Romance astride the Equator

There are many things you can do here,” our guide says after performing an experiment to prove that we were standing right in the middle of the Equator.

“You can spend time with Nat King Cole, for instance.” I think he means listening to some of his famous songs, like When I fall in Love and Unforgettable, considering Nat King Cole hasn’t been composing any songs for 45 years.

The jazzist died in 1965 aged 45. Lung cancer did him in from endless puffing of Kool Menthol cigarettes — “to improve his voice,” would you believe it? It turns out the Nat King Cole the guide is talking about can’t sing and has never sung or smoked Kool or any other brand.

It costs Sh1,900 to ride Nat King Cole the horse for an hour at Fairmont Mt Kenya Safari Club.
Many things cross the mind as I sample the delights of this paradise on earth.

Like how this exclusive property, nestled at the ankles of Mt Kenya, was erected on the brick and mortar of love.

The hotel now belongs to Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal’s Fairmont Group that includes The Norfolk Hotel.

Prince Al Waleed is the 19th richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine.

But Fairmont Mt Kenya Safari Club, 190 kilometres or a 30-minute scheduled flight north of Nairobi, was initially a gift from Rhoda Lewinson to Gabriel Prudhomme.
Rhoda met the French bachelor while on a safari across 1930s Kenya. The born adventurer left her two grown-up daughters, an upscale social standing and her millionaire financier husband in New York and renounced her American citizenship.

Rhoda married Gabriel, a big game hunter a bundle of years her junior, in France before settling in Njoro, Kenya.

The cheek-by-jowl lovers then moved to Nanyuki, a town founded by British settlers, in 1907.

Nanyuki has been a port of call for tourists and adventure seekers on their way to climbing Mt Kenya via the Sirimon and Burguret routes.
It was here that Rhoda acquired land from a rich San Fransico window Myra Wheeler to build the house she named “Mawingo,” (wrong Kiswahili for clouds.)

She wanted one large building and have “everyone under one roof because it got muddy during the rains.”
On this day, there is a huge ball of clouds when I look up to the sky from the Tusk Terrace, a chilled Torres wine an elbow away.

The Tusk Terrace is situated outside Rhoda and Gabriel’s home, which today forms part of the deluxe

“Signature Suites” (at between over Sh50,000 to Sh200,000 full board depending on the season) at this resort where there is no smoking in the rooms.

But, by 1939, when Mahatma Gandhi wrote Nazi strongman Adolf Hitler addressing him as “My Friend” and beseeching him not to plunge the world into a war, Rhoda and Gabriel were quarrelling. There was no mirth. They were no longer friends.

Their love, like the snow on Mt Kenya, was frosty. They divorced.
Gabriel retained Mawingo, but he died without making a will. Under such circumstances, the house, which he would have liked to go to Rhoda, went to his family.

But France was occupied by Germany during the war and Gabriel’s family was forced to live in the unheated attic where they died of pneumonia.
While in her 80s in the 60s, Rhoda told friends who visited her California home about her stay in Kenya.

“Those were the best years of my life. There are no regrets,” she recalled. In 1959, Hollywood actor William Holden went for a drink after a hunting safari with his friends Ray Ryan and Carl Hirshman, and was enchanted by the lodge.

He enquired on who the owner was and phoned Abraham Block, who had bought Mawingo from Gabriel’s heirs in 1948.
Block was asleep. “Tell your father that the drunks at Mawingo want to buy the place... and name a figure,”

Holden told the voice on the other end. “We need an answer before midnight, and if we don’t hear by then, we’ll be sober and the deal’s off.”

Block sold it
Holden — the best man at the wedding of American president Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis in 1952 — turned it into the exclusive Mt Kenya Safari Club comprising cottages with sunken baths, a nine-hole golf course, tennis court, swimming pool, sauna and a 1,000-acre game reserve with over 800 wild animals.
Holden bled to death in 1981 after slipping off a throw rug and hurting his head on a table in his Santa Monica apartment, California.

His lover, actress Stephanie Powers, set up the William Holden Wildlife Foundation at Mt Kenya Safari Clubs’ game reserve.

Actually, Room 12 is the William Holden Cottage from where he monitored beer stock of what is now ZeBar… using a telescope.
You can be picked by the hotel’s club car from any of the 120 cottages, which have a Hospitality Bar (a bottle of wine from Sh2,000), to have a cold one at the ZeBar while bisecting the equator.

The bar, initially Rhoda’s downstairs dining room, was then called Zebra, and still sports wall and seat cushions with zebra motifs to keep Holden’s spirit alive, 7,000 feet above sea level.

The club celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. And in the roll call of those who paid it a courtesy call here reads like something like this: President Omar Bongo, Daniel arap Moi, Prince Berhard of the Netherlands, US president Lyndon Johnson, Conrad Hilton, Mrs Anwar Sadat… and yours truly.

There have been other lesser showcases of “living monuments” like the Gertrude Garden Children’s Hospital in Muthaiga, Nairobi.
It was colonel Ewart Grogan’s memorial to his beloved wife, Gertrude.