Mathare School

We visited a Christan school in the Mathare slum on Saturday, it was crazy. Whites are a novelty to the kids and we were mobbed. Imagine 100 four-year olds chasing you and shouting "mzungu!!" (the word for whites, it literally means the people who are always running around like crazy with no apparent purpose) Three hundred kids ages 4-13 attend. Each class is in a different metal shack, and the preschoolers (this is about an eighth of them)

are all in this building that is also the church.

One of the classes.

As we left I took this picture of some kids and their world.

Hell's gate

Renting mountain bikes was interesting, there were six guys each trying to get us to rent their bike. I tried three; "no, that one's seat is insanely uncomfortable", "this one has a flat tire", I decided on one that had a not-too-painful seat and front suspension. We rode about a mile uphill with trucks and buses roaring by enveloping us in black smoke (apparently everyone here modifies their vehicle in hopes of making it have more power, I don't know if it works but they sure do make a lot of smoke) trying not to run over pedestrians, and dodging the places the road was missing. Then we rode a mile or so uphill on a extremely rough road to the gate of Hell's Gate. They wanted money for a map so we figured we could do without.

The first interesting thing was Ficher's Tower, it is just sticking up 80' out of a mostly flat field.

I really wanted to reach the top and tried three different routes, but with already fifty feet of exposure, no ropes and a handhold literally a only foot out of reach I decided that it would be wise not to try. I know I could have made it up, I was not so certain about back down... The basalt cliffs were really cool, this one about one hundred feet high.

We considered the ten mile round trip to the Obsidian Caves but decided to go to the Gorges first and go to the caves later, if our water held out. At the entrance to the Gorge they tried to sell us a guide and Aram convinced them that we did not need one, and we went on our way. But they weren't done, a guy ran after us and started to "guide" us on the path while Aram was trying, in Swahili, to politely convince him that his services were unnecessary and undesirable. Eventually we paid him fifty shillings and he left. The gorges were amazing, the rock is a soapstone type and very soft so erosion does really cool stuff to it, but try as I might I could not get any good pictures of them. Here are a few of the best pictures I was able to get.

A waterfall. Obviously.

A small piece of the gorge.

Another.

The central tower.

We heard a really loud hissing and followed it to this. It seemed to be a capped steam vent. The pressure release was what was letting off hot, sulfurous gas at high pressure.

Our water was running low and our hindparts were rather sore from the biking over the "roads" so we didn't go to Obsidian Caves. I wonder what they are....

We stopped a little store (little as in, the three of us barely fit inside) and ate fries and discussed politics with the owner, who happened to be a pastor that Aram knew. When we got back to our camp site we found that monkeys had knocked over and collapsed our tent. We chased them away and were relieved to find that there seemed to be no damage.

Lake Naivasha is so polluted that swimming isn't smart but there was a pool and, although it looked pretty nasty, it felt good after biking 15-20 miles under equatorial sun. I also took this picture of Tobias diving in.

The Mt. Longonot Expedition,10/15/09. Warning: Rather lengthy.

After driving from Nairobi down into and across the Rift Valley

and only missing one turn, (Aram was too busy discussing politics, cultural differences and religion with Tobias and me to pay attention to where we were going) we arrived at Mt. Longonot National Park,

drank as much water as we could and began to climb. It was 9:23.

The path at first was a gently sloping gravel road and the rim of the crater looked to be a twenty minute walk away. We saw gazelles, zebras and a large herd of weirdabeasts, we noted the fact that sagebrush actually smelled like sage, and also that the nice smooth road was becoming a steep climb in a two inch thick layer of superfine dust that filled our shoes and our lungs and was not friends with our digital cameras. The twenty minute walk was an hour of half walking half climbing. We came over the top and...

...the ground vanished. The top edge of the crater was, at most, ten feet wide with a two hundred foot drop to the bottom of the crater. The crater is about a mile and a half across (my pictures give no sense of the scale) and the bottom appeared to be fairly smooth with a few bushes here and there. It looked like if we found a way down into the crater it would be easy to cross it and climb the other side to the peak. There was one place where there was no sheer face between the rim and the bottom of the crater and we decided on that as our point of descent.

After walking/sliding/climbing down we discovered that we had severely misjudged the character of the bottom of the crater. There had been a fire recently and it was a charred thicket that covered the bottom and the parts that hadn't burned were so thick with undergrowth that they were nearly impassable.

And it was far from smooth, the entire landscape was a boulder field of the pieces of pumice that had fallen back into the crater after the last eruption.

We realized that crossing the crater was not an option. I climbed a tree to look for a certain cinder cone that we had seen from the top, also to look for a place that we might be able to get back to the top of the rim. I thought that I found both. Once we made it to the cinder cone and got a better view of our surroundings we saw that the ledge I thought we would be able to climb out on was merely a discoloration of the rock. We also drank most of our remaining water. I climbed spike of rock and found another way to exit the crater and, after Aram and Tobias climbed up to have a look around, we headed for it.

Climbing the twenty foot cliff was easy enough, the talus slope was hard because with every two steps up I slid back a step, then we had to climb about 150 vertical feet of almost vertical, hard dirt covered with charred trees.

Oh, and did I mention, the ground was almost too hot, from the sun, to comfortably touch. it took us almost an hour to scramble out of the crater and we were covered with soot, ash, dust and sweat, and we had half a liter of water left. We decided to try for the summit of Longonot which meant climbing another two hundred feet in a mile hike.

I regretted that decision after about a half mile of climbing through dust and pumice gravel. (Keep in mind that this is at 9000 feet where there is a lot less oxygen than at 600 feet where I am used to living) We rested for a bit at the top, looking at the world around us, the Masai herdsmen hundreds of feet below, the dust devils swirling across the dry fields,

the crater and lake Naivasha.

Then we started the descent running and sliding down through the dust and gravel that had been so hard to climb through. We caught up with a group of Kenyan schoolchildren and joined them, dodging the thorny acacia trees in the controlled fall down the side of the mountain the foremost thought in our minds, "WATER!!". We drank a little, not wanting to get sick and drove to Lake Naivasha where we were planning to camp. It was now 3:47.

The view from the top.

In some places the rock is really soft and so it gets weathered easily.

Sunday

We rode a Matatu (the low cost, low comfort, rather dangerous public transport) most of the way to church and walked the rest of the way through a slum/flea market where one could buy lumber, used wire, shoes, fruit of many kinds and all sorts of other interesting stuff. The church was a tent, with an added on part made from a billboard tarp stretched over wood, and plastic chairs for seating. One thing I found interesting was that most of the songs were a single line that was repeated many times with the occasional alteration of a word. The pastor is a Kenyan and speaks both Swahili and English so when he was speaking English his translator would speak Swahili then he would switch and so hid translator would too. I occasionally heard a word in the Swahili that I recognized so at least I have learned something... After church we went to an Ethiopian restaurant. They brought out the food on a tray with little piles of the different stuff, meat, another kind of meat that was in a little stand that had burning charcoal under it, some garbanzo bean stuff that was really good, (however it had insanely hot peppers hiding in it) and some other stuff that I don't remember. There was no silverware, they brought some white pancake like stuff that was in rolls, and you picked up the food with that. We played more Ultimate in the evening and everyone was really impressed because I, by pure chance, threw a disc the length of the field and my target person did not have to move their feet. Today we are going to go help the pastor of the church design a greenhouse, oh, we are leaving in ten minutes...

My recent past

We played a game of Ultimate yesterday evening, until it was too dark to see and every pass was being dropped. It was the first real game of ultimate, where the people actually used strategy, that I have played in several years. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and escaped with amazingly minor injuries. Tobias and Aram were not so fortunate; when Tobias and I collided Tobias face-planted and got an impressive scrape on his face and Aram fell on some rocks (the field wasn't the best) and a good deal of skin that was intended to be attached to his leg.

Today we went on a game drive and saw all sorts of beasties, I took over three hundred pictures and I have deleted all but 71. Here are a few of the more interesting ones...

Zebras and an eland.

I don't think this needs a caption...

Cool birds. (Their identity is, as yet, unknown)

Another unneeded caption...

My niece, Priska, riding a rhino. (check out the facial expression :))

Me photographing a giraffe out of the land rover.

And, the Weirdabeast, (named by me because of it's strange appearance) it is another species that remains unidentified...

Flora and Fauna

Bougainvillea.

Passion fruit flower

The soil looks like this, only redder.

This is an Ibis that wanders around the yard.

This evening Aram, Tobias and I went and played a pick-up game of soccer, it was pretty fun but I did not get much action because everyone else is ten times as good as I am.

Tomorrow is my first Swahili lesson. I hope learning Swahili work better for me than learning Spanish. :-|

Africa: First Impressions

The Zurich airport was modern design, spotlessly clean, empty and silent. I felt like I should be wearing a Tuxedo. When I landed in Nairobi it was quite different. Low ceilinged, crowded, noisy, people sitting on the floors and I would guess that the Swiss would be appalled at the level of cleanliness... The drive to my brother's house was interesting, African traffic is quite different from that of America. For one, there are practically no traffic control signs, and definitely no traffic lights, also the use of lanes doesn't seem to have caught on here, and there are peopleeverywhere, walking along the road, running out in front of trucks and somehow surviving, horns are in constant use by everyone. I am told that traffic is amazingly clear right now.

Today we went and and walked around a small piece of the town, to get there we rode matatus, the public transportation. The number of people is amazing, everywhere you might look there are more people.

We are planning to climb a mountain this week at some point. Should be interesting.

These are a few pictures I took on my flight.