Internet has been spotty and intermittent, so we haven’t had much opportunity to add posts. Besides, it’s been busy and exotic, enough so that’s it’s hard to get in the frame of mind to sit at a computer.
It’s Saturday here. The rainy season is waning. MP is doing some shopping at the Masai Market, braving the metatu rides (taxi buses from hell), this morning. We’re hoping to attend the Kenya-Malawi soccer game tonight. Another day in a trip almost a month old already.
Some highlights:
– a week spent in the villages of Khwisero, in western Kenya, where Ronald grew up – staying in his mother’s compound in a mud hut and meeting his friends and relatives, touring the sites of water projects he instigated, and being introduced to authentic village life in a way few tourists get to experience.
– a day in the Kakamega Forest, which is a bittersweet remnant of what once was a vast equatorial forest filling most of central Africa. Even the remnant is staggering, and being there makes one think of Conrad . . . Full of birds and monkeys and unbelievable vegetation, not to mention outstanding birds.
– L. Nakuru National P., where we got close to lions, giraffes, black and white rhinos, hippos, and tons of birds – from flamingos to crested eagles . . .
– Three days in the Masai Mara, which seemed like the western US, only bigger. Maybe a glimpse of what the American west once was like in terms of the scale of the environment and populations of wildlife. Elephants, tons of lions, more hippos, jackals and hyenas, the usual gamut of ungulates, and again, some very exotic birds – think lilac-breasted rollers, black bellied bustards, secretary birds, ostriches . . .
Next week we’ll meet a friend and head for Tanzania, where we hope to climb Mt. Meru, shop for fabric, and get a dose of life, Tanzania style.
We head back to Montana early on the 18th, hope to be home by around the 20th of June.