Keeping going through the hard times... And trying to keep sustainability at the front of our minds.

Nairobi is in another lockdown and so we have closed the camp again - almost exactly a year on from the first time. Cases are still fairly small and we are feeling blessed that Kenya is not facing the awful struggles as India does right now. Saying that though, we have had no guests in a number of weeks now with both local people stuck inside Nairobi and not able to travel nor international guests venturing here yet (even if they could - in the UK and other European countries it is illegal to go on holiday at the moment).

While the camp is closed, we are not laying idle. The rains are beginning again, which is great as they are almost a month late now and had been causing much anguish, so we have been replanting a number of flowerbeds that had been eaten by dik-diks (who have been walking around the camp freely with no guests around to frighten them off!). We are removing the beds completely and replanting the whole around with grass - a move to rewild the small areas that we had tried to cultivate. Let’s be honest, when you are in the middle of the bush, it’s so much nicer to be surrounded by wild flowers and long waving grass than a green lawn and imported flowers.

I have been meeting with our mentor group from The Conscious Travel Foundation (TCTF) for some hard truths and desperate stories. While the last lockdown was long, this one feels much more difficult as it really was unexpected. For the first time, we have had to put our staff on unpaid leave as we can’t afford to pay them right now. It seems like everyone is in the same boat, across the world, in the tourism industry and the conversations that came from the mentor group made me feel hopeless and hopeful all at once. We were asked by our mentor, Suzanne, to give a parting word of what we can do to keep working towards a sustainable future for travel and mine was ‘keep learning, celebrate the small wins, and don’t give up’.

By keeping learning, I meant to keep seeing what others in the industry are doing, keep asking questions, keep thinking of new ways in the future to innovate. I found a new blog that I like called ‘Live Well, Travel Far’ and it is full of interesting ideas for sustainable travel. Other webinars and presentations allow leaders to get together to learn from each other online. And TCTF also means chatting and hearing how you aren’t alone in this situation, however much you wish that wasn’t the case.

Celebrating the small wins means sharing my excitement that I recently found a locally owned recycling plant in our nearest town, Nanyuki. It means that when we do have guests again, our rubbish can be recycled rather than burnt - a huge win for our sustainability promises. We have also made a new compost heap for all the veggie waste that comes from cooking for guests - before we used to just throw it away and now it will go towards something really useful. We also got 6 chickens that are producing eggs that can be served at the camp for breakfast, and best of all, we made a vegetable patch which has been planted with seeds that we find it hard to buy locally like berries, aubergines, broccoli and cauliflower. We actively chose not to plant things that can be bought in our nearby village like carrots, tomatoes and greens because supporting our local farmers is really important to sustaining and growing the local economy. See some photos of this below…

Finally, I said we won’t give up. If we think that 18 months of Covid-19 is hard, wait until we try to run a tourism business when the world has heated by 2 degrees, or when the rains are so skewed we can’t predict them, or food is too expensive to make the camp affordable, or any other predictions that scientists are making for the future of our planet if we don’t work to halt climate change. We declared a climate emergency because we care about our planet, and even people out there are sidelining our planet in the pursuit of profit in order to recover losses from this time, then it is up to us to stand firm, shout loud and promote our businesses as THE option to go for because we care for longer than just this year - we care about the future.