Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Okay so I didn't see any tigers or bears but I did see a LOT of lions, and I've been wanting to use that blog title for ages.

Amboseli, the national park in the foothills of Mount Kilamanjaro, was so beautiful. The whole area was almost completely flat, with a few scatterings of smelly swamps and lakes, meaning that Kilamanjaro, emerging out of the ground on one side, looked so dramatic and enormous. A lot of the time it was surrounded in misty clouds, making it look even more mysterious and exciting, the top just peaking out covered in snow.

We were camping right at the base of it, and after an afternoon game drive where we saw hyenas, elephants, hippos and of course a lot of gazelle and zebra (I always have remind myself to mention these as they're pretty much the cows of the Kenya world) we had a very tasty fire-cooked dinner by lantern-light on a wooden bench under a big tree.

After eating an awful lot of rice and vegetables, we stepped outside the big tree and suddenly realised that WOOOOOWWW the stars were absolutely amazing. They covered the whole sky; you could see the milky way, a kind of white floaty misty thing in the sky, and the plough was SO big because we were on the equator. Amy, our official star expert, spent quite a while explaining to Nick why the plough was enormous, how shooting stars appeared, and generally what stars were (worryingly Nick is going to do geography at university) and then we all sat around the fire in the dust telling ghost stories.

Despite being sufficiently freaked out by these (and the white bag that the wind blew close to us), it was eventually Rebecca's observation of 'Oh it's a scorpian!' that made us all leap up and retreat to our tents after finding another one in the toilets. The night was filled with silly conversations yelled between tents and finally a silence only broken by what sounded scarily like the sound of a lion trying to get into our tents. Camped inside the national park, and with our tents pitched about ten metres away from the 'fence' we weren't supposed to go closer than 50m from, these noises were not all that reassuring.
Thankfully the lion, imaginary or not, never made it inside the tents and we awoke to watch the sunrise through the thick clouds over the mountain, a sight made all the more spectacular by the group of five lions and four cheetahs prowling around in the early morning sun. It was really interesting to watch as we were told the whole story behind the prowling: a lion had killed a cheetah cub and so the mother-cheetah had left the remaining cubs in the long grass to try and make the lion think that all the cubs were gone. Thankfully, despite watching the lions searching the long grass, the cheetahs were never found, and we headed back to camp to a breakfast of pancakes and eggy bread and pineapple :)The rest of yesterday was spent travelling back, listening to i-pods as the safari van passed huge stretches of desert and little towns where chocolate and pineapple lollies could be obtained to make a mess of the van. We arrived in Nairobi where I picked up my 'fixed' camera (broken by too much sand; sorry for the lack of pictures because of this), which promptly broke an hour later, and then ate our final real pizza before getting a shuttle bus back to Nakuru.

So I now have clean clothes, a comfy squishy bed with no bed bugs, and food that is free :) I love Nakuru :)

This Could All Go So Wrong, But We're So Happy

The day after my last blog entry I awoke to find my right ankle swollen up rather horribly because of my silly tendancy to run into large rocks in the sea, and so I rather reluctantly took a matatu 2 minutes up the road to Palm Beach Hospital (bringing my Kenyan-hospital count up to three). This was by far the prettiest of all the hospitals I've visited before, but pretty shocking in every other way. They told me the cut on my leg was infected, did some nasty things to my leg which hurt SO MUCH, gave me a tetanus injection, antibiotics, and took an x-ray (exciting!) to check it wasn't fractured (it wasn't). They then presented me with an enormous calculator displaying the equally enormous amount they wished me to pay for the privilege of having my leg tortured for an hour, and I almost cried. I have NO MONEY.

This was still in the place South of Mombasa, and we didn't do much else there during the day other than eat lots of food by the beach and make friends with a hilarious Kenyan woman named Mamasofia, who came and plonked herself onto the sand in front of us with an aching back and entertained us with impressions of waterskis and giving us multicoloured hats for us to try on for about half an hour.

However, the nights in this place were amazing. One night we went to a bar called Forty Thieves, literally on the beach, which served really good food (falafel!) and played primary-school-disco music on a dancefloor lit with lots of stars spinning around. It was so much fun :)

The next night was even more spectacular, as we had dinner in a CAVE :D It was the poshest place I've seen in Kenya, with enormous round tables with big white tablecloths, set with 3 wineglasses increasing in size and lots of silver cutlery in each place, and all under this coral cave, lit with lanterns and candles and with a large hole in the roof at one point where you could look up and see the stars and hear the sea. We had a waiter named Athman, who told us he would transform into Batman the following day and looked very amused when we sat there grinning like chesire cats on drugs at how amazing this place was. I ate a veggie shepherd's pie and, for dessert, a flambeed mango, which I ordered simply because I didn't know what flambeeing was and the menu said they'd do it at the table. So my mango appeared, looking tasty, I went to eat it, and Athman said 'No, wait for flame'. One minute later he reappeared with a metal jug of flaming liquid, which he poured on my mango, and it danced with fire in front of me :) SO exciting.The day after the cave, we once again made a rather intrepid day of travelling, taking two matatus, the pile-in-like-sheep ferry again and a tuk-tuk to central Mombasa, only to find we'd missed the bus to Lamu that we'd needed to get. Wonderful. Whilst everyone else actually tried to be useful, Lorna and I spotted a nearby bakery and wandered towards it, and were suddenly confronted by a man saying 'you want to go to Lamu? I get you bus.' Before we knew it, he was on the phone, we were arguing about price, and we were happily zooming along on our way to Lamu in a private matatu.

Sadly, this happiness was not to last, as when we stopped about 2 hours into the journey for chocolate (of course), an undercover policeman suddenly appeared and we consequently spent two hours in Malindi Police Station as apparently the driver didn't have the right insurance to drive tourists. It took 3 phonecalls to our police friend, quite a few bribes, and an explanation from the policeman that he was worried the men would simply abduct us, before we were allowed to leave, reassured by the fact that, as the police had taken our names and passport numbers, they would at least be able to inform the British Embassy if we were abducted and killed. Fantastic.

The remainder of the journey was long, dark, and had an air of danger as we discovered the reason that buses don't go any later than 11am to Lamu: you have to drive through an area filled with Somalian bandits who will very seriously attack vehicles in the dark. We had an armed guard come with us, but thankfully the only danger we saw was a large hippo stomp across the road right in front of the van.

Our brilliant day of transport was completed by a boatride: Lamu's an island just off the Kenyan coast. It was pitchblack and we zoomed across the water in a little motorboat. The black sea merged into the black sky so it felt like we were flying, thousands of stars twinkled above us, and approaching the old white, lit up buildings of Lamu town, which looked like they were floating in the sky, it felt as if we'd come to the end of the world.

We spent five days in Lamu not doing very much; it was SO hot that any unneccessary movement was to be avoided. We went to the beach and baked, and took a boatride out to this beautiful idyllic private desert island, which I swam around in the clear blue sea :) The house we were staying in was extremely weird but in a very good way; it was four stories high and we were renting the top three. It was like Hogwarts, with stone staircases everywhere and everything being highly disfunctional. There was an absence of real walls, and so all through the night you heard the sounds of Lamu as though they were right there in the bedroom (which indeed they were some nights; often random black cats would just run through). Donkeys e-orring, cats screeching and muslims talking in kiswahili were all around. One night we went to a club, which was a bad idea, as it was stupidly hot even at 2am, and we found that all Lamu-men were pretty aggressive and nasty in their treatment of women.
Now I'm back in Nairobi, after taking a sleeper train from Mombasa last night (see above!), looking very sadly at my hugely decreased bank balance and heading to the foot of Mt. Kilamanjaro tomorrow morning, to do an evening and early morning game drive, and watch the sunrise :)

Beaches in the Moonlight and Swimming with Turtles

So I was right to ask for luck for the bus journey to Mombasa, as it was pretty hideous. We were in a big dark coach (there went my hopes of catching up on my journal on the bus as I'm two weeks behind) playing the same kiswahili song over and over and over again for the first hour and a half, it was absolutely boiling so the window had to be open the entire time, and there was nothing to rest your head on, so Rebecca and I just ended 'sleeping' on each others shoulders and on my hoodie pillow.

We arrived in Mombasa at 4.30am, after a lot of confusion on the bus with a man shouting 'MALINDI MALINDI MALINDI' at the top of his voice, which we wrongly interpreted as meaning we were in Malindi. However, when we heard him also say 'Welcome Mombasa' to another woman, we got slightly worried. It took about 10 questions to random Kenyans ('Are we in Mombasa?' 'No', 'Are we in Mombasa?' 'No', 'Are we in Mombasa' 'Yes') to establish that maybe we should be getting off, and so we stumbled out into the baking hot, dark, maybe-Mombasa street. After ringing our friends at a nearby hotel and consulting the map to discover that THANK GOD we were not stuck in Malindi at 4.30am, we ended up in their hotel room, sleeping on the very hard tiled floor to the sound of the nearby Mosque calling all Muslims to 5am prayers.

That morning Rebecca, Annie and I went to Fort Jesus, a historical fort-thingy next to the sea, which made some interesting photos with lots of turrets and dungeons to hide in, but wasn't amazing, and then we all went on the rather intrepid trip to South Mombasa, where we had a beach hut booked for that night. This involved a matatu ride, a ferry ride (SO different from normal ferries, more a kind of weird experiment of 'let's see if we can cram 10,000 people into one strange looking metal, industrial type boat', with George-Bush-insulting videos playing on large screens whilst we waited to get on), and another matatu ride with enormous rucksacks, but it was SO worth it when we arrived.

We had a big, proper house, with an actual bed per person, about 10 metres away from a secluded, white-sand-warm-blue-sea-and-skinny-palm-trees beach. It was amazing. We couldn't believe the view we looked out onto when we woke up.
We of course rushed straight into the sea, exploring some caves and finding some brightly-coloured crabs, before some people made a big trip to the supermarket then cooking spaghetti for tea (we had a kitchen!). That night we went down to the beach and did some paddling under the moonlight. It was so beautiful.

The next day, Easter Sunday, we awoke very early to catch a bus to go snorkelling and dolphin watching for an extortionate price. After about 2 hours on a wooden, old fashioned sailing boat on rather rough seas, feeling seasick and with no sign of a dolphin, we were feeling slightly worried about the amount of money we seemed to have wasted, but then came the snorkelling. We stopped by a shallow area with coral reefs, put on our masks and snorkels and spent about 3 hours swimming just above these fantastic coral reefs. It was like entire landscapes underwater, and there were so many fish. I never realised it was possible to gasp underwater until then. There were angel fish (so pretty), literally thousands of tiny black fish all swimming in one movement, rainbow, turquoise coloured fish, and we actually swam about half a metre away from a huge turtle. I could have touched it at points, and I just swam alongside it for ages marvelling at how amazing it was. To top the day off, we did see a dolphin once we were back on the boat, and had a really good vegetable-curry lunch on board the boat.

That evening was very funny; we spent the first half crashed out on the beds, wishing we could just sleep, then suddenly found some energy and ended up sat on the beach, playing a hilarious game of truth or dare, until 3am. There were tons of stars and the moon reflecting off the water, and the waves just splashing in against the shore. Unfortunately we also had the idea of running into the sea at about 2am, and, being the ridiculously clumsy and uncoordinated person I am, I went running into the sea at the speed of light and smacked my shin straight into an underwater rock, it being low tide. This hurt rather a lot and I had to go back up to the house to bandage it up before spending about an hour alternating between panicking that we'd buried our room key on the beach (it turned up in the keyhole of the house, stupid us) and talking to Amy. We ate CREME EGGS that Amy's friend had brought over from England at 3.30am :)

Yesterday we spent on the beach, reading and attempting to tan (all this achieved is that I now have a bandage-shaped tan line on my leg), Rebecca fell in love with a shell and sat all day in the ocean cleaning it and is now lobster red, and we ate lots of good food at the restaurant in the beach hut complex, and lots and lots of noodles cooked in our kitchen.

In the evening, six of us travelled to another beach, slightly south of the previous one, where we're now staying in a surprisingly nice (for the money) hotel, inhabited by a tiny tabby kitten, a matatu ride from the beach.

Today was spent on the beach (rather more seaweedy than the last one, and with lots more beach boys trying to sell you hats or rather more dubious goods, or alternately trying to pay you for rather more dubious goods), riding a camel named Tristan (brightly decorated with flowers and patterns for Easter), sunbathing on the dampish sand, and eating pizza by the sand. Sadly I am a bit afraid to swim because of my leg, which hurts quite a bit, but we are planning to do some watersports soon and go on a giant yellow banana boat, so hopefully it will be better for that :)

Nairobi: Ice Cream, Pizza and Stupidity

So Nairobi is a bit insane, it has ICE CREAM and BOWLING and some extremely 'interesting' clubs.

We've been here since Tuesday afternoon and the whole thing's a little surreal. It feels like a Kenyan city in that there's lots of street kids and crazy traffic (you can scream 'red light red light RED LIGHT!' at the taxi driver and still they will drive through it), but there is also real shops (I bought a novel!), bowling, mini golf, and pizza restaurants, which makes it rather unnerving for people who have been living in pure(ish) Kenya for 3 months.

Over the 4 days, the best things have been bowling (I got three strikes in a row and everyone thinks I'm some kind of bowling genius! Pretty sure it was pure luck but I'm liking it anyway), going to the cinema (saw Marley and Me and cried and cried and cried), playing mini golf and watching Rebecca be so bad that the ball was flying everywhere, visiting the elephant orphanage again and the wedding today. It was the wedding of the son of one of our teachers to an American woman, and it was really fun :) There was tons of clapping, dancing, singing and random orders to 'high five your neighbour!', and the whole thing was so happy and cheerful. It was all outside and it was a beautiful sunny day :) All the other teachers were there and it was nice to spend some time with them outside school, although the interaction is limited as they speak in kiswahili most of the time.

More interesting experiences have been waking up to realise that leaving your hotel door room unlocked, with the key on the outside of the door, all night is NOT the best idea, especially in Nairobi which is supposed to be one of the most dangerous cities in Africa (proven a little by the consequences of leaving said room unlocked), going to a fun but unpleasant at times club, and renewing our visas, which wasn't difficult but left us all covered in blue ink after having our fingerprints taken.

Tonight we are about to go and get yet another pizza (Nairobi is the only place in Kenya, I swear, where you can get one in less than 45 minutes) and then get on an overnight bus to Mombasa, on the coast. It's going to take all night and arrive at 7am or something, and Kenyan roads are very bumpy, so wish me luck with getting any sleep whatsoever. At the moment though I am unworried as the thought of pizza is very very nice :)

Off for a little bit

Today I am heading for Nairobi, where we need to stay for a few days to renew our visas and do exciting things like visit an Ostrich Farm where you can ride ostriches (I'm torn between the feeling that this is slightly cruel and the excitement at the idea of doing something so strange as riding an ostrich) and visit the Elephant Orphanage again. Me, Rebecca and Annie are also going to a Kenyan wedding there on the 10th which should be interesting!

After that we're all travelling to Mombasa and Lamu, on the coast of Kenya, with long white beaches and warm sea and awesome things like snorkelling and beaches with turtles laying eggs on and swimming with dolphins :D We'll be spending 2 weeks travelling around there, camping on a beach for two nights right next to a nightclub with waterslides! After that I think Rebecca, Nick and I are going to camp for a few nights in the National Park at the bottom of Mount Kilamanjaro to watch the sunrise over it.

Sooooo...I won't be back in Nakuru for a couple of weeks, so there will be no blog entries til then but probably an enormous one when I get back :)

Streamers and Balloons and Rasta Bracelets

It was the last week at school this week and it was so much fun :) The kids had exams on Monday and Tuesday, so I sat marking an enormous number of social studies papers whilst invigilating, and then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the kids had nothing to do whilst the teachers were all marking exams, and so we basically had free rein with them.

Earlier in the week I started a fortune teller (you know those funny little paper things you write colours and numbers on and silly things like 'you are a monkey' inside?) craze by making one, and prompted literally the entire school to swarm me and go 'teacher make for me!', waving pages of lined paper ripped out of exercise books in my face. Therefore on Thursday it was pretty much essential to teach at least some of them how to do it, and so I taught my Standard 4 class how to make them, eliminating 60 children out of the 600 asking me for one, and they loved it :) I was pinched and poked by fortune tellers from every angle for the whole day.

Friday was possibly the most exciting day at school ever. It was Rebecca's last day, as she leaves at the beginning of May so isn't coming back next term, and she had a huge party with her class, with popcorn, bracelet making, cakes, streamers, badges and balloons. Her, Annie and I spent about two hours sitting in a restaurant in town the day before shoving sweets into the smallest balloons in the world, and so on the Friday we gave each of the kids a balloon, and they had to blow it up and pop it to get the sweet out. It was so funny, everytime one popped the entire class screamed and then burst into laughter.

Rebecca had also bought a ruler and a pencil for all of the class, and their faces when we got them out were amazing. They screamed and cheered and leapt up and down when they realised what we'd got for them, and it was so little compared to what they should have anyway. They were SO happy :)

I also had a good day with my class: I made friendship bracelets with them, teaching them how to plait with red, yellow and green wool (coincidentally rasta colours - not intentional) and I was so proud that they all made one as I had to sit with about 10 of them individually and show them exactly how to plait. Admittedly some were very 'interesting' plaits, but they all did it :) They were all so pleased to have bracelets, especially as I was wearing one too, and the bright colours look really lovely against their skin. It's also a really good way of identifying all my class members as, with 60 kids, I'm still a bit unsure about some!

After the bracelets I did some drawing with them ('Draw the happiest day of your life' - most children drew their birthday, but I sat down with one boy, drawing a greenish animal with a threatening looking metal object labelled 'knife' drawn next to it, asked 'which animal is that?' to get the answer 'sheep! i kill the sheep'. So I now have a charming picture of a green ship being slaughtered by a nine-year-old boy as the happiest day of his life. Fantastic), and generally messed around all day, visiting the hair 'salon' with my standard 4 girls, who excitedly and messily braided about half of my hair ('You look very smart teacher!').

It felt really really sad that it was Rebecca's last day, but it was a brilliant last day of term. I feel sad that I won't see them for a month (although I have a feeling that small children may be turning up at our gate for the whole of the holiday as they ALL know where we live).

Other eventful things this week have been Tuesday night, when we went out for the leaving party of my friend Helen, who's gone back to the UK, and Rebecca and I played some interesting and noisy card games with poor Annie's cards before going into town, and last night when we went out, talked to many many many Kenyan men, told many nonsensical lies (I was Natalie from Bulgaria with Amy as my twin sister who came from Sweden), later bumped into those who we had lied to (by which point we'd completely lost track of who had said what and about who) and so all our lies fell apart and we ended up with a lot of Kenyan men calling us liars in a funny and jokey way. I couldn't really blame them given that I think I claimed that I was related to at least three other of my friends all night, and I introduced Rebecca to someone as Carrot at one point.