Lakes and Rainforests and Being Surrounded By Baboons

Lake Victoria was fab and involved the following:

-- Boats - After much haggling and a lot of 'you must be kidding me we're not paying ten pounds for an hour in your boat', we had two boat trips onto Lake Victoria. These were very funny as after clambering into these little wooden boats with holes in the bottom and only life jackets for half of us, the boats spent a lot of the time lurching and splashing and generally threatening to tip us out to the hippos. However, Lake Victoria was absolutely amazing and ENORMOUS and on the second boat trip we did spot some hippos :)

-- Sunsets - Watching the sunset over the lake was one of the most beautiful things ever; it was so peaceful and we all just perched right at the end of the lake, myself on a large rock, listening to the plants rustling and floating around on the waves, and watching the sky gradually turn from light blue to yellow to deep orange to black.-- A Lot of Squashing Into Small Spaces - Travelling with very little money means everything must be minimised. Thus, we fitted 8 people into one tuk-tuk (these are little metallic box-like vehicles designed for 3 passengers), and 5 people into one very very small and hot room with only 2 beds.

-- A RAINFOREST - This was absolutely amazing as we really hadn't expected to find this. Basically, we were chatting to one of our boat-drivers and asking where was good to go near Kisumu, and he told us there was a rainforest about an hour away by matatu. Soooo, with much excitement we all embarked on an extremely bumpy journey that actually consisted of 2 matatus and took about 2 and a half hours, and arrived at our rainforest. It's the last section of rainforest left in Kenya and we spent the day wandering through it and finding trees that strangle other trees, trees that cure cancer, lots of monkeys and dinosaur-like birds. We even climbed a tree made of lots of vines (I can't adequately describe this tree but it was so cool). We must've walked about 15 miles over the day and made the mistake of thinking there would be a cafe in the rainforest and consequently didn't eat for about 12 hours, but it was worth it.

-- A Lot of Baboons - We saw these in the rainforest but I think they're worth a separate bullet point. Basically, we were walking happily along quite a large track, when suddenly I realised there was something large and gorilla-like wandering across our path ahead. We all stopped and looked around, and before we knew it, there were about 10 baboons blocking our path ahead and another 10 or so emerging from all the foliage around and above us. Half terrified that they would eat us, and half amazed and taking a lot of photos, we continued cautiously and found that they didn't want to eat us, and actually scampered away a little bit when we approached.

-- A Very Nice Restaurant - Two of the nights we ate at an amazing restaurant right on the edge of Lake Victoria, with SUCH good food. I had a vegetable lasagne and a banana split and some rose wine out in the open night air and it was so lovely :) Plus, just as we were settling the bill on the first night, someone spotted a hippo very close by, and so we all leapt up, literally running away from our bill, and went and stared at this hippo sleeping about 25m away from us in the dark on the shore. We were really silly though as we all decided, for a joke, to stamp our feet at the same time (the men on the boats do this to attract the hippos), and soon found this was not a good idea. The hippo got up, stampeded towards us, sending us all running in every direction, but thankfully decided to just circle back round and disappear into the water. Lesson for today: never stamp at a hippo.

The teacher's strike has now finished and I'm back in Nakuru looking forward to starting teaching on Monday again :)