Wild outpost ... giraffes at dusk on the Kenyan savannah.Credit: iStock
At a cool colonial club in east Africa, Craig Tansley hears echoes of elephants and Hollywood excess.
Though some of the deadliest animals on Earth live on Kenya's savannah, there was a time when people visiting the country were just as dangerous and even more unpredictable. The most volatile visitors to ever set foot in Africa would gather at the bar of what was once the world's most exclusive club - not your regular holidaymakers but some of Hollywood's biggest names of all time.
At the Mount Kenya Safari Club you might have witnessed a brawl started by a drunken Ernest Hemingway, high as a kite after a bloody hunt; or by the boozy Brat-Packers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra; or the crazed Lord Delamere, whose notoriety spread across the globe when he rode his horse through Nairobi's finest restaurant in a drunken rage.
Wild outpost ... giraffes at dusk on the Kenyan savannah.Credit: iStock
The club's one-time owner, the actor William Holden, liked to wear a six-shooter on his hip when he drank here, in case the animals charged him on his way down from his cottage. His favourite trick was to wait until the bar was packed with guests, then he'd grab a star by the shirt collar - Steve McQueen or Clark Gable, perhaps - and slide them over the bar, smashing glasses in the process and jumping on them in a mock wrestle.
Stories would filter back to Hollywood from shocked guests - those privileged enough to receive a personally written invitation from Holden. A notorious prankster, he also loved to fill the bar's peanut tins with snakes. Real ones.
Serious risk-takers might have entered a high-stakes poker game on the perfectly manicured lawns with Aristotle Onassis, a regular visitor, or members of the Saudi royal family. When Holden's business partner was killed in a bomb attack in the late 1970s (not on the property), the most infamous arms dealer in the world, Adnan Khashoggi, bought the Mount Kenya Safari Club. He liked to turn up unannounced by helicopter on the lawn in front of surprised guests, emerging in safari gear with six leggy blondes required to walk in a straight line behind him.
While the club was once a hedonistic hot spot for Hollywood bad boys, it never compromised its old-world civility. Now run by Fairmont Hotels, the Mount Kenya Safari Club is still regarded as one of the finest hotels in the world, though it no longer requires a personal invitation to stay. In the heat of the day guests can sunbake and swim in the pool, yet it gets so cold at night that fires need to be lit in guest rooms and hot-water bottles are deposited discreetly between the sheets of your four-poster bed.
For a taste of a bygone golden era of Hollywood and Kenya's halcyon days, when reckless heirs of billionaires ran riot, there's nothing quite like the club. Pictures of visiting stars take pride of place in the club's Trophy Lounge; Marlon Brando, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner stayed here and the area became the most popular film location in Africa. Sir Winston Churchill loved to smoke his cigar while taking afternoon tea in the lavish dining room. More recently, Michael Caine insisted fresh water be carried to his bath every evening to enjoy a "clean scrub". The club's regal ambience - open fireplaces, expensive rugs, weathered Chesterfield sofas, antique Arab chests and game trophies - is an elegant counterpoint to the most popular accommodation in Kenya - the safari tent.
The writer Robert Ruark described staying here in melancholic prose: "From the broad window, a rolling green lawn sweeps sharply downward … to a forest … at the top of the forest stands Mount Kenya, almost close enough to touch. In the later afternoons, just at fire-lighting time, the mists sweep away and the old snow-capped mountains fill your living room. It is impossible to watch without weeping a little."
The club is a short light-plane ride and a bumpy 20-minute four-wheel-drive trip north-east of the capital, Nairobi. On the drive here - a bouncy affair over dirt tracks and potted bitumen roads that provide an "African massage" - we pass a village where old men use donkeys to transport goods to market. "They have seen the most famous stars of all time drive through this village," the driver says. "But they had no idea who these funny white people were."
I arrive in the early evening, through 17th-century wrought-iron gates and past an animal orphanage just as Mount Kenya, at 5199 metres, emerges from a layer of cumulus clouds. It's chilly here at 2300 metres, welcome relief from the humidity of Kenya's equatorial coastline and the dry heat of the savannah. I'm directed to a guest room in what was once dubbed Millionaire's Row. Ruark wrote that the suites here were "designed for people in love".
After a long bath, a nine-course a la carte dinner is served in the Mawingo Dining Room (sports gear for men and miniskirts for women are forbidden but the rules on mandatory jackets have been relaxed). After dinner I retire to a Chesterfield by the fireplace in the opulent Zebar, where the heads of animals killed on long-ago hunts look upon me as I sip a snifter of cognac.
In the morning, golf on a course designed on the advice of the great golfer Jack Nicklaus comes highly recommended, with the potential to spy zebras and elephants while putting. Lawn bowls is another civilised option - it became Holden's obsession later in life to build a full-size bowling green - and no visit to the club is complete without an afternoon of croquet on the lawn.
The Mount Kenya Safari Club is the cool retreat (literally) after a week of animal spotting on the savannah (even the most avid animal enthusiasts can suffer from safari fatigue). For an insight into wild Africa with none of the crowds of the Masai Mara, the Ol Pejeta conservancy reserve is a 30-minute drive from the club. It's a 37,000-hectare rhino sanctuary with the highest wildlife-to-area ratio of any national park in Kenya and is home to Africa's big five (elephants, rhinos, lions, buffalo and leopards).
We spend two days on safari here. At night a female leopard and her two cubs creep along the road in front of our four-wheel drive and we sit metres from a pack of lions on the hunt. This reserve, at the forefront of the Kenyan conservancy movement, has the largest population of black rhinos in east Africa. Here you can see three types of rhino: the black rhino, the southern white rhino and the northern white rhino (five of the last remaining eight northern white rhino in the world live here). Also within the reserve is the only chimpanzee sanctuary in Kenya, established by famed naturalist Jane Goodall. There are also full-day fishing safaris along the Honi River, catching trout downstream from the Chania, Karuru and Gura falls.
Still, it's easy to remain for days at the club, channelling the movie stars and world leaders who came here to unwind. When Holden bought the club in 1959 it made the front pages of newspapers around the world; readers were fascinated by "the African Shangri La" as Holden called it: a celebrity hide-out among wild animals beneath a snow-capped equatorial mountain. While the snowfalls on Mount Kenya are receding and celebrity sightings aren't so common, the Mount Kenya Safari Club still has blue blood in its veins.
Craig Tansley travelled courtesy of the Kenya Tourist Board.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Kenya Airways flies to Nairobi for about $2325 low season return from Melbourne and Sydney, including tax. You fly Thai Airways to Bangkok (9hr), then Kenya Airways to Nairobi (9hr 30min). Australians require a visa for a stay of up to 90 days, obtained on arrival for $US50. Safarilink flies from Nairobi and Nanyuki from $US200 return, or take a four-hour drive to the club. Many tour operators include the drive to the Mount Kenya Safari Club as part of a package, see www.magicalkenya.com for a list of operators.
Staying there
The Mount Kenya Safari Club has 120 guest rooms from $US329 a night, including breakfast. Accommodation ranges from rooms in the manor to one- and two-bedroom suites and cottages - all have fireplaces. See www.fairmont.com/kenyasafariclub. For more information about Kenya, see www.magicalkenya.com.
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