafe on the property, a variable sunbird visited us repeatedly, admiring himself in a mirror over an outdoor sink.
The silence here on the west side of the city was incredible. For as much traffic as we saw on the streets leading to the estate, we may as well have been surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. Had we not had other plans or a driver waiting for us, we could have stayed there the rest of the day.
