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.