On Thursday night we found a really delicious Ethiopian place and we went with my Danish friend Katreen who is friending through East Africa this summer. We each paid $4.50 for way too much food and Ethiopian honey wine, not bad. The next day we headed out for a day excursion to Lake Nirvasha and Hell's Gate. It was an incredible day... we started early, waking up at 6am when Julius and his friend Charles who is a safari "freelancer" came to pick us up. In true Julius nature, he insisted that he come to the Wildebeest to introduce us to Charles before he went downtown for work.
We drove only an hour outside of the hectic city atmosphere of Nairobi and quickly came upon the Great Rift Valley. Nairobi is an incredible city because you can drive as little as ten minutes from the city centre and stumble upon a national park- so lush and beautiful. Our first stop was to Lake Nirvasha where we took an hour and a half boat ride around the gorgeous lake- saw a ton of birds, a bunch of eagles hunting fish, and lots of hippos-- I had forgotten how ginormous they are! We got very close to them which is pretty eary considering they weigh between 2 and 3 tons each and we were in a fairly small boat. The guide kept insisting that he was going to get us the best picture possible... (sometimes it feels like some twisted competition between the guides)
The boat dropped us off at Crescent island, where Karen Blixen's famous Out of Africa was filmed. We saw so many giraffes, zebras, water bucks and wildebeests. The animals were clearly very used to seeing humans around and let us get very close... by 9am we had alraedy seen half the animals from the lion king.
Charles drove us about 10 km down the road to Hell's Gate. It was beautiful. We biked through the gorgeous valley walls surrounded by baboons, zebras, giraffes, gazelle, etc. It felt amazing to get some good excercise (finally!) We met Charles at the entrance to the gorge and began an hour trek into the heart of the gorge which was produced by a powerful stream and excessive rainfall. The gorge is hard to explain without pictures-- essentially the heavy water pressure had continually carved out the Earth into a massively deep structure over the years. Hell's Kitchen, is the giant "room" and stopping point at the end of the gorge which according to Charles had no sunlight as of April but currently the "room" has grown and is now flooded with light. We ended the day with a picnic overlooking the Great Rift Valley. There was absolutely no one around except for Charles, Julia and I.On our way out we drove past a huge baboon family at least 100 baboons. We sat and watched them for about an hour- there were so many little baby baboons and the mother baby interactions were eerily similar to human beings. Even there hands look identical to ours, with fur of course.
Yesterday Julia and I spent the day at Julius's home where I finally got to meet his adorable chidlren, including a three month old named Dale. Dale was born on April 5th, the land that I landed in Nairobi for the conference. Julius did not mention that he had a son arrive and I now fully understand why he was a little scatter brained when I last saw him! I am not sure why he didn't tell me but I think it might have something to do with the fact that he didn't want me to feel bad about driving me anywhere, perhaps? We saw his Beatrice's (his wife) salon which they bought last year and is an impressive salon which is equipped with salon tools such as blow driers- the first ones I've seen in Kenya.
On our way back to the Wildebeest Julius took us to the Mathere slums and some other viewpoints in Nairobi, as he wanted to make sure that Julia saw it all. Last night we ordered pizza, by delivery! who would have thoguht in Africa? I'm sad she's gone, it is really incredible how quickly we became such close friends and how well we travel together...
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