Life on Lewa

After a hideously long journey, I finally arrived in Nairobi at 6.30am on Sat 3^rd Dec. I was met by a driver at the airport and then it was a 5 hour drive north to Lewa. Fantastic to be back in Africa. November is rainy season so everywhere was very green in comparison to my last trip through Kenya. Indeed, I have to say that I really did not recognize the Lewa area although it transpires that we must have passed by it when we drove south from Samburu in June (there aren’t that many tarred roads in Kenya so I’m told this is the only route we could have taken).

The Lewa Wildlife Conservancy is a 64,000 acre expanse of land. It is stunning – the landscape (savannah and acacia trees, forests and rivers) seems to go on forever and the views of snow capped Mount Kenya are incredible. At the moment, it is all so green and the grass very long but I’m told it doesn’t stay this way for long. The downside of all the rain is that getting to Wilderness Trails (the lodge on Lewa where I am based) is impossible without four wheel drive. As soon as my taxi turned off the tar road, it was clear that we weren’t getting any further in a regular car and we had to call the lodge to come and collect me. It’s a good few miles along very bumpy tracks to actually reach Wilderness Trails – very remote but I am gradually getting used to driving on these crazy African roads!

The nearest big town to Lewa is Nanyuki (an equator town) which is about an hour’s drive south. It has the most amazing supermarket which has seemingly transformed the lifes of the many white settlers (Europeans) living in this area since it opened 18 months ago. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how many English / international products this supermarket has too! On checking back through my photos of Kenya from earlier this year, it turns out that Nanyuki was our first equator crossing and I have a photo of me by the equator sign. Who could have known that six months later I would be back to live in this area?

So what is living on Lewa like? Well my accommodation is great. I have a small lodge to myself – nice big double bed, huge bathroom (including bath), a verandah, TV and DVD player – so it’s all good. I am having to adjust to a life of being waited on – it’s kind of like living in a hotel as my bed gets made, room cleaned, etc each day. Even my laundry is done for me and in the evening my bed is turned down and a fire lit – so I’m thoroughly spoilt really! It is all quite rustic though – lots of insects and you have to be careful that monkeys don’t get in. The generator is only on for a limited time each day and goes off at 10.30pm so it is a life of early nights and early rises.

Food wise, I can either eat with the guests (everyone eats together at one long table), or just go to the kitchen and grab whatever is on offer. Eating with the guests is good – lots of interesting people stay here – but it does mean you end up having a cooked breakfast, 2 course lunches and 3 course dinners each day – will soon be getting fat if I carry on like this! Thankfully I normally miss out on afternoon tea and cake as I’m at the stables then.

As for the job, well there are 38 horses – there were 40 but two had to be put down in my first week. Not my fault, I would like to stress! They had come to the end of the road so it was the kindest thing to do. Nine of the horses are polo ponies that the owners’ children compete on (when they are here – they all work/study in the UK). The other horses are either for guests, retired, youngsters or brood mares. I have one gorgeous cheeky palomino foal and two more due to foal in January.

There are 14 syces (the Swahili word for groom) so I don’t actually do any hard work like mucking out, feeding, grooming, etc. My role is really to oversee the running of the yard, work out exercise programs for the horses, check on the health and welfare of all the horses (some of the syces are not at all horsey and really wouldn’t notice if the horses leg was hanging off), administer drugs, etc. Looking after horses in Africa is so different from the UK though so learning lots. The stables get shut up completely at night because of lions and in the day the horses graze out wild in the conservancy alongside zebra, giraffe, impala, etc. One of the syces is always with the horses acting as a herder.

Most mornings I am out riding soon after 7am. It is such a beautiful place to ride and the polo ponies are especially fun. They are off at a tournament this week though so I have a bit more time to devote to the other horses. Before going to the tournament, the polo ponies get moved to stables at the local polo club to practice. As that is a 45 minute drive away, that was pretty much my whole morning taken up driving up there and exercising them.

The game on Lewa is impressive. Been on a few game drives so far – lions, cheetah, elephant, rhino, waterbuck, giraffe, buffalo, zebra, oryx, eland, impala, warthogs, Grants gazelle – the list goes on.. Lewa is particularly renowned for its success with rhino conservation. There are 60+ black rhino (the most rare) and loads of white rhino – you basically can’t go on a game drive here and not see rhino. I saw eight on my first game drive which considering I only saw two the whole five months I travelled through Africa  previously says it all. This morning I was out riding with guests and we stumbled upon a sleeping black rhino. As the grass is so long, we literally did not see it until the last minute. Fortunately, it got up and ran away rather than charging us (black rhinos are particularly renowned for being aggressive). As four of the guests couldn’t ride it could have been a bit hairy had that happened! Lewa also boasts the largest Grevy zebra population in the world.

So that’s a brief overview of life on Lewa. There is so much to see and learn here. Am struggling to learn some Swahili as that would really help me when dealing with the syces and other staff here – it is quite a hard language though so I don’t hold out much hope of ever being very good at it. The downside of living in such a remote place is that the internet is often not working and when it does it is very slow – hence the lack of blogging recently.