William H. Macy Instagram – Our party consisted of Felicity, her brother Moore, our daughters Sophia and Georgia, and our good friends Ripley, Ellen and Kim. We all flew to Nairobi at different times and we met at the Muthaiga Club. When Karen Blixen, the heroine in OUT OF AFRICA, arrives in Nairobi she says, “Take me to the Muthaiga club”. It was founded in 1913 and it’s got Hemingway and Waugh all over it. You have to wear a jacket to dinner. It’s famous. It’s fabulous. After breakfast the next day, we went back to the airport and boarded an eight-seater, single engine plane designed by Orville Wright. Ellen, who isn’t wild about flying, wept the entire two hours we flew into the bush. When we came in to land on the grass runway, the pilot flew the length of the field at about twenty feet and then turned around, and on the second pass, landed. The first pass was to scare the Zebra and Wart hogs off the landing strip. Waiting for us were two Land Rovers with Simon, his wife Rosie and Daisey who would be our guides. We loaded our luggage into the Rovers and Simon said, “Anybody care to sit up top?”. We climbed through the open roof and sat on thin pads to soften the bumps and, holding on for dear life, off we went at breakneck speeds on roads which were more of a suggestion than actual roads. I thought, “This is going to be epic”. We passed elephants and zebra and cape buffalo and all kinds of gazelles and myriads of fantastic birds.
After an hour drive, we arrived at our fist campsite. It was stunning. We each had a wall tent with a rug and bed and bedside table. Each tent had a small pop up tent nearby which housed a toilet seat over a hole and a bucket of dirt with a spade. Two tents shared a shower tent, and the staff would fill a thirty-gallon bucket with hot water and hoist it up with a system of pulleys. Best shower ever!
Then they assigned us our horses. I got a chestnut with white feet named “Tinga” which they said translated to “The Machine”. Well yeah, I thought, I’ll ride the machine. The third day I heard the guys talking and the translation was not exactly the machine, but more accurately, “The Tractor”. | Posted on 20/Jul/2022 06:50:47
