Thursday 11 Aug
I haven’t had a hot water bottle since I was little! But slipping a couple of bottles into your bed while you’re having dinner is one of the things they do to try and help you stay warm at the Aberdare Country Club. There’s a fireplace in the room, but its hard to get a crackling fire going that actually produces much warmth. This is our next overnight stop: it’s a much nicer place, especially for having a golf course that borders on a wildlife conservancy. By day you can wander around the greens and spot bushbuck, zebras, warthogs and the unusual Harvey’s duiker. By night we saw scrub hares, tree hyraxes aplenty, and the very unique and hard to find Maned Rat.
For mammal watchers the Maned Rat is a waaaaay more impressive sighting than any number of lions, leopards, rhinos and elephants! It is rare, obscure, nocturnal and is a bizarre evolutionary dead-end that just includes this one species of toxic rodent. Yeah, toxic. It eats poisonous plants and secretes their toxins so predators can’t eat a maned rat without dying a horrible froth-mouthed death.
So. Funny story. We were supposed to be spending two nights at The Ark, a hotel within the Aberdare National Park with its own floodlit waterhole. So when Shem surprised us this morning by saying we were only staying one night at The Ark, and one night at the Aberdare Country Club which is way outside the National Park, we were a bit grumpy! And there clearly had been some mis-communication, so we were justifiably grumpy. But… given all the wildlife we saw here, especially the amazing maned rat… well, when it turns out happily ever after you have to swallow that grump really.
Anyway, going back to the rest of the day before our nocturnal rat. We spent this entire day driving up into the Aberdares National Park in search of wildlife. The roads are red mud and rock, bumpy and very slithery on the hills, but Shem has clearly been driving a Toyota Landcruiser for many years and we had no problems. What we did have was plenty of mist and low cloud, so that we got occasional hints of amazing mountain forest vistas, instead of the actual vistas. Luckily we did pretty well for wildlife. My favourite sighting was when a giant forest hog emerged from the dense scrub onto a grassy trail in the mist. He was followed by the rest of the family, and they all browsed their way towards us until only a few yards from the car. We watched them for a while until a buffalo blundered onto the scene and they vanished back into the brush. Lovely big primordial brutes. I mean that in a nice way.
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