A few kilometres out of Nairobi the city simply lets go. The traffic thins, the road climbs, and then there is The Edge, a lodge built where the tarmac of one world runs out and the savanna of another takes over. It is made from shipping containers, of all things, with heavy steel doors that close with a sound you do not hear many other places, and the moment I walked in I said what anyone would. This is cool.

Inside, the hard materials give way to soft evening light, and the whole house is really built around its windows. The savanna is the wallpaper. From the sofa, from the bed, from the kitchen, the landscape is just there, enormous and alive, close enough that it feels less like a view and more like something that has let you sit inside it for a while.

In the evening we rolled out a little bar on wheels and made gin and tonics and watched the light move across the far mountains. There is not much on earth as life affirming as a sundowner in Africa. One day we drove back toward the city through the passes to the market, which is its own kind of wild, a mosaic of stalls and supermarkets and smoke from the street grills, coriander and fresh bread and charcoal all at once. We brought back Kenyan grass-fed beef and cooked it over the coals that night, juicy and tender and full of character.

Sam, who looks after the place, told us the leopards used to rest on these slopes before anyone built here. You can still feel them in it. The baboons certainly can, working the cliff ledges below the house now that nothing hunts them there, and at night you hear things that make you fairly sure the old tenants have not gone far.

That is the strange magic of The Edge. You are wild and you are not. You can watch a baboon on the rocks and, thanks to a dish bolted to a container, message home to people outside Africa in the same minute. The city is right there behind you, pulsing away in the dark, and you have your back to it on purpose.

We went to bed with the moon coming in through the windows, laying a pale light across the valley and the grass, the last thing you see before sleep. A few kilometres from the city, and a whole world from it.

On the edge of a city and the start of everything wild.