A Walk on the Wild Site

Kesho’s photo diaries:

Sometimes I can be a bit of a brown-nose

I started life up the coast north of Malindi, in a little paradise called Che Shale, who very kindly gave me away for free. This is a photo of me with my mum and my brothers and sisters. As you can see, we’re a porkitically correct family.

Me and my salamily

It took me a little while to settle in and had bad manners. To be honest, I think my owners were a bit ham-fisted as they didn’t really know what they were doing. The first night I jumped into the rubbish pit at the bottom of the garden and refused to come out. It took a while for them to summon up the courage to lift me out.

I love crackling

For a while I was free range:

Time for some swineing

Then my owners built me a very sty-lish house. Here’s a video of it going up:

Bacon Roll

Making a scale model of the site, I’m hoping, will be time well spent.

A model will be something we can all use, to help us communicate our ideas between ourselves and with anyone we work with who may not have visited the site.  We need an easy way to test where the buildings are located, and how they relate to one another, and in turn, how their positioning effects how the garden is planted.

Stage 1 -  Measuring the site

…. in plan

….in elevation

…..through the mangroves

Stage 2 – Drawing to scale

Stage 3 – Building the model

We scaled all the main characteristics of the site down to 1-200 scale and used scraps of materials we found to model the main features.  The contours of the site were cut from cardboard boxes; the mangrove trees were made from an old creeper that was held down to the equivalent of 14 metres in height by white cotton thread.  The cashew trees were cut out to the equivalent volume from polystyrene packaging, found sticks used for their trunks.

Stage 4 – Using the model

With the model complete, we have an accurate tool to test how the plot can be developed.  People with little or no experience of building design often relate most easily to a 3-dimensional model than other forms of representation.  It allows us to invite more people into the design process to hear their ideas and test our own.

(from left to right): Andrew McNaughton, Tom, Tara

We’re constantly rooting around looking for information on building and farming methods in our search to do things efficiently and not to re-invent the wheel. When we set up this blog, I made it a tiptheplanet.com blog. I wanted to show how the site is slowly becoming more and more useful and ties the practical, muck-between-the-toes, lifestyle out here, with something lasting. Tip the Planet seemed like a good way to do this. Not only can we write about our journey, for friends, family and interested folks. We can also record our learnings, research, failures in a central place so that people can benefit from our experiences. Plus others can comment on the work we’ve done and suggest improvements and changes – especially those with experience.

Here’s a case in point. We wanted to find out about keeping and rearing pigs in the tropics for bacon and fertilization reasons.

Instead of spending hours and hours researching, which is difficult with a slow internet connection, I requested an article on pigs and an additional about keeping pigs in the tropics on this page. Basically it’s a feature where you can ask for a page to be made by the Tip the Planet community and those with knowledge or time will contribute to the article. Then, a day or two later, I checked back onto the site to find that someone had built both pages and highlighted the tips.

These pages are here – keeping pigs and here – keeping pigs in the tropics.

Suddenly we had a wealth of information to use, all in one place. Not only that, but when we experiment ourselves, we can add new tips and thoughts to this, to improve the resource for anyone who wants to keep pigs in future to use.

…and just a few days ago, we went and collected Kesho (which means tomorrow in Swahili – as a result of our inevitable inability to kill him), a little character who is currently spending his hours breaking out of our poorly constructed pig pen, but will one day will be the father of many a young piglet that we’ll try not to get so attached to so that we have a ready supply of bacon. Photos and Kesho diaries to come.

By Timbo:

This Monday we had a taste of Kenyan professionalism.

A government surveyor and his two assistants came to make their official measurement of the plot to expedite the sale and ensure that what we’re buying is what we’re buying. Tom and I had done a rough measurement the week before, so when one of their measurements ended up 60m longer than our own (175m to 240m!), we decided it was time to challenge him. After all, we’d religiously paced the grounds on a hot day and felt it highly unlikely we’d gone that wrong. As such, we ended up us betting them a round of ‘sodas’ for the correct measurement.  The surveyor was hugely confident he was right, and laughed at us, pointing out his special equipment and his laptop as though by virtue of having them it justified his competence.

So, 10 minutes later, when faced with his own official telling him his measurement was wrong, rather than admit his mistake, he accused our tape measure of being wrong and then proceeded to measure our measuring tape with his measuring tape! He claimed that Chinese goods couldn’t be trusted. Then I spent about two of the most frustrating hours of my days meandering around the site listening to him ‘teach’ me about various aspects of surveying, life etc. Finally, having convinced him to re-do one of the calculations and measurements he admitted that he was, ‘a little more right this time’. And so, we have our ‘final’ measurement. A surprising 175m.

Finally he left in a huff after we refused to pay him extra to compensate the time he’d spent putting his mistake right – with NO SODAS. I mean…

For me, Tarara, this venture is inspired by three things:

1.  Reading a book series called ‘Anastasia’ which, fairy-tale style concludes that the key to all our global problems is to plant and live in our own food gardens.  I lent this book to my father who said it was the most silly book he had ever read, and I know what he means, but it left me with dreams of jasmine scented orchards encroaching on the Sahara and naked people with long hair riding camels.

2.  Feeling that every time I eat, travel, pee, party, I am somehow damaging the earth.  Especially when in London, I would leave a trail of plastic and paper behind me and be elevated and escalated and fed food from far off places.  It would be nice, I think, in a most fundamental way, if I didn’t feel that by living I was causing damage and perhaps I could even tip over into the zone of POSITIVEimpact (so fonted to hark the words as a term to be widely used).

3.  Having set up Wildfitness (www.wildfitness.com ) 10 years ago, and considered deeply what our species should be eating to be at peak health, I have concluded that the most fundamental dietary principle is:  ‘eat food that comes from a healthy ecosystem’.

So this year we begin to create – from a patch of bare sandy earth – a food garden and wild dwelling that will nurture both mother earth and we, the people.  It is most wonderful to have Timbo and Tombo adding their ingenuity and fun-loving and to remind me that just as important as compost are big parties, and as important as indigenous species are aerial sleeping pods in the mangroves.  And Checkidelabambimo (the mum) has blazed ahead, bought land and is facilitating the whole process with the wisdom and no-nonsense that only a mum can bring. Onwards…

Our fearless search for ideas and inspiration doesn’t merely occur during daylight hours. Sometimes in the dead of night,  we’re still hard at work – as this video aptly demonstrates as Timbo adventures in a tank. Boom boom.

Tim’s Adventures in a tank

Boys like to climb trees.  Plus we needed to find out what the potential view over the top of the mangroves on property looked like, so we set forth choosing our tree.

The plot has 2 types of tree: the round-bodied Cashew with curved broad insta-climbable limbs, and the upright Palm, so un-climbable that footholes have to be cut into it for anyone to get up there. Well, anyone brave and without vertigo.

Promising each other we’d conquer the palm, but not today (which we’ve left to Kiponda in order to fetch coconuts to drink) we scrambled up the 10m Cashew in the middle of our plot to get our first glimpse of the creek water over the mangroves.

The magic of seeing the water beyond the mangroves took us both by surprise – it was better, way better than expected.  It gave the site a new quality. Until now the dense, unpenetrable  mangroves had blocked any view through to the open water from the site,  and now looking over their canopies to the water, we were experiencing the site as a place of vantage. More photos to come.

Although seeing the view is difficult from within the foliage of a tree, it is clear that our view could be truly magnificent. We now have plans to build a walkway through the mangroves, which will enable sundowners and a view across the lagoon in a magical spot. Plus, having climbed a couple of trees in the mangroves, we now have dreams of aerial walkways and hanging beds with secluded views. Things are getting better and better.

Something similar might have moved a young Jorn Utzorn on a study trip to Mexico write in his journal:

‘By building the platforms on the level of the roof of the jungle, the Mayans had suddenly conquered a new dimension that was a worthy place for the worship of their gods. From here, they had the sky, the clouds and the breeze, and suddenly, the roof of the jungle was transformed into a great open plane.’

There seem to be two conflicting reactions to the claim that one is going to build a house in Kenya, thousands of miles from home.

The first is the understanding that it is a perfect adventure which is accompanied by coos and ahhs. It is something in and of itself, that serves no purpose above and beyond the process of building and exploring foreign climes. Swiss Family Robinson, Swallows and Amazons or my own childhood favourites Brendon Chase by BB and the books by Willard Price – all prompt that childlike urge to adventure in the wild. There is something about bonfires and rafts and nature and mosquito nets that appeals even more so now that many professionals spend 10+ hours a day in front of a computer. That is what going to Kenya to build a house is all about.

The second reaction is one of practicality, or the apparent impracticality, that prompts questions like, ‘Are you going to live there?” Or, ‘How are you going to look after it?’ Or even, ‘What’s the point?’.

For me there are a few points:

The first is one based in ambition, which is somewhat paradoxical given that being here and taking a sabbatical from my ‘career’ (if you can call it that). Long ago, I made a list of things I wanted to do in my life and one of those things was to design and build my own house. So, here I am.

The second, as I’ve mentioned, is the process in and of itself. Even if the house burns to the ground, or the land gets taken away from me due to some unforeseen bureaucratic reason, it’s good just to be here, being active, nurturing that part of my soul that longs to be able to build my own furniture and understand how plumbing works.

Thirdly, this is a wonderful part of the world where just living in the day-to-day makes you stronger, browner, healthier and feel more alive. So building a house will help encourage many returns and provide a hefty excuse to come back.

And finally, leaving money sitting in the bank, which I’ve done since selling my student house in Edinburgh, is decidedly boring and feels like a complete waste of making it. So instead I’m trying to do something that will result in better returns than the paltry offerings my bank gives me and is also something that friends and I can enjoy.

In conclusion – worse case scenario a very fun and long but very expensive holiday… best case, a house that I can keep returning to when life allows and I can rent out when I’m stuck somewhere else or if things require that I can sell. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Our walk on the wild site has been propelled by a lifelong dream…

We’re here in the depths of Kenya (or perhaps the shallows, given that we have a fresh supply of cold beer to hand) to build a house. Not just any house, but one that is designed and built with its setting in mind, with its inhabitants in mind and with it’s ambition in mind – to be a house that grows, develops, interacts sustainably with its surroundings and sees (currently expected but non-existent) children and grandchildren pass through it.

At the moment things are moving slowly (or ‘pole pole’), as they are want to here in Kenya… but things are moving. We’ve been here six weeks and we now have a site in mind. We have the beginnings of a design in mind and we have browner skin and tougher Mowgli-esque feet that are beginning to crush thorns, rather than be speared by them. It’s nice to feel like the site is no longer attacking us quite as readily from the ground and the sky, with even the mosquitos giving us a wider berth on account of our hardying blood.

Given our daily explorations, discoveries and adventures – this blog serves as an attempt to capture this magical time. And, hopefully, as the days slide by, you’ll see a structure (very) slowly come into being.

Three of us will contribute to this process – Tara, of Wildfitness fame and our Watamu resident, who has Africa in her genes and Eve from ‘the garden’ in her mind as she works trying to create a positive-impact site.

Tim, architect extraordinaire, designing, drawing, pencil-sucking, head-scratching, building, shaving sporadically and becoming

frustrated by the continual references by all Kenyans we meet to his Jesus-lookalike-ness. Photos to follow.

Last and definitely least, Tom meandering at the back, waving his arms, pun-ctuating the silences with poor jokes.

Three T’s, a bunch of trees and a dream to build a place to eco-please. (Tim: ‘that was terrible, Tom’. Tara: giggles).

And so it begins…