So this weekend was our first opportunity to get to leave IU House and explore the wonders Kenya has to offer. We decided to take it easy for our first weekend and go to a couple places within an hour of where we're staying.
The first place that we went to was Kruger Farms, which is a 3,500 acre plot that houses free-roaming giraffes, impala, gazelles, and anteaters to name a few attractions. The entry fee was 500 Kenyan shillings apiece (a little under $6)--in many aspects, that's the way things go in Kenya. $1 is about 84-88 KSH depending on where you get it, so minus a few commodities our money goes fairly far here. We were led by a guide and did a lot of walking; en route to the giraffes we saw a herd of impala as well as a wild chameleon, which all but thankfully one of us walked right past. Finally our guide located the giraffes and we got as close as we dared, which couldn't have been more than 10-15 feet. It was pretty cool; our guide informed us that you can tell the males from the females because the males have a fairly significant protrusion in the middle of their forehead, whereas the females typically have no more than a bump. At one point there was one running toward us and we thought it was charging, but it stopped about 10 feet away to eat some of the leaves off of a nearby tree. It goes without saying, it was pretty cool, despite the fact that I had to go to the bathroom for about an hour and twenty minutes of it--but who was counting?
Our next destination was Kerio View. Kerio is a world famous part of Eldoret where athletes come from all over the world to do high altitude training. When I say high altitude I mean high high. You'll see in the pictures below. Kerio View refers to a fantastic high point where you can see miles and miles of Kenya; in fact you can see two points where the land sort of drops off. One of my classmates and I commented on how awesome it would be to just hang-glide off of the ledge, and our taxi driver for the day, Ken--who was awesome--informed us that a lot of tourists do paraglide off of the cliff. He made sure to let us know that it's mostly South Africans, Europeans, Australians, and Americans that do it though, or "the crazy people" as he referred to them. He told us Kenyans "are too scared" and "know better." He was a pretty funny guy. We took a bunch of pictures, but pictures really don't do this view justice. It is one of the most incredible scenes I've ever viewed. One thing I really like doing wherever I go--I don't travel often though, which is why my Facebook isn't really full of them--is take pictures of me doing a handstand. I think the last one I took was in Pensacola on my spring break trip back in 2009. I decided to take one at Kerio View which you see below. It's a pretty sweet picture, as it includes both drop-offs I spoke of as well as a rainbow in the background: you could actually look out and see the parts of Kenya where it was raining from where we were.
We left for Kruger farms around 9:15 am and got back to IU House around 5:30 pm or so. The ride to both locations and back cost about 5000 shillings total, so about $10 for each of us. Incorporating the cost of lunch, I'd say there's not a lot of places in the U.S. where you can have a day this awesome for less than $50.
Well, I start rounding in the wards tomorrow; I have to up bright and early at 6 am to get to the hospital by 7, so it's kwaheri for now.
"Anyone who sees beauty and does not look at it will soon be poor." ~ Yoruba proverb
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