Lake Nakuru

In my true blogging fashion, I am behind in my Africa posts too!! The next day we left Nairobi and headed for our first animal adventure in Lake Nakuru. It was about a 3 hour drive - although I think it might have been more. It was interesting to get out of the big city and see what more rural parts of Africa looked like. Unfortunately taking pictures while driving doesn't turn out well so I will just have to describe it. They drive on the left side of the road - or at least that is the way it is supposed to be. Really you spend about equal time on the right side too. Most roads are two lane highways so if you want to go a good pace you have to do a lot of passing. You also get the opportunity to swerve out of your lane to avoid craterous pot holes. Sometimes they span the whole road so you just have to slow down and try and navigate them. They also have lots of random speed bumps - I think it is just to make sure you are really awake =>. To the side of the road you see people walking. Most people if they want to go somewhere they walk. Sometimes you can see someone doing laundry at the river. You can see an assortment of things being carried on people's heads: 5 gallon buckets of water, big bundles of sticks, baskets, bags full of veggies to sell at the market, suitcases etc. The women tie their babies to their backs with a shawl. Groups of young children walk along the side of really busy roads - probably on their way to school. You can see bunches of animals, but maybe not the ones you would expect to see in Africa: cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and donkeys. We saw all sorts of donkeys; some were carring big loads, some were pulling carts but it was funny because when we started to play the game who's the first to find 15 donkeys - they were harder to find. At some parts of the drive you would see markets - usually for vegetables- although sometimes it was clothes, shoes, material, charcoal, or whatever else people might need. People would bring their stuff in and stack it up to display and sell it. It was neat to see them with potato pyramid with the last potato stacked directly on top of one other potato. We also drove by many brightly painted buildings. They were generally advertisements for products that had nothing to do with what was sold there. Advertisers pay people to let them paint their buildings. I guess that's what you do in lou of bilboards. We saw a lot of farm land. Some in the form of shambas - which were peoples individual land with their gardens. Some were comercial; there were a lot of tea fields in the area - that were beautiful! Even though we were enjoying soaking in the scenery somehow it felt like we were never going to get to Lake Nakuru -- maybe it was just too soon for along drive after our crazy long flights out! Or maybe I was just excited about getting to see African animals! Lake Nakuru is one lake in a line of lakes that is along the rift valley - which is a large valley on the east side of Africa that was formed by volcanic action. This is a picture of the valley with the dormant volcanoes across the valley. It was beautiful. I didn't actually get a lot of time to look though, because the lookout point was surrounded by tourist shops. We weren't shopping and made that clear, but the shop keepers kept insisting that we just look. By the time I had "just looked" at nearly everyone's shop I was back by the van and I figured if I walked back to take another look at the valley I might have to look at all of their shops again too. So I just got back in the van!

I like this picture of the volcano with the top blown off.

After traveling for what seemed like forever we finally came to the town of Nakuru. Woohoo almost there -- or not. Our clutch went out in the van (I didn't even know they made stick shift vans!) And we got this picture because we were stopped at the side of the road. Nakuru was a pretty busy place with lots of cars and pedestrians. It was fun to be a people watcher as we sat wondering what we would do.

The thing that I noticed was that for the most part people dressed nicely. Most men wore dress pants and a button down shirt, and the women wore skirts or dresses and half of them were very fancy. The kids really liked this guy -- it's hard to tell from the picture but he is wearing a scout shirt. It was not out of the ordinary to see people pushing big loads of things down the road. I like the push carts filled with 5 gallon plastic jugs of water. It had to be pretty heavy. Unfortunately I thought it seemed rude to just take pictures of people living their lives and minding their own business so now that I'm home I find I don't have nearly enough pictures of what we saw (animals on the other hand we have way too many pictures!!!)