Menlo Park resident Gwen Books says she loves being with animals.
That sentiment has been tested in Africa, where she’s had occasion to travel on the job as an independent concierge for her clientele of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Her purpose: to scope out vacation spots and suitable accommodations for her executive clients.
One night found her and her niece just arrived at “a five-star tree house” in a Kenyan wilderness camp, she says. Under the exposed floorboards, they heard a scuttling of animal footsteps, and they were getting closer.
With the footsteps setting the mood — “We were terrified,” Ms. Books says — they put a suitcase in front of the door and looked to their beds, where they saw a lump under the covers of one of them.
“Auntie Gwen,” her niece cried, “there’s something in my bed!”
Ms. Books got a stick and whaled away at the lump, then pulled the covers back. “I killed the hot water bottle,” she says.
On another occasion, when she and her niece were staying in a two-person lodge, they happened across “a wee little viper,” as a British man passing by called it.
He asked them for a pair of sunglasses and an empty tote bag and, with a stick, picked up the spitting cobra — said to be extremely good at shooting venom into one’s eyes from as much as 10 feet away — and dropped it into the tote bag. He then emptied the bag in the vicinity of their lodge.
“You know, you didn’t have to put it by our lodge,” Ms. Books recalls saying to the man, who then replied: “Oh, it’s scared to death. It will go away.”
On another evening in a two-story thatched platform with no walls and overlooking the Great Rift Valley, they were lounging in their beds when they discovered a black lizard on the floor. “Imagine a black pickle with a stump tail,” Ms. Books says.
They jumped up and zipped down their mosquito nets. “We lay down and complimented ourselves on our ingenuity,” she recalls. But then: “Our luggage is out there. We’re going to have lizards in our shorts!”
