Esther

Watch the video

Hi everyone. I have been trying to upload video but it doesn't seem to be working. Very frustrating. I still can do still images though. To the right is an image of Rick holding an average size avocado we bought in the local market for about 30 cents USD. Rick is an American teaching english in Turkey. He was here with his friend Carrie for a week, afterwards they took the train to Nairobi which normally takes about 6-8 hours instead took 21 hours because of engine problems.

The week before Rick and Carrie were here our friends Bob and Juliette were visiting. Bob and their kids stayed here while Juliette (who works for CDC) was mostly in Nairobi working. Max and Esther had a great time with their old buddies. Max really missed them.

Three families (Bob and Juliette, Danny and Mary, Kayla and Alan) are on our way to Mombassa this weekend. We'll fly there and take a train back. should be another adventure and hopefully I'll have a post up soon after returning.

Oh! we took delivery of our RAV4 last week. it's a great car! It's a little small for our needs but it's a great car for around town.

Hiking Mount Elgon

We did some short hikes off the dirt road to the famous caves here. These are just enormous caves, they aren’t very deep but they are huge (see photo). Apparently elephants travel to these caves to lick salts and minerals off the walls. We didn’t see any but we could see where they rub their tusks against the cave walls.

At the end of the drive we hiked in high altitude towards the rim of the crator. I was really feeling the high altitude, my heart was really pumping! But Max was an amazing hiker. He left us in the dust to walk with one of the other families (who are very experienced hikers) to hike with (and impress) his girl friend, Hannah. Although on the way back he walked with us instead, complaining and whining to be carried. That was excruciating! It was hard to enjoy the scenery carrying two tired toddlers.

The Beast

Wanted to write a little about our trip to Mount Elgon. Before we left I had our car serviced and in the process many problems were discovered. New shocks were needed, no surprising with the road conditions here, and a new clutch was needed. It also turns out, unknown to us at the time we bought this car, that it’s hard to get parts for Nissans in Kenya. What the mechanic has to do is remove the old part, send it to Nairobi for an exact match (sometimes the match isn’t so exact and they have to send it back) before they can install a new part. What a hassle! Well we decided not to take the car up Mt. Elgon, it almost forced us to cancel the trip when Mark, one of the Walter Reed expats offered to lend us his ‘beast’ to drive. The Beast is a late 70’s Land Cruiser. He’s in the middle of restoring it (see photo in gallery), I think… No air conditioning, none of the gauges work, it’s enormous with those bench seats, and noisy. But you can get a huge amount of stuff/people in this thing. It didn’t drive that well on tarmac, there was a sort of delay when making small steering adjustments I had to get used to but off road this thing really shined.

We were in The Beast climbing Mt. Elgon on the second day, beautiful forest dirt road, amazing views, high altitude when we stopped for a pee break and someone asked me how much petrol I had left, I said I didn’t know, they asked if I had filled up at the last town before we entered the park, I say no. their eyes widened as they reminded me that this car is a huge gas hog. Yikes. We decided to just leave the car where we were and all piled in one car for the last 5k before arriving at hiking area. If need be I’d just coast down, hopefully. Well believe it or not we were able to drive it down and got gas on the way back to Kisumu, whew! A close call.

Quick Update

I know, I'm bad. I haven't posted anything much in quite a while. I'll do better, I promise. This post is just to let you know that FINALLY I am able to upload photos again so I've added about 6 galleries to the collection! Check out the photo galleries link. I am still unable to upload any video from home, though.

We've had visitors from America for the past 10 days or so. Bob, Juliet and their kids Roxanne and Isadora. Max has been having a great time with his old buddy. And I've had a great time sharing our Africa experience. Can't wait to show YOU around here too!