Welcome to the colourful world of artist Pat Gunning, a woman passionate about art, nature and, most of all, Africa. Go on an unusual safari with her, through her beautiful, vibrant images and fragments of her memoirs. Travel over wild terrain, get up close to lions, leopards, cheetahs and elephants, smell the hot African earth, hear the crickets and birds in the bushes, battle through the extremes of this dangerous and wonderful continent, be overwhelmed by its diversity, life a rich life.

Mombasa is a bustling, friendly island perpetually wreathed in smiles.

From where we parked the car, we could see the old worn paths that were used by the cruel traders to take their slaves in chains to the coast where they were shipped to Zanzibar and the Omari Empire.

We enjoyed collecting pale or bright yellow or orange money shells. Like the Asians in the bazaar, we were hoarders. It was exciting to think that not so many years ago, these shells would actually have bought us necessities or luxuries, for in those times they were legal tender. We tell our children that money does not grow on trees. In those days, parents told their children that money grew on seaweed!

One day, when adventuring on my own in the bazaar area, I spied a little silver casket. I asked the man how much. He informed me that it was not for sale. I persisted. “Ah, 25 pounds to the Memsahib.” And thus the bargaining began. For two days, I sat cross legged in from of him, on the dirty earth floor, haggling and drinking coffee, and finally walked away with it for 3 pounds, which even in those days was a fortune.

Twenty miles south from the island of Mombasa is a hotel called Jadini. It was a small family hotel, owned by the Trench family. Dan, the son, was a friend of my father’s. They met at Malindi, eighty miles north of Mombasa, at the beginning of the war and had fun at drinking parties.

I washed, brushed my teeth and put on my nightie. I got one leg onto my top bunk when the ship slewed right over and I slid off the bunk and fell head first onto the basin and saw stars. As I fell, so did I hear what sounded like thousands of glasses breaking. The ship then rolled to the other side and the alarm bells began ringing. … As I came up the stairs to deck level I could see a lifeboat being lowered. My God, they’re putting them into the sea and we are all going to have to jump into that cold inky black water!

We inherited twenty-one historical Jacaranda trees, a remnant from the long long avenue of the very first exotic trees planted in Nairobi by the mission fathers who also grew the first coffee plantation in the country. One could walk through this bowery and come out on the other side of the house and continue along either an outer or an inner walk of curvaceous borders of trees, shrubs and flowers, until the bottom one came to a round garden in one corner, with its entrance.

Who wants a man-made church when one can have all this splendour which never fails to reduce one to a mere speck of humility as one looks down and sees the world as it was about twenty million years ago.

They had the belief that if you did not talk about any kind of life’s nightmares, they would go away and be forgotten about.