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Published: February 22nd 2015
Distance Travelled Today: 245 km
Elapsed Travel Time: 13 hours 24 min
Lodging for the Night: Kisolanza Farm
This morning was another early morning. We woke up at 5:15 so that we could shower (the water was actually hot today!!), pack up and take down our tent before our 6am breakfast. We had a wonderfully prepared breakfast of French toast and Elysia's team (just her and Matt; team D, or team dik-dik) was finally on a rest day but Mike and Anna (Team E aka The Eh Team - even though Anna is not Canadian) were on clean up duty.
After breakfast we were off on another driving day. We only drove 5 hours but of course due to the early wake up, we were all exhausted. We passed through some very beautiful mountains and lots of villages. There isn't really anything else to say about that, you'll have to look at the photos to see yourself.
We arrived at Kisolanza Farm at 12:30 so after we unpacked the tents and our stuff, we were free in the afternoon. The campsite is surrounded by a fence and is protected by a Masaai warrior, with his sword of course.
Apparently they had some safety issue years ago with thieves killing the masai guard and slashing tents to look for the keys to the safe on one of the overland trucks. They caught the bad guy. Since then, they have installed a huge electric fence (about 3 m high with many strands of high voltage wire to keep out would be invaders).
We were told that Kisolanza Farm is a very famous spot, because it is home to the cleanest long-drops (=outdoor toilets) in all of Africa (sarcasm about the fame, but they really were that clean! In reality, they are the best outhouses we have seen anywhere in the world, full stop.). We were thinking about upgrading for the night, but the accommodations were more than what we wanted to pay. It should be noted, though, that this campsite has the cutest little cottages that you can spend the night in. They were rather luxurious and maybe something out of a fairy tale; we could imagine the 7 dwarfs living in something similar. Another interesting thing about the farm is that they grow their own produce there. So for lunch, we had some rice with veggies and pineapple
that were grown right there.
After lunch, people were just hanging out, some doing their laundry.
Matt and Masivu thought it would be a good idea to do the cinnamon challenge. This is the impossible task of eating a spoonful of cinnamon. The cinnamon sucks all of the moisture from your mouth making it impossible to eat it - but they tried anyways. Here is what it looked like:
Elysia went for a walk outside of the farm with Holland to a nearby lake, and they nearly lost the trail! Later when the sun was close to setting, the two of us (Mike and Elysia) walked along what they called the "sunset walk". It took us through the animal pastures and some pens that cows were locked up in. On a hill overlooking the pastures, the sunset was one of the most amazing we have seen in Africa. We thought we were seeing the sun set over a large distant mountain, but we were very surprised to see the sun set below the mountain (we were actually looking at a cloud that looked like a mountain). Before the sun was completely gone, we walked back
through the farm to the campsite for dinner. For dinner, we had vegetables and lamb that had all been grown on the farm, which was pretty awesome.
It was an early night again, since we were up early. We were in bed at the late hour of 8:30. We were in more of a hurry to get to bed tonight because there were quite a few biting ants around and we didnt want to deal with them crawling all over us.
For the past few days we've been playing this ongoing game to raise some money for a party we're supposedly having when we get to Kande beach in Malawi. Whenever we call the vehicle that we are traveling in a bus (instead of a truck) we owe one dollar that goes toward the kitty to buy supplies for that party. We also started playing where if you say the word of the day (today the word was "mine"), then you have to pay a dollar. We had a lot of fun tricking our new friends into saying those words!
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
That first picture of you jumping in the middle of the road brought back a memory...
I was traveling in Uganda on a newly paved road. I came upon a team of about 10 men measuring the distances from each side of the road and from the end of the last stripe. Then a couple men on the team would paint the next stripe by hand. It seems that there are plenty of laborers so anything that can be done by hand is done by hand. Earlier I saw men chipping away at a large rock to make smaller aggregate for concrete. Full employment but very, very unproductive! Anyway, someday I hope to overland from Tanzania to South Africa so am enjoying your blogs.