21th Mai Collegues in the wild

At my work place at the World Agroforestry Centre it is tradition to go on a retreat with you work group once a year. To do something on team building and to address some work related issues or something like that I was informed. All 25 persons of my group, gardeners, Msc students and senior scientist included went to the Masai lodge (this is spelled correctly). On the picture you see a PhD student Stepha and our group leader Ramni. The lodge is situated at the other side of Nairobi national park, seen form Nairobi centre. After been abandoned for 30 years it was reopened in 2005, and minor renovations are ongoing. The camp consists of a few dozen huts with en suite rooms with different configurations of beds. The main building is an open construction with fire places on the top of a riverbank on which is the Park boundary, with steps and terraces with bars and a swimming pool, brrrrr. We arrived for lunch, where after there were some games where group cooperation and coordination were crucial as well as a good sense of humour, giving a lot of comical situations. Just before it became to dark we went on a stroll where we visited a hanging bridge leading to Kitangale(?) glass recycling, which unfortunately was already closed. We were lucky that we the rain hanging over all day fell now we were caring umbrellas. At the lodge we grouped around the fire and were served tea and wine until diner was served. The food was relative simple but very good with pancakes flambé as desert and accompanied with singing and dancing maasai.
The next morning we were expected at breakfast at 06 o’clock to reach the main gate of the Nairobi National park at 07 to buy tickets for 25 persons, which took an half hour with help of some telephone calls. Then the bus was scrambling off to find some lions, which we unfortunately did not see, but a lot of other animals. We saw many beautifull birds of many different sizes. The one on the picture is almost 1,5 m high. There were also a lot of ostriches, and that we saw only one lady among them caused some consern in the bus. The park roads have signs at most crosses which are numbered, and where animals can be found are indicated as in the vicinity of such a number. At a picknick place we had a sandwich and after group meeting we headed back to the park were Merijn and I needed to get home to repack, luckily the traffic was normal.