At Sopa lodge at Lake Naivasha, about a hundred kilometres north-west of Nairobi, you can ask a guard to accompany you down to the edge of the lake (the guard is needed to keep you away from buffalo and hippos, rather than vice-versa: buffalo and hippos can pretty much go where they want) and you can watch flocks of pelicans heading home, or somewhere, at sunset. Hippos semi-submerged in the shallows seem to share a joke now and then, making a deep "nyah nyah nyah" trumpet-like noise which they apparently produce through their nostrils. Animals of all sorts wander around the unfenced lodge, including monkeys, giraffes, various types of antelope, and - at night - hippos as well, who come out of the water to graze in the dark.
The guards - who accompany you to and from your room - are equipped to protect you with: a short stick - this is Kenya, after all, so there's none of the nonsense you get in the Kruger with large-bore rifles at the ready. I asked one of the guards about how effective a short stick would be against a charging hippo. "If you start running," I said, "Should I follow you?" "No," he said, "I'll be trying to distract the animal. You run in the opposite direction." Then he laughed. I still don't know if he meant it.
Above: the lake; yellow fever trees - a type of acacia (the bark really is yellow and somewhat furry - if you rub it the fur comes off and it's a beautiful lime green underneath; years ago people thought it caused yellow fever, but this is only because it tends to grow in swampy areas where mosquitoes breed; but the name stuck. Give a tree a bad name...); giraffes on the path; Colobus monkeys - which hang around outside windows, hoping for free food; pelicans on the lake.
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