Monday 20 April
Off to Amboseli which is at the bottom of Mt Kilimanjaro today. We leave at 7.30 and traffic is unbelievable. When we clear the city after 30 minutes we head to Ocean Sole. This is a private organisation that was set up to recycle discarded thongs or flip flops as they are called over here.
We spend about 40 mins there and it is fascinating how the operation works. It is all manual labour from scrubbing them clean, to shaping and polishing them and then gluing the shapes together to form pieces of art. They do have polishing machines and a template cutter.
There is a group of 20 women who collect washed up thongs from the ocean and rivers. They are paid for their collection. They expect to collect 1 million thongs this year. Ocean Sole exports all round the world and have a store in Miami Florida.
Now we are off to Amboseli, we have to head back into the city area. We are told the drive will involve a lot of trucks as we are travelling on the main route between Mombassa and Nairobi, a major transport corridor.
It is horrendous! After about 45 minutes the road becomes single lane each way. The trucks are very slow barely getting above 80 on the flat and going up hills some are crawling at 20. This makes for impatient drivers.
I lost count of the number of head ons that nearly occurred. Cars/trucks are braking to let other cars in or there would be a head on. As you are waiting to pass when the road is clear, suddenly cars behind you come roaring past. On one occasion we were the second car behind a truck when a suv went past us and then a van was outside of the suv! There was a lot of ducking in and braking. We had two occasions where we had to brake and veer off the road or we would have had a head on!
The road surface was good, very few potholes. We reached the turn off safely, but then we had another 45 minutes of African massage to the gates of the park. From there it should have been another 30 minutes to our site, but rains had caused the direct route to become impassable so we had to go the long way round and it took an hour, with us finally arriving around 1.35. However the cloud cleared briefly so we could get a glimpse of the snow capped Mt Kilimanjaro.
On the way in we saw a large herd of 40 elephants and after lunch, which was pretty ordinary, we saw hippos on our way to our cabin.
For the afternoon we visited a Maasai village. Yesterday in Nairobi at our tour managers suggestion, we bought some biscuits and lollies to give to the children.
It was an amazing experience where we were welcomed with singing and jumping. They showed us how they start a fire with acacia and cedar wood, they explained some of the medicine they use and how they get from bark and plants and even took us inside a house, built out of wood and dried cow dung. We then had the hard sell to buy something and after that we gave our gifts to the children - pandemonium. Once we started we were swamped, but there was a warriors there who had a thin stick and he would threaten to hit them if they became too greedy and to keep them in line. Did not work!
The tribe consists of two families with a total of 150 members. The men can have multiple wives and each wife must have her own house which she must build. One of their medicines is a bark which they say is their viagra! The husband can decide which wife he will sleep with on any night. The men can only marry someone from outside the village.
It is raining as we leave and raining again when we have finished dinner. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
The internet is really slow and patchy so photos might have to wait.
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