Meet Laura Dyer, Kicheche has become her Hotel California … she ‘can try to check out any time she likes but she can never leave’. Laura extended her safari three times, finally returning home after five weeks. Thank you Laura, these are her heartfelt lyrics:
How do I quantify happiness, when it’s been so long since I had felt the sun on my back and the soil of Africa beneath my feet?
Is it the tally of cheetahs or the quality of the meals? Is it the vividness of the sunsets or the lament of the fish eagle? Could it be the rumble of a distant welcoming storm or the guttural rumble of a lion?
No – it’s finally being in a bubble of peace away from the world that rages. Playing lawn cricket with new friends before retiring for a drink under my (new) favourite tree-chattering starlings for company. It’s being in a camp where everyone has been tested for covid, suddenly hand washing and sanitising groceries doesn’t dominate every waking moment. A place where nature is omnipresent: it seduces and entices with its raw secrets
Conversations eddy, ideas are exchanged and debated and the sun baked me gently like bread in a charcoal Maasai oven. The worries that accompanied me here dissipate day by day, until my soul is stripped bare: basking in the glow of my own happiness.
Nature is a drug, I need her fix and she needs reciprocity. It’s no wonder it took me so long to leave and I’ve already booked my return. The people I met and the animals I encountered have drawn me back:again and again, to where I belong.
