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. 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 — and healthy populations of lion, elephant and buffalo. On the other, a fringe of rolling sand dunes and the open Indian Ocean. The nearest town — if you can call it that — is Kipini, 18 miles up the beach. Malindi is 56 miles and a river crossing down the beach in the other direction. There is nothing apart from the odd fishing shack in-between.
The logistics are astounding. 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 the owners dug below sea level and struck the rainwater aquifer. It takes three miles 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 lavatory 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 breadboard 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 blowhole stabs your bottom.
For the children this is a Robinson Crusoe paradise, 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 fazed.
Our room, with its lovely palm- thatch roof spiralling in the shape of a seashell, has an open-air view of more than 270 degrees. You look out from your bed, or the shower, or the lavatory, onto the whole of Africa. At night, bats, bushbabies 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, the camp’s manager, 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 in the thickets, so close, Rob says, their growls send vibrations through your stomach.
After supper — a feast of king prawns, sea bass, more mango — we’re escorted the 140 or so steps up the dune to our rooms by an armed night watchman. When we say 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, as she falls into enviable unconsciousness, I lie rigid and wakeful, one hand on a can of Doom mosquito repellent that I dimwittedly plan to spray into the predator’s eyes. I never thought I’d look back on our past 10 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, 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.
It was. As we sat around our campfire that first night, toasting our arrival, the full moon sliding into an inky sky, fireflies drifting along the riverbank, listening to the call of nightjars, one could almost dream that nothing had changed in the past 40 years. 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 Land Rover 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 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 to the whoop of hyenas and snorting hippos. When the cook dispatched a 7ft-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.
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()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 campfire — 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, nobody needed an escort to the short-drop any more, or 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.
With a tented safari apprenticeship under our belts, we were all the better prepared for Tana Delta. I even began to overcome my innate leoniphobia and put aside my Doom for the mosquitoes. On our final morning, we took a boat up river, stopping on the way back for a mud bath barely quarter of a mile from where we’d seen our last crocodile. Rob stripped off and dived in headfirst, followed swiftly by my husband and the children. “Never seen a croc up here,” Rob called out to me reassuringly, “they don’t seem to like it.” Two weeks earlier, 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.
Isabella Tree travelled as a guest of Cazenove & Loyd
Travel details: Cazenove & Loyd (020 7384 2332, www.cazloyd.com) has a 10-night safari from £3,500pp, with stays at the Tana Delta Camp and a tented camp in the Masai Mara, including flights from Heathrow to Nairobi, all meals, game viewing, and transfers. Or try Tim Best Travel (020 7591 0300, www.timbesttravel.net), or Okavango Tours & Safaris (020 8343 3283, www.okavango.com).
