Nella's Notes

Kenya, The Tuscany of Africa

It’s the light. Tuscany and Kenya are siblings of light.

In Tuscany, soft hues of yellow, gold and brown infuse the fields of wheat and the narrow streets of hill towns with a sense of ancient peace. In Kenya, this same palette of colour imbues the drama of nature that enfolds on the great savannahs.

Having lived in Northern California, the Italian Dolomite Mountains and Tuscany, I have found nothing as soothing and as energising as the light in Kenya. Writers, painters and photographers have been trying to capture and reproduce the subtlety of colours in Kenya for centuries, some with beautiful results. However, I’ve come to believe that to truly understand the unique combination of nature and light here, you must see it for yourself.

Imagine an early morning game drive. You look out across the dry plains to see a glimmer of gold shining from the ground. You’ve trained the eye to see nuances now and so you know that the small change in the particular saturation of gold is a lioness, resting after her night of hunting. Imagine scanning the countryside through the bronze haze of sunset and identifying the large grey shape near the trees as a lone bull elephant making his way to the watering hole.

Anyone who has been here knows that the Light in Kenya is as much a protagonist as the animals themselves.

I discovered this when my dream of seeing Africa came true. A ten-day horse safari in Northern Kenya turned, four months later, into a new  life.

Galloping across the plains with zebra and giraffe, trotting away from an over-protective matriarchal elephant and keeping my sore legs tightly in the stirrups in case of a surprise appearance by a buffalo made me feel as good as I ever had. But it was the combination of that sensation with the glow of dawn and the haze of sunset that I remembered most. Once back in Tuscany, my mind didn’t reminisce about ‘that gallop with the eland’, it remembered ‘that light in the sky as I galloped with the eland’.

Thus, I left a life of teaching Italian literature, making my own olive oil and helping travellers enjoy the best of Italy to live in Kenya.

Each evening, as the sun goes down, I walk amidst zebra, wildebeest, waterbuck, impala, gazelle and giraffe – oh to walk under the graceful gaze of a giraffe.  I feel privileged and humbled to be part of this world. Few  places on our planet are not dominated by man. The fact that each night I must beware not to surprise the family of four hippos who come out of the lake to graze in my front garden, makes me feel that nature is as it is meant to be here and that I belong to it in just the right way.

In Florence, I often sipped campari as I sat on a roof terrace and watched the sun set slowly behind the Ponte Vecchio. In Kenya, I now sit on the roof of a land-rover, sipping wine and watching the equatorial sun descend much more quickly. The zebra gather together, the giraffe lie down and the hippo make their way out of the water to graze. It is all still happening in the darkness and I can’t wait for the light to return so I can belong to it all again tomorrow.