Saturday 13 Aug
Our lunch stop today was probably my favourite place in Kenya so far. The Trout Tree Restaurant is just a few hundred yards off the main Nanyuki road with buildings and human life along every mile, but you feel like you’re back in wilderness. The trout farming ponds are all in the shadow of a single ginormous tree, and they’ve built a treehouse restaurant around the trunk where they serve expertly grilled trout dishes that couldn’t be fresher. Expertly grilled. I also had a unique hot drink of lemon, honey, ginger and garlic… yes, it was as potent as it sounds. The name (which I forget) translates as “medicine”.
We also found tree hyraxes and Syke’s monkeys around the place, and several kinds of dazzling sunbird on the flowering trees near our table. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a habituated troop of Guereza colobus monkeys that we found hanging out with the chickens. We caught the tiniest glimpse of these guys in the mists of Aberdare NP, and here they were so close that my giant zoom lens was no use at all! They are beautiful monkeys and – okay, I feel a bit guilty about this, because habituating animals is seldom a good idea – the guy who helps look after the place let us feed old Julius by hand. Old Julius being a monkey, by the way. Here’s a colobus video too: https://youtu.be/DBrm9ZXMT6o
Anyway, this was all just a short stop on the long drive to Rhino River Camp, where we are staying for three nights on the edge of Meru National Park. This is a bit more like a posh safari camp! We’ve got a tent perched on a wooden platform over the little Rhino River, completely hidden from anyone else. On the other hand, the place does feel like a little bit of a cheat; the nearest village is only 200 metres from the camp! To be fair, because you approach the camp from the National Park you’d never be able to tell, except for the occasional noise of a distant motorbike over the sound of the gurgling river.
We also had company for dinner: they have some habituated greater galagos that lurk around in search of foooood. One of them hopped on our table, politely lifted the napkin off of the bread basket, took out a bread roll and then ran off. Very fluffy little beasts, and they also they became the only new mammal we saw today.
I almost forgot that our day started with a final game drive in the Aberdares. It was even more foggy, even colder, and we saw absolutely nothing!
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