Beware of Wild Animals

The final day of our meeting today and I wandered down to the Lake for a last quiet cup of coffee before I had to organise getting everyone back to Nairobi for a day's training on digital technology, which feels far removed from our low tech 'retreat'. It's been so peaceful here and I hope a great rest as well as stimulating work meeting for my colleagues about to return to various war zones around the world.

The tree was full of monkeys again, shaking alarmingly as they chased each other from branch to branch. I had a strange encounter with a monkey who seemed to think I'd put my coffee cup down for her, and we ended up in a kind of 'after you', 'no after you' tooing and froing around the cup, before she wandered off to a bench post and sulked a little as I asserted control over my coffee.

Johnson the Masai nature warden has taught me how to identify various birds including the very visible and large Fish Eagles, the sweet little Speckled Mousebird, Superb Starlings with their vivid blue and red colouring, and the lovelyPied Kingfishers and stunning Malachite Kingfisher.... oh my goodness... I think I'm becoming a twitcher!

The dangerous wild animals were, of course, the hippos and I did see plenty of them, rather intimidatingly close to the house, but far too dark to capture on my little Ixus..

Back to England tonight on a packed night flight, let's hope it's sunny when I get back (ha ha)