Exploring Mount Kenya

Pole, pole -sorry, sorry I haven't written in a while. I have been busy with Swahili classes and guests from Sweden amongst other things. A few weekends ago we set off to Mount Kenya, the highest peak in the country with an altitude of nearly 6000m. As usual when traveling in Kenya we set off early in the morning but the roads where really good and we got to the hotel in no time. The hotel itself wasn't a fancy place at all, something I had already suspected when I had a look at their website, have a look for yourselves Mount Kenya Leisure Lodge. The very nice hotel Fairmount could only offer our Swedish guests a rate of 708 dollars for a double, you have got to be fcking kidding? So we settled for the less nice hotel with an interior from the 70's, at least we were reminded of our happy up-bringing.

The surroundings were as breathtaking as the cool mountain air, it looks somewhat like the European Alps but slightly more exotic. We hit the road after a mediocre lunch and went straight for the national park. I don't know what we had expected, bad planning maybe? Of course this would not be like other safaris we had been to, I mean going uphill on a rocky road in the middle of the forest, well we could not see much. At about 3000 m there was finally a base camp and we got out of the car to have a look at the surroundings. We decided to go for a little walk up the mountain, I have to say it was a bit scary since there are wild animals living even at this height. There was a distinct animal odour probably buffalo since there were some large poo here and there..... We continued the walk becoming more and more puffed, breathing like a 80-year olds and poor Mats was carrying Noah on his shoulders as well, the air is much thinner up there and contains less oxygen, time to turn around before turning blue.


We went back to the hotel and enjoyed a GT in the warming afternoon sun. Since the lunch was pretty much a disaster we thought we could head to one of the nicer hotels for dinner.

By 6 o´clock we were back in the car and took off, we passed a sign with the word equator written on it, pretty cool. They say that the water swirls the other way in the sink in the Southern hemisphere, got to test that..not that I know which way it swirls in the Northern hempisphere...

Anyhow we drove and we drove and decided check a sign saying restaurant, we got there and thought the place looked even dodgier than the place we already stayed at. We drove and we drove and became more and more hungry, finally we arrived at the "very nice hotel" and they would not let us in because we were too late for dinner. GAH!

So we had to turn around, decided to check the dodgy place out anyway. While we were sitting there sipping on our drinks in the more or less empty restaurant we came up with the brilliant idea of calling "our" hotel to see if they could still fix dinner. Indeed they could, 2.5 hour later we were back at the hotel (they must have laughed at us behind our backs). Dinner turned out to be pretty nice.

We slept like logs that night.