I got back from Naivasha yesterday, where I’ve been on Youth Leaders’ Retreat. It was going to be a Youth Retreat, but the Youth couldn’t make it, so we decided to go anyway and plan for a camp later this year instead.
Naivasha is north-west of Nairobi and is next to quite a large lake and the Hell’s Gate National Park, which we went around a couple of times. On Saturday we saw quite a few animals and I think I got some good photos – I’ll find out later in the week when I get the pictures developed.
We also had a look around the campsite and played some basketball and had a bit of a swim. The campsite was quite nice, although the woman in charge of the campsite liked her rules – eighty shillings to go down to the lake, pay twice if you have a swim, play basketball and then want to swim again…!
In the evening we cooked sausages and potatoes over a campfire our askari (guard) had lit for us. (We told him we’d feed him if he lit our fire for us!) Then we watched The Matrix on my laptop on the verandah overlooking to lake, and our askari seemed to enjoy watching it as well.
On Sunday we managed to get the fire lit ourselves eventually, using a few pages of a Graham Greene novel we’d found in the chalet to help start it. We cooked breakfast, hung around for a while and then went back to the game park. We went for a walk along the gorge which was fun but tiring as it was pretty hot.
Shortly after we’d got back to the car it started raining, and by the time we’d got back to the chalet it was raining so hard I got soaked in the two meter run from the car to the chalet! It was also thundering continuously, and it was quite a contrast to the hot sunny weather we’d had earlier.
Despite having been in Kenya for over three months now I haven’t seen much of the country outside of Nairobi. Nairobi is pretty developed, western, dirty and crowded, but Naivasha was really beautiful and seemed like a totally different world. I finally felt like I was really in Africa!
Who’s Graham Greene?