SAFARI PICNIC

There’s a history to the safari picnic. In 1913 Berkely Cole founded Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club so he might have a place where his drinks would be properly served. Like the later safaris, Kenya was now beginning to provide a pleasing blend of hardship and luxury, as the Muthaiga offered its croquet course, polo stables, Goanese chef and chauffeur’s. The Muthaiga’s sturdy rooms, ‘non so elaborate as to make a rough-handed hunter pause at its door, nor yet so dowdy as to make a diamond pendant swing ill at ease’, were the refuge after long hunts, lean crops, and strained meetings at the bank. As Beryl Markham remarked, ‘these were the rooms which the people who made the Africa I knew danced and talked and laughed, hour after hour’. Much of the social life also revolved around sport, not only hunting, but also polo and cricket. Golf was less popular, as the rough was thick with ticks, an occasional rhinoceros reduced concentration and one player was mauled by a lion on the fairway.

If you relate to the passages above then you too are one of them. And you too will picnic like they did.