A farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills



Karen Blixen's home and museum

No visit to Karen could be complete without a visit to the home of Karen Blixen of "Out of Africa" fame, that used to be in the middle of the failed coffee plantation she started, and is now a well maintained national museum that attacts a constant stream of visitors. The museum guide took us around the rooms, furniture and artifacts that belonged to her (or was used in the Meryl Streep and Robert Redford film) and have now been collected together in the house.  It is not the house but her gardens and view outside that give a clue to why she fell in love with this part of Kenya and left her chilly and comparatively sterile homeland of Denmark.


Gardens around Karen Blixen's home

The beautiful manicured lawns, flower bushes and extraordinary trees with views of the Ngong hills as a background is also a home to numerous butterflies and birds.  In the garden there are a number of tall extraordinary trees that are half cactus and half tree; the trunk is like a tree but the branches and leaves are like a cactus.  Eunice, the lady that works in the garden there, said that it is not related to the cactus family but is a species in its own right, "candelabria euphorbia" as we found out.

Eunice and coffee extraction machine

Eunice was eager and happy to show us around the garden and enthusiastically plucked a green coffee bean from the plant and offered it to us to taste.  We were reluctant at first but she put a few in her mouth and said it was fine so we tentatively tried the little beans and sure enough the unmistakable taste was evident.  Proudly she even took us through the bushes to the back of the garden where she wanted to show us a forgotten part where we came across the rusting and dilapidated mechanical coffee-extraction apparatus that was used in Karen Blixen's days.

As evening fell we headed back to our guest house to find that a large group of youngsters, travelling overland across Africa, had arrived and were having a loud and boisterous party.  We left the youngsters to join the rowdy goings on while my wife and I decided to go for a walk along the quiet lanes of Karen instead, past beautiful houses and gardens hidden by tall hedges and patrolled by private security guards who inspected us carefully.  We did get the overwhelming impression that evening walks in the neighbourhood was not a familiar pastime in this part of the world but as we walked hand-in-hand in this lovely neighbourhood we realised why Your Love is King.