It's a Zoe in a Tree!

After spending Monday at the orphanage making yet more woolen bracelets and catching up with the kids (their puppies have grown enormous!), on Tuesday we took Gigi and Vanessa (the daughter of Karanja, our 'helper' person in Kenya and another host family) to Graceland Hotel to swim. We'd promised Gigi ages ago that we'd take him and he was so happy :) We spent the day outside in the amazing sun, tanning and leaping into the dubiously cloudy pool and watching Gigi having a lot of fun.

The next day I had planned to travel to Nanyuki, the town at the base of Mt. Kenya, as Amy has spent the last 4 days climbing the mountain and so Becky and I were going to go and meet her on Wednesday, then stay the night and do exciting Nanyuki things on the Thursday. The journey to Nanyuki should only take 4 hours, but due to our bus breaking down irreversably half way there, we spent three hours sat on the side of a hill, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, watching the road for possible vehicles we could get a lift with and watching the dark clouds gathering over the opposite hill and creeping closer and closer towards us. Thankfully, before the enormous rainstorm quite got to our lovely hill, we managed to get a lift in a matatu with a sheep in it, and finally arrived in Nanyuki at 6pm, 4 hours after we'd hoped to. We could see the snow-peaked caps of Mt. Kenya through the clouds, extremely dramatic, and found Amy extremely tired from having clambered all the way to the top.

That evening we went to a local bar to watch the football and phone Karanja to gloat when Arsenal lost 1-0 and then slept happily in our cold and lumpy beds.

The next day was pretty awesome :) We walked for 9km along an extremely muddy track, following the fresh trail of elephant poo, to the MauMau Caves, which aren't really caves but a kind of large overhanging rock, right next to a big pool with a waterfall and river flowing in and out of it. Years ago it was used by the MauMau, a group of Kenyans, as a hospital where they could hide from white settlers, as the waterfall drowned out the sound of the screaming. Despite this being a slightly gruesome historical background, it was really interesting. I had also promised myself that I would swim, as the others had when they visited, and so, remembering Rebecca's words that it was the coldest water she'd ever felt, I apprehensively stuck my toe into the water and INDEED IT WAS BLOODY FREEZING.

Nonetheless, I was determined and waded in fully-clothed, squealing and swearing more than I should, until I was deep enough to swim around a bit. I'd wanted to swim right up to the waterfall but the current was too strong, so I settled for swimming for about a minute before getting out of the water as fast as physically possible to check that all my toes were still attached to my foot. IT WAS SO COLD!

Once the feeling had returned to my toes and I was dressed in dry clothing again, we walked the 9km back, bumping into a chameleon, which we held and stroked and generally scared, before continuing on our way. Chameleons have really sticky feet! It didn't change colour but we did hopefully hold it up against Amy's red jacket to see if it would.

We ate lunch at this amazing restaurant. It was basically an enormous tree, surrounded by the ponds of a trout farm at the bottom, with a huge wooden tree house at the top in which you could eat. There were giant, furry black and white colobus monkeys bouncing around the tree, stealing sugar bowls and creeping into the bar, clutching bottles of alcohol. We ate some tasty spaghetti and carrot cake with cream (SO good), and fed the monkeys with peanuts whilst the waitresses weren't looking :)

After eating we took a matatu back to Nakuru, through a big rainstorm that came through the windows of the leaky van and got me rather wet. I felt quite at home, watching the torrential rain pouring down over miles and miles of grey, bleak fields, surrounded by rickety fences.