Sabyinyo has been enjoying glorious weather with sparkling sunny mornings and the occasional downpour in the afternoons, normally just after guests come back from trekking with all the stories and wide eyed enthusiasm of magic moments spent with the Great Apes.

All the families are doing well and our own ‘Home team’ the Sabyinyo group continue to enchant our guests. The baby born to Karema a few months ago is now a noisy bouncy baby and the apple of his mother’s eye!

With the onset of our ‘short rains’ the river behind the cottages has been running again and the birdlife around the lodge is wonderful, Dave Richards was here for some relief management and has updated our “bird list” of what’s around the lodge to an astonishing 70 different birds. With 17 acres of grounds it’s easy to lose an afternoon just wandering round the place enjoying the birds and multitude of wild flowers amongst the more formal gardens.

Mike, our other relief manager, was lucky enough to host Jim and Anne Hart recently. They have a not for profit organisation, Arts for Animals, which is dedicated to the preservation of endangered species through education and artistic inspiration. It sprang from a desire shared by artist Anne London and her husband Jim Hart, to do something concrete to save the wildlife they had grown to love.

They have been working with Mike Cranfield who leads the Gorilla Doctors Project to help raise money by selling Anne’s wonderful art work of the Gorillas for this essential project that has done so much to help ensure the success of the species. This is a project we have lots of time for and the fireside talks we sometimes organise give a fascinating insight into the complex mechanics of supporting a species who roam between the three countries that make up the Volcanoes National Parks.

Anne was kind enough to dedicate one of her outstanding pieces of art to the Hotel and we are delighted to incorporate this into the ongoing refurbishment program that is finally coming to fruition. We have one room designated as the gorilla room where we will showcase both this and many of the outstanding photographs that we have been able to accumulate.

As a community owned enterprise, we are obviously always closely involved with our neighbours and it gives us as much pleasure to see the less glamorous projects proceed alongside the more obvious. Whereas it’s easy to show pictures of school kids in their improved surroundings, the equally important but possibly more vital improvements such as piped water to hundreds of families is a hugely satisfying project to see completed and the pipeline was ‘opened’ recently in a well-attended ceremony at the bottom of the hill.

Philip Mason Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge Manager.