Sticky tongues and mud baths.

After a relaxing week in Mwanza for the first week of my holiday, I spent the second week in Nairobi. It is still not quite normal that I can get on a plane and in an hour reach places like Nairobi. I stayed with the Mkutu Family some family friends.  They live an area in the west of Nairobi called Karen. They have 2 lovely boys Timothy (6) and Daniel (3) so my week was filled with early morning wake ups, lots of Lego building and some fun day trips that they have been saving up for when they have visitors. 

This is Daisy who was very greedy and was good at nudging people for food.

The Giraffe centre was our first exciting trip. The giraffes live in Nairobi National Park that surrounds the city but they are walked into the centre each day so that the public can feed them from a high platform. Although I have been lucky enough to see a lot of giraffes fairly close up when you are actually touching them you realise how long their necks are and how beautiful their eye lashes are. I knew that they had very long tongues but until you see a tongue 30cm long try and lick  your face you don’t really believe it! I discovered that giraffes dribble a lot when they eat and have very sticky saliva!

There was no escaping the tongue!

 

The next days trip may not seem very exciting to you but going to a proper supermarket was a real treat when you haven’t been into one for 8 months! Cheese, hair dye and decent cereal was purchased, which as you can imagine made me very happy. J

On Thursday we drove out of Nairobi to the edge of the breath taking Rift Valley only an hour away. Our mission was to climb Mount Longonot a Volcano just inside the National Park.

The name longonot is derived from the Maasai word  oloonong'ot  meaning steep ridges so when they suggested the climb  there was a slightly anxious feeling as I smiled and said that would be lovely. This feeling was definitely confirmed as we drove to the foot of the volcano..... it certainly lived up to it’s name. We started our climb ,accompanied by a local guide so we didn’t get lost, and with lot of enthusiasm convincing the children (and me!) that we could make it to the top. At half way we were all feeling good and we had only had to use the bribe of biscuits when we got half way once. As we were sitting enjoying our biscuit reward at the half way hut the guide announced, ‘That was the easy bit of the climb’ and pointed to the tiny hut in the distance and the very steep path up to it .  We scrambled up big ditches caused by the heavy rains and used the trees to heave ourselves up (making sure we didn’t grab the thorn trees!). All that was going through my head was ‘if a 3 year old can do this so can I’. After a lot of bribing with sweets and pulling children from large crevasses we reached the crater at the top. The view as we looked out to the beautiful Rift valley with Lake Naivasha in the background was definitely worth the climb. 

Just to prove that I did get to the top.

Had I really walked all this way. We had started at the far end
  of the seasonal river, the black line on the  photo.

This is the little hut that was a tiny dot at half way.
We were very glad to  see it close up.

The ridge around the edge of the crater was quite narrow so we did have to make sure we kept our distance from the sheer drop into the vast crater bowl.  After admiring the view we started our climb down thinking the hard part was over. Oh! How wrong we were. Lets just say there was a lot of skidding on the dusty paths and our bottoms were a useful tool!

Tim and I had skidded down most of this!

All very pleased with ourselves for completing our mission we enjoyed a picnic which we shared with some Superb Starlings. They actually had the cheek to jump onto our picnic table and pinch our sandwich crumbs.

The Sheldrick Orphanage Centre was the treat the next day. This was a centre for baby elephants who’s parents have either deserted them or have been killed as a result of poaching. It provides them with some where to live until they are 4 years old and then they are released back into Tsavo National Park and integrated back into a herd. They are only open to the public an hour a day so the elephants don’t get too used to human contact. We watched the orphans being fed two enormous bottles of milk and were able stoke their very inquisitive little trunks.Wrinkly skin is actually very squashy and slightly furry.

Then they decided they all wanted a mud bath to cool them off. There was a lot of pushing, shoving and sitting on each others heads. They also decided that we needed a mud shower too. They can spray mud a very long way!

After a very fun week I head back to Mwanza and was greeted with a very heavy rain storm.

 Just one more sleep and then I am back to school for my last term of the year. I can’t believe that we are at term 3 already and there are only 10 weeks until I fly back to England.

Birthday, Bukoba, boats and buses!

I definitely had an Easter weekend of fun!

It all started on a my Birthday.  The girls from the flats had put a Birthday Banner outside my flat door just to make sure that everybody knew it was my Birthday.

 One of the girls in my class shares my Birthday so they bought in a huge chocolate cake for us all (and I made brownie for the adults). So I can’t complain about going to work on my Birthday when you get lots of cake!

When I got home from school there was just time to pack and grab something to eat before Suzie and I were off on our adventures to Bukoba, on the over night ferry. It was definitely a weekend of ‘What do we do now?’ moments, they started at the ferry port. 
We got out of taxi and walked into a huge open space full of people with no signs telling us where to go. We just followed the crowd which luckily got us to the Ferry. You would think getting onto a ferry would be easy, but no! We had to look like lost white people and be shown the very weird steps that we had to climb up.

We were shown to our cabin and we watched the ferry leave with the beautiful sound of the horn (which we can hear from our flat in the evenings so you can imagine how loud it is actually on the Ferry). We settled down in our bed and slept to the roar of the engine.

 We definitely didn’t need an alarm clock as the extremely loud horn was sounded at 5am as we pulled into the stop before ours and gave us both the shock of our lives! 

 When we arrived in Bukoba we found our hotel and spent the rest of the day, catching up on sleep, exploring Bukoba town and  having a very local  lunch of rice and beans. In the evening we enjoyed a lovely dinner in a near by hotel. As we finished we realised there were no taxis to catch home. We were trying to decide what to do as a piki piki (motorbike taxi) driver pulled up and shouted ‘lifty’…….the second ‘What shall we do now?’ moment. We tentatively, but in not very ladylike way, got on the bike. Yes three of us on one bike! There was a lot of grabbing on for dear life, shrieks as we whizzed around corners and slightly worried looks as we zoomed up totally the wrong road. We did get back to the hotel eventually and gave the piki piki driver an amusing end to the drive as we both practically fell off the bike with our feet still caught on the seat.

The next day we had organised a cultural tour of the local area. It started with a trip to the iron works …… well lots of men standing around doing not a lot showing us what they had made. We tried our best to look impressed…. I did buy a dog bell to be used as a door bell which made the trip a little more worthwhile!

 We then drove to the hills above Bukoba and hiked down a hill to a beautiful waterfall. 

This is what the guide stopped and showed us first and I was not very impressed that I had to now walk back up the hill just for this.



It was ok because after slipping and scrambling down the hill we saw a much more impressive waterfall.

Then the guide announced, ‘If we climb down the other side you will have a much better view but it’s a bit over grown’. Overgrown was an understatement. We pushed our way down the steep slope through the thick bush leaving me with bugs down my top and lots of scratches. After nearly falling into the river, as I slipped stepping over a very wide space between rocks, I did get a great view of a pretty impressive waterfall. I wasn’t appreciating it’s wonderfulness so much as I dragged myself back up through the bushes.

 

This was the path through the forest to get to the waterfall.

Next we were driven through the hills of Bukoba that could have been somewhere in England if it wasn’t for the Banana tree plantations and the sunshine! We were taken to a house of a villager who was going to cook us lunch Haya (The local tribe) style. She welcomed us into her house where we sat on the floor covered in dry grasses.  The food was yummy and was washed down with delicious passion and lemon grass juice.

 

This is chewing coffee that we were given to chew on to freshen our breath before the meal. They are Coffee beans that are cooked with spices. You crack the shell and take the bean out to chew. As you can imagine I wasn't a big fan but had to keep smiling when the delicious coffee taste filled my mouth!

Using banana leaves as a plate. She tipped the savoury banana and beans out from the large pot.  It was served with  yummy spinach and peanut sauce and a tomato stew. There were also 2 sorts of yams, casava and potatoes to go with it.  

These were very small and sour tomatoes.
They were suppose to lower our  blood pressure
 but we weren't very impressed!

After eating we were shown how to prepare and cook green savoury bananas and where they made a alcoholic drink from bananas in tree trunk carved in the shape of a canoe. We did sample some too! It was brilliant experience that gave us a little insight into what living in the rural village would be like.

This was the house we ate in.

This was the spirit made from bananas.
 She was pouring us a bottle for the others to taste back ate the flats.
 It cost us less than a pound!

It rained all day on the Sunday so when we ventured out in the drizzle Bukoba was like a ghost town, Tanzanian avoid coming out when it rains. When the sun did come out in the afternoon I think the whole of Bukoba was down at the beach on the lake. We got lots of attention and caused much amusement as we sat doing some people watching. 

We had had a good weekend but we knew that the next day we had a 6 hour bus journey which neither of us were particularly looking forward. We left the bus station at 9am (It was suppose to leave at 8….. Never a good sign!) squashed into our double seat that was made for one and a half people. We were squashed but could have coped for 6 hours. Oh no! That would have been far to simple. After 4 hours the bus stopped and we were spouted a lot of swahili that was later translated for us to mean the something to do with the gears was broken, we weren’t going anywhere. Everyone would have to squeeze on the nearly full bus that was coming along in about 20 minutes. 

After lots of stares as we stood waiting at the side of the road, the bus arrived. Tanzanians push to get on a bus that they know they have a seat on so you can imagine the pushing and shoving that went on getting on to this bus so they weren’t stranded. The only way we were getting on this was to forget we were polite and British and join in with the pushing. After lots of hands in the face and knees in backs I was on the bus………but I had lost a shoe under the bus! I decided I was not going any further until I got my shoe. I got some evil stares as I stopped any more people getting on the bus and shouted 'shoe' whilst pointing enthusiastically under the bus. Someone eventually took pity on the silly white girl pointing and picked it up for me. My shoe was saved and we did get a seat on the bus even if I was so squashed that I had to hold my shoe because there wasn’t enough space to put it on. We were on our way to Mwanza again….. Phew! 

So we thought. A couple of hours later the bus stopped again and everybody got off the bus. We had no idea why but followed the crowd as we have learnt is the only thing you can do. We discovered that the bus was getting on a ferry  to shorten the journey. However on that particular day one of the ferries had broken down so our bus was probably going to be sitting there until about 10pm as the ferry only fitted a few vehicles on at a time and there was a lot of vehicles. We could wait for the bus or go on by foot and find some other way of getting to Mwanza. It had already been a long day so we opted for the 'no bus' option and decided we would play the smiling white girls card on the other side to get a lift the extra 60km to Mwanza.

As we stepped off the ferry we really didn’t know how we were going to get to Mwanza and how much it would cost but within a few minutes there were some random men shouting ‘Mwanza’ at us from a shabby looking bus. They said it would only cost 2000 shillings (Less than a pound) to take us, so what did we have to loose. There were no seats left on the bus but they very kindly let me sit on the very large gear box next to the driver. I had a great view all the way back to Mwanza and a very hot bottom! 

Our 6 hour bus journey had turned into an 11 hour adventure filled with lots of worrying, funny (yes there was inappropriate laughing when all the locals got off the bus to use the toilet otherwise known at the very tall grass by the side of the road!) and ‘What do we do now?’ moments. We were very relieved to see our flat and our toilet!

It had certainly been a Birthday and Easter weekend to remember.