MAGAN'S WORLD:THERE'S NOTHING worse than visiting a hotel owned by someone you know. What if you don't like it? Do you lie? I get in terrible trouble on RTÉ's The Viewfor being too honest – the literary and artistic demigods who I malign end up haunting me for years after, cornering me in random public spaces where all I can do is grovel.
In Tanzania last year, I found myself within spitting distance of a safari lodge owned by an old school friend, Rory Egan, and wondered whether I should call in. In school I had had valid reasons to resent him; he was eloquent, suave and sporty, while I was, for the most part, lost in my own deluded world. He got an A in honours Irish, whereas I only scraped a B, despite the fact that I spoke Irish before I had English.
Worst of all, he was the star of the school play before I had the courage to admit to myself that I loved theatre, and while I endured three years of servitude in the concrete bunkers of Belfield, he was frolicking about Trinity, putting on plays with Mario Rosenstock and Dominic West.
I wanted to hate his safari lodge on the Serengeti plains beside the entrance to the Ngorongoro Crater, to be able to sneer at the opulence, to be sniffy about his exploitation of the locals, but within seconds I was entranced.
Octagon Safari Lodge, which he and his Tanzanian wife, Pamela Lupembe Egan, built from scratch is elegant and comfortable, without being in any way extravagant. It was instantly clear what an inspiration, and major employer, it has been to the local community, creating from a dry-earth wasteland, a lush, verdant sanctuary of water gardens and mini-woodland, all within six years.
It brought a haven of biodiversity to an overgrazed area of rough savannah and with it a vast array of birds: fire finches, chestnut-bellied pygmy kingfishers, weaver birds, crowned cranes and paradise flycatchers.
Sitting on the timber-columned veranda on that first day watching the birds flitting through the bougainvillea, hibiscus and jasmine, as Rory served me rhubarb crumble, I felt the years of resentment ebb away.
Admittedly, the previous weeks of sleeping in fleapit dives had left me susceptible to the seduction of luxury. I was defenceless against the provocative allure of Egyptian cotton sheets on vast
canopied beds, home-grown salads and individual chalets with vaulted roofs and earth-plastered walls in
muted hues, each with its own deck or terrace of oven-baked tiles.
My mind wandered back 20 years to the moment our black-robed Jesuit headmaster had swept into the classroom like Neo from the Matrix, and with a piece of chalk clad in sterling silver casing he wrote the word Weltanschauung on the board. It meant worldview, he said, a wider perspective, a sense of the bigger picture. It was what he wished to instil in us.
Had Rory been as inspired as I was by the concept? Perhaps not, as why else would he have spent those years playing love-rat Des McAnally on Fair City? But certainly a sense of Weltanschauung influences him now. His lodge has an Irish-African bar with South African wines and Irish malt whiskies; the rooms are decorated with paintings by Brian Bourke next to drawings by Maasai tribesmen.
Guests at Octagon generally come to gawk at elephants, cheetahs or leopards in the surrounding national parks, and while chasing wildlife may satisfy one’s atavistic hunter-gatherer urges, I’d recommend instead a walking safari in the Ngorongoro forest – it’s not as adrenalin-stirring as speeding around in a Land Rover, but it’s far more profound.
And regarding Rory, I want to make it clear that I am not at all jealous of his life. I take pleasure from the fact that my Irish is now far better than his, even if his Swahili is word perfect.
- octagonlodge.com