Speke Bay Lodge
A short, roughly 80km journey, back south past the Serengeti Gate at Ndabaka takes us to our next stopping point. Speke Bay Lodge is truly wonderful. It’s managed by Europeans and, as such, has that attention to detail that some places simply lack.
All the solved problems of hotel rooms have no need of mention here, except to say that they have all been applied as necessary. Each circular cottage is self-contained with a thatched roof, very nice bathroom and then a main room with beds, chairs, desk and table. The veranda outside is shaded and comfortable with breathtaking views of the lake just a few metres away. There’s even an extra bed up above the bathroom, allowing three to share at a push.
The beer is cold and the restaurant offers excellent food for all three meals of the day. The lodge sits in several hectares of wooded grassland and there are literally dozens of bird species to see. Indeed, many are easily spotted just sitting on the veranda.
Our journey down to the lodge sees us pass through an extremely heavy thunderstorm and this will sadly curtail any efforts to explore inside the conservation areas this time. We were stopped by muddy tracks a week earlier and they will only be worse now. This leaves us to explore the grounds as we please.
Emmy heads off for the first evening, needing to find a suitable local mechanic to fix a few minor issues with his car. At least they have some tonic to go with the Konyagi (That’s the local alternative to gin or vodka and our preferred spirit). When he returns, the following morning, he has no need to join me for our planned room-share, as there is a spare cottage that he can use.
I find the heat down by the lake to be a bit too much for me this time around. It seems to be making my ankles swell alarmingly, probably in combination with my hypertension medications and anti-malaria drugs. It’s not particularly hot, probably just low- to mid-thirties, but warm enough in the sun to feel draining. It means that I’m struggling a little with determined walking in the rough ground of the lodge. I try my best to go out with the others and we do see a good number of birds, but I can only manage an hour or so before I have to make my own way slowly back to my room. This isn’t helped by the fact that my sciatica is making me continually leaden-legged and uncomfortable. Throw in a few more insect bites and you generate a near-perfect storm of minor issues that add up to an uncomfortable and draining couple of days.
Still, it gives me time to dig out the current manuscript and work on that for an hour or two each day. I’d promised myself that I’d try to write a few thousand words while away and, until this point, I simply didn’t find the time. Now I have caught up on this journal and have time to get back to the novel in progress.
I’m never going to pretend that I’m even a tenth of the adventurer or writer that Hemingway was, but sitting on the shores of the lake writing in a part of the world that he visited and enjoyed – and that nearly killed him – it’s an interesting train of thought. I can now see why some authors travel or even retreat when the want to write. There is something special about working in such an idyllic location that fires the imagination and gets the creative juices flowing. I could literally sit here in the shade; the breeze blowing across my veranda and write for ever.
So, however slight my similarities to Hemingway may be, the place is a inspirational enough to let me manage more than 10,000 words on the draft of my novel in just a couple of long sessions. Let’s just say that he loved Africa for very different reasons than I do and we choose to use different weapons in our hunting.