And actually can't believe it. It was AMAZING. Seriously one of the best things I have ever done.
We headed to Naivasha the night before, sleeping in the cheapest hotel we could find, having dinner in a nice little place with good food, a TV showing the hideous spanish-dubbed-into-english soaps they show over here, and a mouse or two running around for us to laugh at. An evening of inexplicable hyperness occurred, with lots of hiding in a cupboard and leaping on beds for no reason.
On Saturday we got up at 6am, aiming for a very early start before it got too hot, but getting slightly delayed by a) Nick's inability to get out of bed and b) A long matatu ride to get to the place we were hiring the bikes, which was half an hour outside Naivasha, around the other side of the lake. We all just sat looking out the window at the endless dusty roads passing us by, thinking 'OH my god, in half an hour we're going to have to cycle back along all of this'.
We got to Fisherman's Camp, a campsite we were hiring the bikes from, and despite many phonecalls to these men previously, when we arrived they asked 'Are you going to Hell's Gate?' Sadly not. Hell's Gate is 3 km from this place. We replied 'Errr...nooo, we're cycling to Nakuru' and they laughed at us until they realised we were actually being serious. They kindly (well, not so kindly considering how much we paid them) provided us with a van to follow us, taking photos and carrying our water and food for the day.
And so off we went :) It was 25km from the bike-hire place to Naivasha town, and nice and flat, so we all cycled along whooping and cheering and wasting precious oxygen by singing the Sound of Music songs. An hour later and we had reached Naivasha, picked up some hitchhiking kids in our van, and eaten half our food already. We thus stopped, bought more food and continued.
At this point we realised quite what we'd let ourselves in for. We'd used most of our hyperness in the first bit, and the signs saying '69 km to Nakuru' were not entirely encouraging. We'd been under the impression that the road was flat and soon discovered that a) this was a LIE and b) signs saying 'climbing lane 150m ahead' are the most evil signs in the world, as they basically mean an immensely steep and painful hill is coming up. The road went down ('WHEEEEEEEEE') and then UP (OOOWWWWW) then down then up then down then up. I was so glad I had my i-pod as I was able to put some motivational music in one ear and didn't have to listen to the monotonous sound of my bike chain slowly going round as I struggled up a hill.
Basically, it was so difficult, and although the downhills were amazing, whizzing past zebra and golden hills and thinking 'I'M ACTUALLY CYCLING 100KM!', the uphills were so painful. We stopped every 5km or so for water and after we were halfway (i.e. 50km in), everytime we got back on the bikes we were all swearing and shouting in pain because our bums hurt so much. Oh, and the fact that the roads were lined with small children going 'how are you?' when you went past, clearly rather preoccupied, and chasing your bike, was sweet on downhill stretches, bearable on flat stretches, and hugely irritating on uphill stretches.
BUT, we all knew that we were going to do it, and the sense of achievement as Ben and I rode onto the road leading into Nakuru, seeing hills that we recognised and places we'd been, was amazing. The last 18km or so we only stopped once, just pedalled and pedalled and pedalled, whooping and cheering again, until we'd reached the border of Lake Nakuru (5km outside the town of Nakuru, thus making our total 100km). We just couldn't believe that we'd cycled 100km and we'd DONE IT, despite the fact that everyone we'd met on the way didn't believe we could.
The last 5km was also rather funny, as we'd managed not to really crash for 95km, and then as we got into Nakuru our friend Olympas appeared at the side of the road. We all turned around, waved, I screamed 'OLYMPAS' and in the excitement forgot to watch ahead and so before we knew it, my bike was entwined with Rebecca's in front of me, and all five of us had piled into each other with a lot of laughter.
So far, I've raised 440 pounds, and we spent Sunday watching films until the rainy season finally arrived with a literal bang, lightening hitting the aerial and breaking the television. We therefore just lay on the sofa, with aching bums, playing card games and chatting :) It was a really nice relaxing day. Oh, and we didn't go out on Saturday night as planned, as me and Rebecca got home, our maid was like 'come and see how to make chapati!', we sat with Gigi screaming in our ears, half asleep, watching her cook 20 chapatis (these take SO long) and finally realised that as we were struggling to stay awake to eat our lentils for dinner, realistically we were not going out. So we chatted and fell asleep watching desperate housewives (i bought season four for a pound!) So everything is very very good here :)
Monday, 30 March 2009
Friday, 27 March 2009
A week of spacehopping
My Dad brought me over a bright orange spacehopper that's been living in my cupboard for the past few years, and the entire school is obsessed. I must've taken about 300 children for P.E. in the last week. They've never seen one before and so they all LOVE it. Everyone screams when we get it out and it gets prodded by small fingers and punched by slightly more vicious fists constantly. Gigi came home from school the other day and told us that some of the kids from our school had been speaking to him and telling him about it. I love it when they're happy :)
It's been a really nice week, done some usual English teaching, millions of P.E. lessons and lots of singing (I've caught on to the fact that this is an extremely good way to stop a class running riot if they have nothing else to do). It's awesome when they sing; they all starting dancing up and down and grinning and doing air guitar, using random classroom objects like the schoolbell and the duster for the blackboard as a microphone. It's SO cute.
Annie and Rebecca also bought two footballs last week, so P.E. lessons are getting more and more advanced, the school's P.E. equipment now consisting of a field full of potholes, a pile of rocks (used for marking goal posts) and 2 footballs between 600 children. I can't believe how lucky they feel and act just to be given this.
So I am in the internet cafe at the moment waiting to go and meet my friends to travel to Naivasha, where we are staying the night tonight, to start this insane bike ride tomorrow morning. I'm actually really looking forward to cycling 70km for some reason, and we've planned an equally insane night out afterwards to celebrate and just to make sure we have no energy left whatsoever on Sunday.
It's been a really nice week, done some usual English teaching, millions of P.E. lessons and lots of singing (I've caught on to the fact that this is an extremely good way to stop a class running riot if they have nothing else to do). It's awesome when they sing; they all starting dancing up and down and grinning and doing air guitar, using random classroom objects like the schoolbell and the duster for the blackboard as a microphone. It's SO cute.
Annie and Rebecca also bought two footballs last week, so P.E. lessons are getting more and more advanced, the school's P.E. equipment now consisting of a field full of potholes, a pile of rocks (used for marking goal posts) and 2 footballs between 600 children. I can't believe how lucky they feel and act just to be given this.
So I am in the internet cafe at the moment waiting to go and meet my friends to travel to Naivasha, where we are staying the night tonight, to start this insane bike ride tomorrow morning. I'm actually really looking forward to cycling 70km for some reason, and we've planned an equally insane night out afterwards to celebrate and just to make sure we have no energy left whatsoever on Sunday.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Too much STUFF
Basically I have done a lot in the last few weeks; my Dad came out and it was really lovely to see him :)
Main events were:
-- Hyperactive Children - Dad came to the school and orphanage to see what on earth I'm actually doing out here in the African sun and watched my English lesson (observing that the kids here are more obedient than in England; I partially agree but they are also very good at finding sneaky ways to hide the fact they haven't done their homework) and P.E. lesson (i.e. lots of kids running screaming at each other under the guise of 'the hokey-cokey'). I had much fun watching his reaction as he walked into my classroom and was greeted by a screaming-excitable-chorus of "GOOD MORNING TEACHER!" by sixty children. They do this every morning but it's a little overwhelming the first time. The orphanage was nice and relaxed, Dad played football with the older boys whilst I did some more parading round the building with small girls on my back. I think he did realise though how much more could be done with some more money; the 'football' was actually a ball of rubbish cleverly bundled together and the classes of sixty - eighty are an insane number, an excuse that the Kenyan teachers use to hit and generally abuse (there are some seriously horrible cases here) the children, under the idea that it's the only way they're controllable.
-- Cycling Uphill Through a Desert - although good practice for my insane 70km bike ride, this was rather painful. Basically we went to Hell's Gate, a big national park with lots of zebras and giraffes and warthogs wandering freely around in the wild, and cycled 9km down to this fantastic gorge with boiling hot spring waterfalls in it :) The landscape was amazing, it was like going back to some prehistoric time with all these enormous raw faces of rock. It was so good, but the journey of 9km back to the main gate, uphill, through sand and with bikes that had minds of their own was less enjoyable.
-- Masai Mara - we spent 3 days here, seeing more lions, cheetahs, elephants (fifty in one group!), hippos, crocodiles, buffaloes and just about everything OTHER than a leopard. We told our driver that we particularly wanted to see one, and this may have been a mistake as we spent rather a long time playing an enormous game of 'Where's Wally', only over 2500 sq km of the Masai Mara, peering into every tree looking for an extremely elusive animal. However, the landscape there is beautiful so it was lovely just being there again.
-- The Discovery that I am Allergic to the Masai Mara - I spent a rather unenjoyable day travelling for 7 hours in a safari van from the Masai Mara to Nairobi feeling extremely ill, finally resulting in a nice visit to Nairobi Hospital to get another injection and lots and lots of tablets. Kenya is really not the place to be ill; the roads are bumpy and and bounce you up and down all the time and there are an awful lot of extremely nasty smells around. BUT, there was a highlight to this as I got to watch House and Scrubs for the first time in 2.5 months whilst waiting for test results in the hospital. Woo!
-- Cheetahs and FOOD - Yesterday Dad and I went to a safari walk, which was basically a rather animal-less zoo, but was awesome as they had a tame cheetah, which we went in and cuddled and stroked :) And the FOOD note is simply because I had SO much food, everywhere, and REAL food like cake and pizza and actual protein.
I'm now back in Nakuru, having been into school this morning to see where my class had got to in English (my class screamed and cheered when they saw I was back, it was so sweet), catching up on lots of rather eventful gossip from my friends from the last week and trying to plan this mad sponsored bike ride we've got ourselves into.
Main events were:
-- Hyperactive Children - Dad came to the school and orphanage to see what on earth I'm actually doing out here in the African sun and watched my English lesson (observing that the kids here are more obedient than in England; I partially agree but they are also very good at finding sneaky ways to hide the fact they haven't done their homework) and P.E. lesson (i.e. lots of kids running screaming at each other under the guise of 'the hokey-cokey'). I had much fun watching his reaction as he walked into my classroom and was greeted by a screaming-excitable-chorus of "GOOD MORNING TEACHER!" by sixty children. They do this every morning but it's a little overwhelming the first time. The orphanage was nice and relaxed, Dad played football with the older boys whilst I did some more parading round the building with small girls on my back. I think he did realise though how much more could be done with some more money; the 'football' was actually a ball of rubbish cleverly bundled together and the classes of sixty - eighty are an insane number, an excuse that the Kenyan teachers use to hit and generally abuse (there are some seriously horrible cases here) the children, under the idea that it's the only way they're controllable.
-- Cycling Uphill Through a Desert - although good practice for my insane 70km bike ride, this was rather painful. Basically we went to Hell's Gate, a big national park with lots of zebras and giraffes and warthogs wandering freely around in the wild, and cycled 9km down to this fantastic gorge with boiling hot spring waterfalls in it :) The landscape was amazing, it was like going back to some prehistoric time with all these enormous raw faces of rock. It was so good, but the journey of 9km back to the main gate, uphill, through sand and with bikes that had minds of their own was less enjoyable.
-- Masai Mara - we spent 3 days here, seeing more lions, cheetahs, elephants (fifty in one group!), hippos, crocodiles, buffaloes and just about everything OTHER than a leopard. We told our driver that we particularly wanted to see one, and this may have been a mistake as we spent rather a long time playing an enormous game of 'Where's Wally', only over 2500 sq km of the Masai Mara, peering into every tree looking for an extremely elusive animal. However, the landscape there is beautiful so it was lovely just being there again.
-- The Discovery that I am Allergic to the Masai Mara - I spent a rather unenjoyable day travelling for 7 hours in a safari van from the Masai Mara to Nairobi feeling extremely ill, finally resulting in a nice visit to Nairobi Hospital to get another injection and lots and lots of tablets. Kenya is really not the place to be ill; the roads are bumpy and and bounce you up and down all the time and there are an awful lot of extremely nasty smells around. BUT, there was a highlight to this as I got to watch House and Scrubs for the first time in 2.5 months whilst waiting for test results in the hospital. Woo!
-- Cheetahs and FOOD - Yesterday Dad and I went to a safari walk, which was basically a rather animal-less zoo, but was awesome as they had a tame cheetah, which we went in and cuddled and stroked :) And the FOOD note is simply because I had SO much food, everywhere, and REAL food like cake and pizza and actual protein.
I'm now back in Nakuru, having been into school this morning to see where my class had got to in English (my class screamed and cheered when they saw I was back, it was so sweet), catching up on lots of rather eventful gossip from my friends from the last week and trying to plan this mad sponsored bike ride we've got ourselves into.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
The sky is still very blue
And I am running out of creative blog-title ideas.
The last week has been good, I think (everything is now slowly blurring into one giant memory of children and ugali and sun). I've had some of the BEST days at the orphanage :) Basically, as my Dad is coming to see me for two weeks (EXCITING :D) and I'd obviously told him about the state of the orphanage and schools, he gave me some money to spend on the orphanage before he arrived so he could see what the money did when he visits on Thursday. Sooo...last Thursday I spent a very long two-or-so hours (about one hour spent playing snake on my phone waiting for this ridiculous salesman to reappear) in the basement of the local supermarket haggling over 10 mattresses and a water tank, and finally squashing into an extremely small delivery van and transporting these to the orphanage. They LOVED them; it was brilliant. The ten mattresses made an extremely good trampoline and so they bounced up and down and did lots of gymnastics on them and then squealed and rolled around on them a lot when we chucked out their mouldy foam mattresses and gave them new, brightly patterned REAL mattresses. They were all so pleased just to be given their own toothbrush and toothpaste too, neither of which they had before. I loved seeing what just a tiny bit of money could do :)
Then yesterday we totally threw all ideas of Africa's lack of water out of the window by having the best waterfight EVER with them :D We all raced around in the mud (dust+water=mud), starting with a few innocent water bombs and ending by throwing Ben in the enormous well and emptying entire buckets of water over heads. Needless to say, we all were completely soaked, with stripes of mud on our faces (deliberate) and see-through white tops (not deliberate). It was hilarious, although I think the matatu driver who we went home with disagreed when he saw that we were dripping wet.
School for the last week has been uneventful; the kids have had exams so I've spent a lot of time in a mudhut trying to occupy myself whilst monitoring the behaviour of standard 2 during exams. The lovely girls have been as sweet as ever and gave me big hugs before I left on Friday :) My class have been nice but insane; I told them I was going home yesterday and they all made crying noises and wouldn't shut up for 5 minutes.
The weekend was lovely; me, Rebecca and Annie went with Grace and Gigi to visit Grace's 15 year-old daughter at her boarding school. There was loads of family there and we had a very prickly picnic underneath a thorn tree in the baking sun. On Saturday night I slept at Karanja's house, where four of my friends live, sharing a bedroom with Ben and Amy, both of whom are very hyper people and so we spent all night giggling and not catching up on sleep at all. Sunday was spent lounging around on sofas with puppies, ice cream and films :)
Tomorrow Dad arrives in Nakuru and I will be spending 2 weeks with him doing exciting animally things like the Masai Mara and Hell's Gate, a national park with wild animals that you can walk through :)
The last week has been good, I think (everything is now slowly blurring into one giant memory of children and ugali and sun). I've had some of the BEST days at the orphanage :) Basically, as my Dad is coming to see me for two weeks (EXCITING :D) and I'd obviously told him about the state of the orphanage and schools, he gave me some money to spend on the orphanage before he arrived so he could see what the money did when he visits on Thursday. Sooo...last Thursday I spent a very long two-or-so hours (about one hour spent playing snake on my phone waiting for this ridiculous salesman to reappear) in the basement of the local supermarket haggling over 10 mattresses and a water tank, and finally squashing into an extremely small delivery van and transporting these to the orphanage. They LOVED them; it was brilliant. The ten mattresses made an extremely good trampoline and so they bounced up and down and did lots of gymnastics on them and then squealed and rolled around on them a lot when we chucked out their mouldy foam mattresses and gave them new, brightly patterned REAL mattresses. They were all so pleased just to be given their own toothbrush and toothpaste too, neither of which they had before. I loved seeing what just a tiny bit of money could do :)
Then yesterday we totally threw all ideas of Africa's lack of water out of the window by having the best waterfight EVER with them :D We all raced around in the mud (dust+water=mud), starting with a few innocent water bombs and ending by throwing Ben in the enormous well and emptying entire buckets of water over heads. Needless to say, we all were completely soaked, with stripes of mud on our faces (deliberate) and see-through white tops (not deliberate). It was hilarious, although I think the matatu driver who we went home with disagreed when he saw that we were dripping wet.
School for the last week has been uneventful; the kids have had exams so I've spent a lot of time in a mudhut trying to occupy myself whilst monitoring the behaviour of standard 2 during exams. The lovely girls have been as sweet as ever and gave me big hugs before I left on Friday :) My class have been nice but insane; I told them I was going home yesterday and they all made crying noises and wouldn't shut up for 5 minutes.The weekend was lovely; me, Rebecca and Annie went with Grace and Gigi to visit Grace's 15 year-old daughter at her boarding school. There was loads of family there and we had a very prickly picnic underneath a thorn tree in the baking sun. On Saturday night I slept at Karanja's house, where four of my friends live, sharing a bedroom with Ben and Amy, both of whom are very hyper people and so we spent all night giggling and not catching up on sleep at all. Sunday was spent lounging around on sofas with puppies, ice cream and films :)
Tomorrow Dad arrives in Nakuru and I will be spending 2 weeks with him doing exciting animally things like the Masai Mara and Hell's Gate, a national park with wild animals that you can walk through :)
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Loveliness of the week so far
I went to the orphanage yesterday and spent 20 minutes parading around the local neighbourhood with a 9 year old girl called Becky on my shoulders, singing and waving our hands in the air. It was the funniest thing ever, we were stared at SO much (this is in a really rundown area and so I don't think most of them had seen a white person before, let alone a crazy white girl singing, dancing and with a black child on her shoulders) and I returned to the orphanage feeling like the Pied Piper, with 20-30 random children dancing after me. Love it :)
School is also SO good, I feel so close to some of the children and I have been learning all their songs and clapping routines in kiswahili. Today I gave them some paper to draw on out in the sun and they all drew pictures of 'Miss Zoe', writing underneath 'I love Miss Zoe', or 'Miss Zoy', in some cases, in cute handwriting. We also discovered that the children play imaginary games based around us, one girl acting as 'Miss Annie', one 'Miss Rebecca' and one 'Miss Zoe'. SO CUTE.
By the way, did I mention that last week a random, scruffy looking man wandered into the school grounds, shook my hand and asked me in an entirely serious voice "Are you God?" This country is hilarious.
School is also SO good, I feel so close to some of the children and I have been learning all their songs and clapping routines in kiswahili. Today I gave them some paper to draw on out in the sun and they all drew pictures of 'Miss Zoe', writing underneath 'I love Miss Zoe', or 'Miss Zoy', in some cases, in cute handwriting. We also discovered that the children play imaginary games based around us, one girl acting as 'Miss Annie', one 'Miss Rebecca' and one 'Miss Zoe'. SO CUTE.
By the way, did I mention that last week a random, scruffy looking man wandered into the school grounds, shook my hand and asked me in an entirely serious voice "Are you God?" This country is hilarious.
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