Serene highland retreat

The stars pop out and the night chill sets in. In the beam of the flashlights on a cool Njoro night, Andrew Nightingale leads us down the path to where the chameleons are in slumber – and suddenly chameleons begin to pop out of the hedges.

“Chameleons are just very cool creatures,” states Nightingale. I had this walk with him a decade ago and it’s a reason to return to Kembu – for a night of things nocturnal. Granted that chameleons aren’t nocturnal, but these amazing creatures are charming.

Nightingale keeps spotting the cold-blooded reptiles but when I tried alone, I didn’t see even one!  “They are weird but so specialised,” Nightingale continues. “They are tree-climbing reptiles, they have a tongue which they spit out to capture prey; eyes that

roll independent of each other like CCTV cameras to scan its environment, all the way around, all the time.”

The chameleons in question are Von Hoehnel’s chameleons. They are named after Ludwig von Hoehnel, the first European to see Lake Turkana in 1888 together with Count Teleki. They named the lake Rudolf after an Austrian prince. A few years later, in

1904, they were followed by the pioneering Lord Delamere who jumped off the train a few metres from where we stand and walked down the hill to where his manager had built him mud huts to live in on his newly acquired Equator Ranch.

“We’re on the southeast corner of the original Equator Ranch,” continues Nightingale.

At the time that Delamere got off at Njoro, Kenya’s population was barely a million and from a picture of Njoro taken in 1907 in a book titled British East Africa, Its History, Peoples, Culture and Commerce by Somerset Payne, it was all flat grassland and the oldest location recorded of a Kenyan endemic bird: the Sharpe’s longclaw.

SHEEP BARON DREAMS

Delamere’s dream was to become a sheep baron and the grass-filled land seemed to be great for that. But unbeknown to the men, the soils lacked cobalt, a trace mineral, so the sheep didn’t survive.

The enterprising baron than went on to plan B. He began to import different varieties of wheat and crossbred them to be rust and fungus resistant. The legacy of that is that Njoro is still the plant-breeding capital of Kenya.

Continuing along the farm paths, a barn owl watches us from his perch under the barn roof. “They began nesting in the haystacks on the farm a few years ago and when the babies began popping out of the stacks, I knew we had a problem. So I fitted an old door with a nest and moved them all there,” shares Nightingale. Since then they stopped nesting in the haystacks, preferring the new arrangements.

It’s time for us to call it a night in our charming cottage called Acacia. A beautiful glow in the verandah opens to the glass conservatory and the bedroom filled with a few antiques from the grandparents’ times restored by the dynamic duo – Zoe and Andrew. It’s a warm place and in the sun-drenched conservatory, the aroma of hot coffee awakens us to breakfast served in our private abode.

“Zoe and I have travelled a lot. So we created a place where we would want to holiday in a home away from home,” Andrew Nightingale explains.

They started with building and renovating old buildings on the farm – Beryl’s Cottage that was built in 1914, Albizia Cottage in 1929 and Acacia Cottage and the main house in 1939/1940.

Out on a morning stroll, the crystal clear air is as heady as champagne, I’m hoping to catch sight of the mole snake that can grow up to six feet long which the Nightingales use instead of pesticides to keep the moles from digging up their lawns. But these non-venomous, rosy-pink sub-terranean snakes only surface when they are looking for new territory.

It’s magical country. The highlands boasts a 360-degree panorama that takes in the Mau, and the mountains of Kiplombe, Tugen as far as Kapedo and the Aberdares. And if we were living here a century ago, we’d have had as a neighbour the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west – Beryl Markham.

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