The rains are here and mornings dawn cold and grey. At night we are kept awake by the sound of it drumming on our tin roof; everything is damp, mould grows freely in cupboards and on clothes and I sit here typing this wrapped in a big sheepskin coat with, for once, slippers on my feet. Last night the flying ants came, they arrive in ones and twos, attracted by our lights, but then before you know it they have multiplied and the air is thick. They fly in complete panic for many minutes and then fall to the ground, lose their wings, look for a mate and then die. Just like that. In the mornings we sweep up their bodies and gossamer wings and wait for the next time they’ll take flight.

I love this time of year. I love how our forest is so green, I imagine everything growing underfoot and if I sat there long enough I would probably see it grow. I drove down off the farm yesterday, and the stream at the bottom was in full flood. I sat and contemplated it for a while, wondered if my study old station wagon would withstand the force of water, or get swept down on to the rocks instead. But no time for second thoughts, places to go and restless energy at my heels, so we forded the river and roared out the other side.

Most days though I don’t leave the farm preferring to sit perched up here on the foothills, catching only the odd glimpse of our mountain and watching the weather as she moves past.

But I always find myself going back to black & white (well, at least I tried!)





But a recent photo assignment was a little different. I was asked to accompany a well-known actor/comedian on a family safari in the Serengeti; this for an English magazine. I have to admit, somewhat shame-faced, that I had to ‘Google’ him first, although this was mainly so that I would recognise him at the airstrip and not by accident leave him there.

He and his family were an absolute delight and I had what was surely one of the best safaris ever. Much of that I’m sure was due to watching the Serengeti unfold through their totally ‘new-to-Africa’ eyes; everything they saw was exclaimed upon with delight and it was this that really made my trip. After 18 years of living in Africa, I worry sometimes that my eyes are jaded, that I don’t see all that there is out here. Does the afternoon light on the plains still make me stop the way it did, and do I still feel my breath being taken away by elephants rumbling in the evenings. The answer to that is yes I do and no doubt always will, but there is something that takes it up a notch when you know it has maximum impact on the person standing next to you.

We laughed a lot, long and loud, over evenings under the stars. We raced like banshees in open vehicles to stay one step ahead of a huge storm that broke just as we reached camp. We sorted out the world, as you do, in three easy steps and I tried not to laugh so much that wine spurted out of my nose, at any funny joke that was made during dinner. One morning early I woke everyone so we could watch the migration file into our valley, the first lines of them that stretched for miles behind. Stepping through the wet grass wrapped in blankets and with coffee in hand, we walked out to meet them.

It’s the time of year before the rains come, hot and dry, when dust rolls down off the mountain and fills the air. The sky is monochrome and dust devils whirl across the Maasai Steppe. It’s the time of year when tempers are short and easily frayed, you feel prickly in your skin. Yesterday evening I sat out in the space between and waited for the light to soften and the gentleness of the evening to begin

“People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…”  Karen Blixen

Wishing everyone a wonderfully unruly and carefree 2012 – with lots of colour in every direction!

Madelyn Mulvaney and I are 11 hours apart, which means when she wakes up, over there on the Pacific Ocean, we’e enjoying ‘sundowners’ over here. Similarily when the mullah calls at 0525 (my usual wake-up call), Vancouver heads into evening.

We’ve had a lot to talk about and images to share over these last weeks – welcome to our first post:

Eliza and Madelyn.com

Beyond this storm-hit windscreen, with me cowering behind it – fair-weather ‘apprentice’ farmer that I am – there are 370 acres of rolling hills, views of both Kilimanjaro and Meru, beautifully aged and remarkable trees and coffee bushes in every direction. And we are now its guardians!

And these are our first “Mbosho Coffee Company” beans, growing happily in the coffee ‘nursery’.

On a hill in the midst is a house, or rather the remains of a house…open to the skies and the elements which of course, because I am a hopeless romantic and practicalities like this don’t concern me, bothers me not one jot! I have already rebuilt it in my mind, even down to the herb garden. I’ll let you know when we move in!!

It’s been a dry year and there is little water, we saw only a few skinny buffalo and a small herd of elephants on this last visit. “They’ve been going into the villages”, a local man told us, “it’s a big problem, they get into the crops and people get scared, they chase them, they shoot them”. I heard a terrible story of a young elephant being chased to its death, run off the edge of a cliff by an angry mob; this from friends who themselves are custodians of two elephants, 4 and 14, rescued when they were separated from their herd and faced certain starvation. They now live together in relative safety on the western slopes of Kilimanjaro. There are always two sides to everything here, both ends of the scale are side by side and you need to look both in the eye.

When the rains come to this area, and if they’re good, it means grazing and water is more readily available without crossing unmarked boundaries, leaving less room for conflict. The rains bring everything back to life -  out of the dust and bones -  and nowhere is it more apparent than here. I wish I could ‘bed in’ here and never leave. Watch the days, weeks, months change, the animals come and go, and forget anything else in the world as nothing would be as important as this.

Being here takes my breath away. On the one side, you have the Usumbara’s and the Pare Eastern Arc Mountains, deep purple and shadowy at sunset. From the top of a craggy escarpment we looked all the way out across Tsavo, could see the Taita Hills on the horizon. J was in a good mood, it’s a birders paradise and he saw several species he’d never seen before, that made him very happy. Maybe I’ll let him ‘bed in’ and stay with me here too.

I’ve been up since 4am, wrapped in a blanket on our upstairs veranda. Staring up the sky which is inky black and swallows me whole. That and the silence…I’m lost in both, equally. Quiet, contemplative, realising I’ve sat for nearly an hour without moving. I’m afraid to now, not just because of cramped limbs twisted under me, but because my movement will cause a ripple, stirring, an infinitesimal start, the ‘butterfly effect’.

It’s 4am and I couldn’t sleep. There’s a moth that flutters inside my head and won’t let me rest. When I try its filigree wings brush against some half-forgotten thought and pushes it forward. I sit and watch faint light rise over the Maasai Steppe, I feel on edge but I put this down to lack of sleep. My body lies down at night but everything pulses around me and whilst I listen to J’s steady sleep-filled breathing, my own rhythm does not follow.

If I sit so still, will I absorb all the sounds around me, sitting in this place, hidden in shadow. The mountain is mine at this hour and I am its keeper as it slowly rises. The mullah starts his call from way below me, his voice climbs as it swirls through the foothills and the hairs on my skin prickle as they always do.

At this moment I have no eyes and all sound is exquisite. I have no eyes but I can hear the wind coming down from the peak, can smell the chilled scent of snow it carries. This perfect moment is like a meditation and I realise that sometime back I forgot how to breathe.