Elsamere

Sunday August 28, 2005


Elsamere is the one-time home of wildlife conservationist Joy Adamson, who became well-known for her work returning captive lions to the wild. She is best known for her relationship with Elsa, a lioness that she raised from a young cub after her husband George was forced to shoot its mother in self-defense. The story of Elsa's return to the wilds of Kenya was chronicled in the film "Born Free" which I watched as a child.

Today, Adamson's house, a small rancher overlooking Lake Naivasha, is a centre for local conservationist and ecological programs, as well as being a museum and a sort of shrine to Joy's life. She was found murdered in the eighties. At first the media thought she'd been killed by a lion; later it was found that one of her employees killed her.

Apparently she was a complicated and not universally-liked person. But the film the staff at Elsamere showed us did not go into details, and besides I unfortunately slept through a good chunk of it. Put a jet-lagged bunch of people in a warm darkened room and just try to make them concentrate on an educational nature documentary.

I was much relieved when the film was over and they served us hot tea and coffee and let us graze from a table spread with scones and cakes and tasty little cookies. Why, oh why was the coffee not served before the film?

We took our tea out onto the lawn and sat back and relaxed for a little while.

Colourful little African birds joined our feast. The starlings, with their shimmering blue feathers danced around our feet and up onto the chairs. A little red bird decided it wanted to share my cake and hopped right on to my plate. A couple of hornbills disdained to beg for food but flapped around in the trees above us, one of them coming down to perch on a post near Sarah's head.

There were also a few colubus monkeys around, peering down at us curiously but keeping their distance at first. They are the most striking-looking monkey I've ever seen, glossy black with a white shawl and an enormous plume on the end of their tail.

One of the Elsamere employees put some fruit and potatoes in a basket on the ground and that brought one colobus down from its perch. The monkey stalked haughtily along a branch, dropped easily to a tree stump below, and peered searchingly at us before advancing on the food. Once he had the potato in hand though, he lost all pretense of dignity and scuttled up the tree again.

Some of our group elected to flake out in the warm evening sun on the patio furniture. Others investigated the small museum . Me, I went off on my own for a little walk to take some photographs. There was a lot of interesting vegetation on the grounds of Elsamere.

There were the prickly young of acacia trees with their impressively sturdy white spikes which protected them from the ravages of hungry giraffes. There were large aloe-like plants, possibly sisal. There were the tall, branching Euphorbium candelabrum which looked like cactuses grown as tall as trees and containing a sticky toxic sap which could blind you.

There were also beds of flowers which looked slightly familiar, but just more...African. For instance the geraniums (pelargoniums) were as big as a small shrub instead of the size of the potted ones on my front door-step back home.

As I walked tiny little birds fluttered up almost from under my feet. I wouldn't see them until I'd nearly stepped on them.

I walked all around the property. From one end, away from the main building, I could hear the sounds of loud African music and people laughing. Perhaps it was a party nearby.

When it was time to go back to our campsite we left by the road instead of by boat.

As a slightly morbid footnote to an otherwise idyllic place, there was a jeep parked near the front gates of the property and this was apparently the vehicle George Adamson, the husand of Joy, had died in when he was shot by poachers in 1989. It seems like the pair of them met with bad ends.