You drive and drive. Past hills that look like the back of the heads of people you know. Uphill on open empty roads almost meeting the wide blue skies.
You play Bruno Mars moaning about the treachery of a woman, ‘How could she do this to me?” Then you play Madilu System begging Nzele to tell him if they are still in love. Oh, love is bitter and sweet.
After two hours and change you swing off the tarmac, down a thirsty red dusty road, brush past thorny shrubs and you arrive in Oldonyo Orok in Kajiado.
It’s a quaint and charming tented camp teeming with giraffes and antelopes and dik-diks. Birdsongs interrupt the quiet, perhaps moaning about their own lost loves.
The rooms could use maintenance; a torn sheet net here, a loo running out of water there. Your woman, whose showering time is longer than the gestation period of an Opossum, complains about the pressure of the shower. But that is quickly forgotten because the staff is lovely and the food is amazing.
If you are lucky and don’t run into the Nairobi yuppies in swish vehicles you will enjoy a quiet and peaceful time.
After dinner, when the cold has set and the sky is dark as the woman Bruno Mars moaned about in “Smoking Out the Window” guests will gather around a roaring fire by an antique orange VW combi that opens up as a bar lit with neon lights.
The middle class takes ages to thaw to each other, annoyingly sizing each other up like packs of hounds, which means couples can sit around an intimate fire and exchange not more than polite nods.
What’s the use of sitting around a fire if you can’t turn to the guy with the bushy eyebrows and ask, “How long have you grown that?”
But maybe it’s best that way because our voices only tend to pollute such magic moments under the night sky.
So it’s fine to just stare in the crackling fire and dream your little fantasies while holding your woman’s hand in one hand and your scotch in the other.
And it’s perfect. Well, near-perfect until she turns and asks, “Why do you listen to Rhumba when you don’t know what they are singing?”
