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Published: April 12th 2007
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Volunteer Work;
Well I guess most of you have probably heard about our really successful volunteer project in Kenya! Well to cut a long story short for those that haven’t, we arrived in Kenya all eager to start our little project which was to spend 3 months in Shompole Conservancy (very edge of the Rift Valley in Masaai land) doing a combination of conservation work which was monitoring and researching the movement of lions in the local area as well as teaching English in the local schools.
It soon became apparent that the organisation were extremely unorganised and after sitting and waiting in Nairobi for two and half weeks we were finally taken down to Shompole to at least start teaching. This turned out to be worse than Nairobi as we were stuck in the middle of no where without access to money, food or ability to contact anyone including the people from the organisation! This was all topped off by Matt heroically being bitten by a scorpion which we later learned was 6 months premature of having fatal poison!!! This was a quite a scare despite Matt’s downplay of events so not to worry me considering we had
no transport or means of communication to get us to the nearest hospital which was 50km away on a dirt track!! After that we decided to pull the pin on the volunteer stint for now and got taken back to Nairobi. But we still managed to see some beautiful animals (giraffes, zebras, lions, gazelles, oryx) completely in their own environment which as we later found in Masai Mara is quite a rare treat now days.
I really need to mention the absolutely amazing people down in the Nguruman community. We were welcomed so kindly everywhere we went. The actual country side reminded us a lot of home being quite dry with bush shrubs everywhere. There was a river running just beside where we were staying so we spent a bit of time down there with the local women and children who would bathe and let their cattle drink in the mornings. It was amazing trying to converse with people who had never seen white people before let alone know any English or Swahili (we could speak some basic Swahili but down there a lot of the locals only spoke their mother tongue). Two men in particular took us in and
made sure we were always ok and had plenty of food, our gratitude to them stretches beyond words. It was heart breaking leaving the area and not having had the opportunity to really get involved in the community as we’d hoped but our safety and sanity had to come first so hopefully one day we might be able to get back there.
A little glimpse of the wonders of Nairobi…. Second most dangerous city in Africa, though reports of late indicate it might be fighting for top place! It has claim to fame of the largest slums in all of Africa which are quite centrally placed near the city. These consist of two million people living under corrugated iron sheets with no electricity or running water (including toilet facilities, which they have adapted to what is known as the flying $hit… into a bag and flung out the front of their shack!) So it was quite confronting in many ways, with the fear of constantly being mugged or carjacked. This was highlighted when we were on our way home one night after dark and got questioned by the police why we were out so late (10pm) and that it wasn’t
safe. We were with a local who had been out with us but that obviously wasn’t sufficient so we were then escorted the rest of the way home with two policemen carrying machine guns!!! It was hard to decide whether this felt safer or not!
Masai Mara Safari;
So after what felt like a complete waste of a month, we cut our losses and decided to at least try and see some of the Kenyan country and then change our flight to London to be a month earlier. We booked a 3 day safari in Masai Mara which is one of the best game parks in the world. It was fantastic!!! Quite different seeing the animals being so used to passing cars and people snapping at them, it almost felt like an open range zoo at times but is such a great opportunity to spot all of the animals that we only get to see in zoo’s at home. We didn’t quite tick of the big 5 (also learnt that these five animals are actually the 5 that will attack people unprovoked) which are the lion, hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros and leopard. We got to see all but the
rhino and leopard as the rhino’s are sadly becoming extinct and the leopards spend their days avoiding people up in the tops of huge trees. We did get to see both of them in a safari walk back in Nairobi but it’s not quite the same!!! But as you can see from the photos we managed to get quite up close and personal with lots of different beasts and had a really great time with our little safari group, despite the high pitches squeals of delight that regularly came out of the Japanese boys when we were trying to creep up close to an animal!
Upon our arrival back in Nairobi we decided to splurge and go for lunch at Carnivore, which is meant to be one of the top 50 restaurants in the world (possibly 20 years ago but definitely not now!). The appeal is a huge range of game meat that you can't sample anywhere else. So we were quite excited about our fancy meal out only to be served lamp, chicken, pork and a tiny bit of ostrich. All up it cost us AUD 80 without any alcohol for lunch... such a chunk on our budget
and it was so terribly disappointing! the kenyan standard of customer service is more like the british rather than Australian!
The coast and final bliss!
We decided to treat ourselves and book flights from Nairobi to Mombasa, one to save ourselves the 9 hour bus ride from hell and second to avoid having to step foot in Nairobi again! So we landed in Mombasa and jumped straight on a bus up the coast to ..... This didn't quite turn out to be the dream location we hoped for so we just stayed a couple of nights and headed back about 20km south to Watamu which lived up to every expectation and more. We had a gorgeous little room with our own kitchen and bathroom right on the beach. We stayed for a week, enjoying the pristine beaches and selecting our fish out of the fisherman's arms as they came in from their boats!
We decided to head back down south to Diani, which is just below Mombasa on the coast. Found a great English run (well it was actually overrun with monkey's but the English couple did their bes!) budget place where we could cook our own
meals and enjoy the steaming humidity.
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Anna
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HELLO
Hi Matt, Its been a while between blogs..Are u guys in London now? I am heading over to the greener pastures myself(holiday only) but if ur there on the week June 11 be good to catch up (after that i'll be heading into eastern europe!) talk soon anna