Africa & Middle East > Kenya > Coastal Kenya > Tana Delta > Desert > Articles > A Whole View of Africa from the Loo

The wise man builds his house on rock; the foolish man builds four cottages, an open-air dining pavilion and a freshwater swimming-pool on top of a 100ft sand dune. The lunacy of Tana Delta Camp, you could say, is in-built. There is no earthly reason for it to be here – apart from the staggering view, a sea-breeze and sheer joie de vivre.

Swinging in a hammock after a lunch of mud-crab and mango and a cold Tusker or two, it is easy to see what inspired this folly, the euphoria that must have rushed to the heads of Charlie McConnell, Terry O’Meara and Renaldo Retief, the founders of Tana Delta Camp. Up here you feel like you’re poised on the brink between the beginning and end of the world. On one side stretches 130,000 hectares of mangrove and dhoum palm forest, one of Kenya’s last untouched wildernesses, haven to nearly 300 species of birds, a unique type of monkey - the Tana River Mangabey, the endemic Tana bushbuck, and healthy populations of lion, elephant and buffalo. On the other side – a fringe of rolling sand-dunes and the open Indian Ocean. The nearest town – if you can call it that – is Kipini, 28 kilometres up the beach. Malindi is 90 kilometres and a river crossing down the beach in the other direction. There is nothing apart from the odd fishing shack in between.

“My father loved this place”, says Rob O’Meara, the lodge’s present manager. “He used to come here with Charlie and Renaldo on safari, to get away from the tour buses. They used to bring their tents all the way down the river on a rickety old boat called ‘The African Queen’ and pitch camp at the base of these dunes. My father dreamed of building a lodge up on the top one day. When someone told him it would be impossible, it was like a red rag to a bull.”

The logistics are enough to make most men crumble and weep. But this is Africa, where pigheadedness and ingenuity are Siamese twins. Gigantic posts of driftwood – stray logs of teak and mahogany washed up from Burma – were hauled up the dune and driven into floating platforms of concrete. Drinking water was a problem until Terry dug below sea-level and struck the rainwater aquifer. It takes five kilometres of pipe to get the water to the bathrooms on top of the dune. This is one of the last places on earth you would ever expect to find a flushing loo and a hot shower, let alone a swimming-pool.

Everything of any use was salvaged from the beach – the dining table is part of the deck of a dhow, complete with cargo hatch; bread is baked in a tin trunk; the bread-board is a paddle. Canoes provide benches and sofas; old cable reels - coffee tables; whale vertebrae - soap dishes and foot stools; and a sperm whale jaw makes a spectacular armchair – though you need a thick cushion on it or the blow-hole stabs your bottom.

For the children this is a Robinson Crusoe paradise and beach-combing becomes a hotly-contested design-and-innovation challenge. But it’s just as well this is the last leg of our Kenyan safari. Had we come here straight from the UK we might have been just a little bit phased. When Rob recommends an early morning bird walk and says he’ll give us a knock at 6am, our daughter Nancy is bemused. “How’s he going to do that, Mum?” she asks, “We haven’t got a door. Or walls, come to think of it.”

It’s true. Our room, with its lovely palm thatch roof spiralling in the shape of a seashell, has an open-air view of over 270 degrees. You look out from your bed, or the shower, or the loo, onto the whole of Africa. At night, bats, bush babies and a genet cat consider themselves cohabitants. Baboons have a habit of attacking their reflection in the bathroom mirror. Vervet monkeys break into the kitchen and play lets-go-albino in the flour-sacks. All of which is entirely delightful until you begin to wonder about less welcome visitors.

Earlier in the day we followed fresh pug marks from the beach straight past the lower mess at the bottom of the dune. Two lionesses, a male and two six-month cubs live in the vicinity. The engineer, servicing the generator a discreet quarter of a mile from camp, encounters them regularly. Rob hasn’t seen them yet, and nor have most of his guests – these cats are wary of humans, not like the prima donnas you drive up to on safari – but sometimes you hear them roaring in the thickets so close, Rob says, their growls send sonic vibrations through your stomach.

After supper – a feast of king prawns, grilled sea bass, more mango - we’re escorted the 140 or so steps up the dune to our rooms by an armed night watchman. When he cheerily bids us goodnight I try to keep the rising falsetto out of my voice. I persuade my daughter that lions have never been known to penetrate a mosquito net but, while she falls into enviable unconsciousness, I lie rigid and wakeful, one hand on a can of ‘Doom’ mosquito repellent which I dim-wittedly plan to spray into the predator’s eyes. I never thought I’d look back on our last ten days and long for the security of a tent-zipper.

My husband and I gave up trying to sleep together at the start of our safari. By the first night it was clear we would have to strike up battle formation. Within minutes of landing on a dusty, almost invisible airstrip in Shaba – a remote, beautiful and relatively unknown wildlife reserve in Samburu country in northern Kenya, we had seen elephant, giraffe, zebra, buffalo and every kind of antelope. Our camp, in a grove of lofty dhoum palms, was on a crocodile-infested river, just downstream from a rocky canyon, home to a troupe of baboons.

The children were amazed but apprehensive. “You never said we’d see animals so close up”, they said, “…or that we’d be sleeping with them out in the middle of nowhere.” This was camping at some remove from the field at home where our wildest encounter was the bark of a fox, or the odd barn-owl. But it was what we were after – a real sense of the African bush, the kind of experience that safari lodges, with their growing list of amenities, balloon rides and buffet dinners, somehow fail to deliver. This trip had to be the real McCoy. The children’s grandparents were with us and it was the first time they had been back to Africa for forty years. My mother-in-law, born and bred in Zimbabwe, had last seen Kenya when she was at school in South Africa over half a century ago. We didn’t want canned musak and satellite CNN to be part of the welcoming committee. But we needn’t have worried. As we sat around our camp-fire that first night, toasting our arrival, the full moon sliding into an inky sky, fire-flies drifting along the river bank, listening to the call of night-jars, one could almost dream nothing had changed.

Our hosts, Charlie McConnell, one of the founders of Tana Delta Camp and his wife Mouse, were natural inheritors of the Out of Africa gene - the kind of glamorous Kenyan adventure-types who can fry a full English on a Landrover engine, and ride their horses through the cocktail bar of the Muthaiga Club when they’ve had one too many. Their three children, Milla, Milo and Fia, on half-term from a grey and uninspiring English winter, were clearly relieved to be back in the bush and regaled us with a lifetime of close calls with wild animals. Somewhere in the darkness a lion gave out a lazy, mournful growl. Ned, our nine-year-old son, was in his father’s lap before you could say David Livingstone, plea-bargaining a boys-only tent. I surrendered all hope of seeing anyone but our daughter in my camp bed again.

By the time we reached the Masai Mara the sleeping arrangements were a fixture but the children had grown so used to things that go bump in the African night, they were falling asleep contentedly to the whoop of hyenas and snorting hippos. When the cook dispatched a seven foot long black mamba he’d found coiled up under his bed, the children were thrilled. I was the only one turning a whiter shade of pale.

Gradually, though, the bewildering sense of exposure that comes from finding oneself without four strong walls, a dozen safety locks and a hotline to emergency services, gave way to a relaxing absorption in the wide world beyond the tent flaps. The scary and downright dangerous took on a reasonable sense of perspective. On camel safari in Sabuk, we graduated from canvas to tents made of fly-netting. At night, we gazed up from our sleeping bags at the stars and the bizarre silhouettes of browsing camels. One of our guides, a divinely beautiful Samburu warrior aptly named Gabriel, told us Just-So stories around the camp-fire – what made the African animals wild, why they shunned the company of humans, how the hyena was tricked into thinking the moon was a delicious piece of honeycomb, what made the fish-eagle so clever.

The African bush began to work its magic. Soon no-one needed an escort to the short-drop any more, or tooth-combed the bedding for creepy-crawlies. The children, it seemed, were going troppo by the minute. When a leopard took a baboon from the trees above our cook tent on one of our last nights in the Mara, raising an almighty cacophony of yelps and screams, they simply turned over and went back to sleep as if it was the most natural occurrence in the world.

With a tented safari apprenticeship under our belts, we were all the better prepared for the wonders and eccentricities of Tana Delta. I even begin to overcome my innate leonophobia and put aside my Doom for the mosquitoes. On our last morning we took a boat-ride up river. Beads of saline dripped down on us from the mangrove leaves as herons, kingfishers, eagles and egrets flapped away from their fishing-posts. Fiddler crabs and flocks of plovers, sandpipers and sanderlings scurried across the mud flats. As the banks broadened crocodiles slid into the water, one after the other, like bolts down a gun-barrel. Ahead of us, laid up in a deep channel like a floating barrage, a colony of 200 hippos lolled and puffed, their sentinels sending warning snorts across our bows.

On our way back to camp we stopped for a mud bath barely a quarter of a mile from where we’d seen our last crocodile. Rob stripped off and dived headfirst into the soft, black silt, followed swiftly by Granny, my husband and the children. “Never seen a croc up here”, Rob called out to me, reassuringly, “they don’t seem to like it for some reason”. Two weeks ago nothing would have persuaded me to put a toe outside that boat but now, with only mild concern for my extremities, I plunged in after my born-again African family merrily playing croc-slide into the river.


TRAVEL FACTS

British Airways flies direct to Nairobi daily.

Best times of year are December-March, and July and August

Best guide book: Helm Field Guides ‘Birds of East Africa’ by Terry Stevenson & John Fanshawe (pub Christopher Helm, London 2004).

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