The Abedares

Lord Aberdare was, in the late 1800s, President of the Royal Geographic Society in England, and greatly concerned with filling in the "black spots" in maps of the continent. An explorer, Joseph Thompson, named a mountain range the Abedares, north of what is now Nairobi, just east of the Great Rift Valley and its Lake Naivasha, and just to the west of Mount Kenya, second highest peak on the continent.



From the verandas of The Ark, Mount Kenya quickly disappears in the mist and clouds shortly after sunrise. They say it creates its own weather, its temperature rising more quickly than the plains around it, sending updrafts of moisture-laden air to generate its crown.



My week away from Ghana was spent on golf, game drives in the Abedares, a round of golf, sharing restaurants with the visiting Senator Barack Obama, a bit of golf, and visits to markets. My dear friend Suzanne also took me out to play a bit of golf, most spectacularly at the (under repair) Abedares Country Club on the plains at the foot of Mount Kenya. Free drop for warthog piles, and you can use your club on the greens to scrape away the droppings of Thompson gazelles.