26th October 2007

[PHOTOS COMING SOON - AS YOU CAN PROBABLY TELL, I'M POSTING THESE ENTRIES RETROSPECTIVELY AND I'M TRYING TO CATCH UP WITH MYSELF, SO THAT I AM ABLE TO START POSTING AN ENTRY PER DAY, ON THE DAY...]

It actually rained heavily for the first time – great excitement! But guess what? It only lasted five minutes, just enough to pockmark the beach sand below the house. Meanwhile the wind continues to swirl around and around, constantly changing direction, which is often what happens in Tsavo during the time of heavy rains and yet for us, it’s disappointment again as we watch the black storms falling all around. But it’s drizzling again now, so we wait and see…

The Monitor Lizards must be waking up from their period of aestivation during the dry months, as we have suddenly started seeing them again after their long absence. Is this a sign of more rain approaching?
The Dikkops were fighting off a Monitor this afternoon, over on one of the sand islands in the middle of the river. The Dikkops must have a nest there on the sand, and they’re afraid the Monitor will steal their eggs. They were hopping around on the ground, right in front of the big lizard, their wide black and white wings outstretched, making themselves look bigger, hoping to intimidate it…or perhaps by attracting its attention in a different direction, they were cleverly guiding it away from their nest, just as plovers will do. It was too far away to see whether or not the birds were successful, or whether the Monitor ended up with the meal he was after.

Getting out of the bedroom in the morning is difficult, because as soon as we wake up, life is already burgeoning outside the house, and there is so much to see, just outside the window – it’s almost impossible to drag oneself away, even though an equally spectacular view awaits you on the balcony over breakfast. The fruiting commiphora tree on the hippo-lawn-to-be (which I can see from my bed) is still attracting a myriad of birds, including the Spot Flanked Barbet. The Von der Decken Hornbills were here today too, the male with his impressive red and yellow beak and the female with her heavy black bill. I was too slow getting the camera out of its bag to catch them, but as this part of Kenya seems to be “Hornbill Central”, I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities for photographing them. We hear the Grey Hornbills all day long – to me their whistling cry is truly the signature tune of the bushland – and there are also the Red Billed and possibly the Yellow Billed Hornbills too, as we have spotted some not so far from here. You also find the spectacular turkey-sized Ground Hornbills – which prefer to walk than to fly - on the other side of the river, but I’m not sure if we’ve ever actually seen any on our property.

A Tawny Eagle was chasing the slightly smaller Wahlberg’s Eagle down the river today – obviously the Tawny does not like too much competition around. It’s interesting to see the different shapes of the eagles in flight, the Tawny with its fan tail and the Wahlberg’s with a very square tail. The juvenile Martial Eagle – dwarfing both the others – was also flying around, and no doubt sending terror into the heart of any dik-dik venturing out in the open today.

Over the past few days, I have noticed the Termites are working on their mounds – you can easily see the new additions by their darker colour. Termite mounds are like icebergs, in that what you see above ground is only a fraction of what lies below. By adjusting the ventilation pipes above ground (which is what the mound really is), the Termites can control the temperature and humidity of their fungus gardens below, with which they feed their young. Termites are everywhere in Africa, busy below ground, performing a vital function in nature. They are the only creatures that can break down the base elements found in wood cellulose, and therefore they are critical in disposing of dead vegetation, and recycling the energy locked in dead wood. Just by going about their daily life’s processes, they put the goodness back into the soil, helping to make it fertile for the next generation of plants.

Because we are watering the trees and plants around the house, we have created an island of green in a sea of grey and brown. The trees are bright and flourishing, and many plants are flowering. Compare, for example, the lushness of our watered commiphora trees with the grey leafless commiphora elsewhere on the property.

We have so many different types of commiphora tree here, and I don’t know much about each one, but many share the papery quality of their bark – although you can see some are quite yellow in appearance, others grey and others almost blue.

I was out photographing some of the flowers today – unfortunately I am not knowledgeable (yet) about all their names, but that does not prevent me being blown away by their delicacy and beauty. There is a bush up behind the house that is attracting hundreds of bees – both the smaller sweat bees and the larger honey bees. The bush is covered with yellow and red flowers. They are so beautiful, I just could not stop photographing them. The perfection of each blossom is so acute, it almost makes me ache to look at the photographs.

What my father calls the ‘Lucky Bean Tree’ (though I know others ascribe this title to the flamboyant, or flame tree), with its extraordinary thorny bark is also starting to sprout new leaves, despite having been unceremoniously banished from our balcony flowerbed into the garden. We suddenly realised the tree’s roots were getting a little too ambitious and were starting to uproot our floor from beneath, so it was removed forthwith to a place where it couldn’t do any harm, and could continue to grow unhindered.

There is a robust creeper with a thick white flower, hanging in garlands from the tree on the corner of the driveway. Although our flower identification book is quite hopeless, I have managed to discover this is the thunbergia guerkeana, which opens its flowers at night and is pollinated by moths. Down near the river, there is a bush absolutely covered by it, which we can see from our bedroom. I photographed it in the early morning, so you can see the flowers fully open.

The Slate Coloured Boubou was hanging around while I was photographing the flowers, so I took a quick snap of him, sitting in one of our newly transplanted Terminalia trees. There was also a tree squirrel, busily munching in a bush next to me.

The grass below the front door Baobab tree is growing out of control – it’s quite ridiculous to see grass growing like that in this ordinarily dry country – just goes to show what a little extra water can do. In amongst the grasses (several different species) are various kinds of flowers, poking up their colourful pretty heads between the greenery…two different types of white flowers and the lovely, tiny blue and yellow Commelina.

There are a couple of new arrivals in our balcony flowerbed today – one is definitely a lily, growing out of a tuber-like root, and the other may also be a lily, though it looks quite strange at the moment – amazing what seeds and plants were inadvertently brought indoors when we filled our flowerbeds with soil. (On the other side of the same flowerbed, my other lily continues to visibly grow and unfurl more and more by the day).

With the migrants arriving from Europe, we are seeing new birds almost daily – today we spotted the Little Stint for the first time, which is like a small sandpiper; yesterday it was the Ruff (like a large sandpiper), both riverine species. The Eurasian Bee Eaters were here again too. Today I also saw Somali Bee Eaters, as I was on my way back from sending emails from the top of the water tank (and photographing butterflies in the seemingly desolate wasteland of the cement slab and surrounding dry scrub).

“Sending emails from the top of the water tank?”, you might well ask. Living in the middle of the bush in Africa, as we do, brings with it many unusual challenges. We have to be completely self sufficient in terms of the infrastructure and services one takes for granted in a Western city: water, power, phones, internet access… The reason I venture daily to the top of our water tank (which is on top of our hill – the highest point on the property) is that it is the only place where I can get a phone signal strong enough to make phone calls and get online to check my emails. You should have seen me trying to organise an entire wedding from the top of the water tank! And no ordinary wedding it was either, with 70 people sleeping under canvas and food and drinks having to be brought in from 200 kilometres away…but fun it was, and well worth it.

Ian, my husband, returns from Nairobi – Kenya’s capital city – today, bearing a mobile phone antenna, which we will erect on our roof, in order to enable us to make and receive phone calls from the house – in theory anyway.

Despite living by a river, getting water to our house is still one of our greatest challenges. We’re having to replace our old water pump, which reached the end of its life, as we rely on the river for all our water needs – there is no mains water supply here. From the river, the water needs to be pumped into a settlement tank nearby, where the silt will settle to the bottom, allowing us to pump the clean water to the massive hilltop water tank, which then gravity feeds the whole property, including the house (you should feel the water pressure in our showers – it almost washes your hair for you, hands-free!). We use the river water for all our household requirements, including for cooking, but always ensure we boil it thoroughly first to remove any “nasties”. For drinking water, my father designed the flat roof of the house to act as a catchment area for rainwater, which then drains into an underground tank beneath the house… Now all we need is the rain.
As for internet access, we are about to install VSat – that is, satellite broadband internet. At that point, we will be back in touch with the rest of the world, and I will be able to post this blog, instead of writing it as a word document and saving it for the big day when we get connected.

We have no electricity here either, being 15 miles from the nearest mains cable. At the moment, we use a large generator for our power requirements, which we turn on every evening for an hour or two. (Our cooker and fridge both run off gas.) We are now in the process of installing a solar power system, which is obviously more environmentally friendly than a generator and over time is a lot less expensive to run (though the initial purchase and set-up costs are very high.) We are probably in one of the best places in the world for harnessing solar energy here, and will combine the solar system with a wind turbine, so that we can generate electricity both day and night, and on the odd day when there is not much sun, there will probably be a whisper or more of wind… Water for our showers is already solar-heated, and they are luxurious in the extreme.

You might wonder what we do for shopping. The nearest “town” – more like highway truck stop – is 15 miles away, which on the narrow dirt roads takes about an hour to reach. There we can buy the very basics that we need: potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and a few household items. Mainly, we ensure that whoever is driving down from Nairobi, with its modern supermarkets and delicatessens, brings with them fresh supplies of food, and we use our freezer to full capacity. It just takes forward-planning, and the use of a little imagination when cooking – if I run out of one particular ingredient, I replace it with something else until such time as one of us has to make the journey to town, or friends come to visit (here, when visitors come to stay, it’s not a case of asking them to ‘bring a bottle’ but instead ‘bring some fresh fruit & veg’…or ‘bring some fresh fruit & veg AND a bottle’). But more often than not, it comes down to looking in the fridge and seeing what is left, and then conjuring up a meal – instead of opening the fridge with a particular meal already in mind.