Lewa Horse photos

Polo ponies enjoying a roll after their morning exercise



Me on Golden Princess with the giraffes




Sheba, just a few hours old. Mummy Coco and syce Akangi watching over her!




Rhinos joining us for a bush breakfast!




Champagne and syce, Paul




Di riding Dancing Cat, with baboons in the background




Santa and Champagne playing together



A Taste of Lewa - photos

My  house



Inside my house



The pool at Wilderness

Views across Lewa to Mount Kenya



Evening game drive on Lewa




White rhino




Giraffe




Herd of impala





Grevy Zebra (on a very green Lewa - this photo was taken in December just after the rains)




The waterfall below Wilderness - a great swimming and picnic spot




Up, the donkey, enjoyed a rest after bringing lunch down to the waterfall




Waterbuck




Elephant by the swamp




Ann and I after our bi-plane flight




Cheetah




Warthog



End of the Season

Peace and quiet at last. All the guests have gone and the season is officially over. Wilderness is now closed until the end of May. Sadly the rains are still yet to arrive. Normally they start mid to late March but despite a few afternoons of threatening clouds, the rain has still not started. It may seem strange to those of you reading this who live in the UK, but in Africa the rain is essential to life and everyone is desperate for it to come. If it doesn’t, then the next rainy season is not until November. All the grass is dried up already so the animals will suffer and even die through lack of food. That said, I am told by guests that there is a “drought” in the UK at the moment. Somehow, I doubt that it compares to a drought in Africa..

After saying in my last blog post that slaughtering animals is not a regular occurrence here, a big staff party was held to celebrate the end of the season and an ox bought, killed and devoured in one day! Admittedly, there were probably close to a hundred people to feed but by the end of the day, there was not a scrap left – no part of it goes to waste and once again, the drinking of the blood is a big part of the ritual for the Masai people.

On to more pleasant subjects, I am flying home tomorrow! Very excited, although I will miss and worry about the horses, I think it would get very boring here with no guests and the majority of the staff have gone on leave. That said, for a couple of days, it is nice to enjoy Wilderness without guests and have the pool to myself. So I will be back in the UK until almost the end of May and then back to Kenya ready to start the next season.

Had some good rides and wildlife sightings recently. One of the great things about riding here is that every ride is different because you never know what you might see. Sometimes it is just the small things such as the ostrich eggs hatching. We had seen a male and female ostrich looking after their eggs for some time, and then the other morning it was lovely to see them with nine little ostrich chicks bobbing along beside them. Or yesterday, two cheetah relaxing on a termite mound. Seeing cats is always special as they are so hard to find and normally keep themselves well hidden in the long grass. Some days you just see so much out riding, for example, twelve rhino and a herd of buffalo within the first fifteen minutes of leaving the stables! The buffalo are tricky customers as they can be very aggressive. Had to wait a while for the two by the river blocking our path to move on. Today, we exercised the polo ponies on the canter track with around thirty Grevy zebra lined up along the airstrip watching us! So it’s never boring and, at times, quite surreal.

Anyway, once I get back to the UK and faster internet, I will endeavour to get some photos posted so you can see what Lewa looks like!

Slaughtering a goat Masai style

Thinking about what has happened over the past week, one thing that springs to mind is the evening we slaughtered a goat. This isn’t something that happens on a regular basis here, but one of our guests (a blood thirsty teenage boy) wanted to see how the Masai kill a goat. As you may be aware, the Masai also drink the blood of the slaughtered animal so I was intrigued to witness this ritual. Hence a very large billy goat was bought to camp late one afternoon. I had expected the animal to be killed by slitting its throat but actually they pin the animal down and suffocate it first. The throat is then slit and they take it in turns to drink the blood directly from the animal! Very gruesome as you end up with blood all over your face. Suffice to say, I did not try this myself! The actual meat once cooked still retained the billy goat smell and tasted pretty awful.

Finally today I saw the wild dogs which was brilliant. They are such a rare sight so I’m very lucky to have seen them. Even one of the guides who has been here three years said this was his first sighting of them. They had killed an impala not far from Wilderness so I got to watch them for 20 minutes before they headed off up the hill and disappeared into the long grass.

Our newest baby foal has been named Sheba. She is very sweet and naughty. It is great watching the three foals playing together, but the other two are a bad influence and have already taught her how to bite! Poor Santa has had an eye infection so he is now very distrustful of humans – he did not appreciate having eye ointment put in his eye for five days. Champagne is back on form now that her stitches are out and her wound has healed. She demands to be centre of attention and won’t let me spend any time with Sheba. She comes up to me and pushes me in the back, pulls at my clothes and then bites me if I ignore her! When Santa is having his legs bandaged, she comes over and tries to disrupt proceedings. Her favourite trick is grabbing the medical bag in her mouth and throwing the contents all over the ground. So Champagne and her mum are moving up to the Wilderness stables today (from the farm) to live with the rest of the herd. I am praying she doesn’t get kicked (her cheekiness could get her in trouble with the other horses) and makes some friends so that we can then take mum away and get her weaned. Santa and Sheba are going to miss her though as they both really look up to her and I feel very mean having to separate them.

I probably shouldn’t say this because something will go wrong, but amazingly it has now been over two weeks since I last had to inject a horse. Fingers crossed, they continue to stay healthy. The polo ponies had an eventful day last weekend when they went to the nearest polo pitch to practice some “stick and balling”. I had a go too and it is so much harder than it looks – you definitely need strong arm muscles as the stick is heavy. Anyway, there was lots of rain later that day and the lorry could not make it back to Lewa. The poor ponies had to hack all the way back from the tarmac road to Wilderness. Given lorries here don’t have ramps (they use loading bays instead), I don’t think I want to know how they got the horses off the lorry. The syce said they found a slope to back the lorry up to so they could get the horses off, but I strongly suspect it was not exactly level with the back of the lorry and the horses had to jump down. Nevertheless, they all survived their day out. Given how bumpy the Lewa roads are, it was actually probably preferable for the horses to walk back. In a car, the roads are terrible so for a horse in the back of a lorry, it can’t be too much fun either.

That’s about it for now. Our last guests leave on 8^th April and then the lodge is closed until the end of May because the “long rains” are due to start any day. The “short rains” are in November. Lewa is very dry now so the rains will be most welcome. I will be coming back to the UK at some point during April and May for a “holiday”. Can’t wait to see my family and friends. The last 11 months have been truly amazing and I am looking forward to reading back over my blog to remind myself of all the incredible things I have seen and done since I left the UK at the beginning of May last year.