This weekend, four of my friends and I went on an adventure to Navaisha Lake and Hell’s Gate National Park. We had an amazing time, saw lots of animals, and really explored. Navaisha town is about 80 kilometers away from Nairobi, which means an hour and a half matatu ride. Woohoo! To start, we had to find the big matatu center in downtown Nairobi. We took a taxi, but we had to wait about thirty minutes to get a letter from our school saying we were students in Kenya that do not yet have pupil passes so that we could get discounts later on. That wasn’t a big deal. We just ended up starting a little later than expected.
Once we were on the matatu, we didn’t need to worry about much…until the matatu started to break down. We all suspected something was happening when there were a lot of beeps and suspicious noises coming from the driver’s area. I’m pretty positive we cruised downhill for about ten minutes in neutral before the driver got out by himself, Little Miss Sunshine style, and started trying to push the matatu uphill alone. At that point, it was pretty much hopeless for our little matatu. However, we were only about 2 kms outside of the town, and our group decided we would just walk the distance. About ten minutes later, we see our matatu drive by with everybody waving, being dragged by another matatu by a cable. I have no idea how they were expecting to stop but I guess that didn’t really matter. O and also, my friend fell down a hill when we started walking, which only added to the ridiculousness of the situation.
Not to worry…we reached Navaisha town. From there, we decided we would check out Crescent Island for the day, a place we thought was publicly part of a national park but is apparently privately owned. We took another matatu and found our way. It was a nice little hike up to the main owner’s house, and we ran into a TON of zebras and gazelles and whatnot. It was pretty awesome! Finally, when we reached the house, we found this really nice English woman, Linda. Her and her husband had apparently owned the place since the 70s or 80s. They were very friendly and helpful and gave us some advice on where to sleep for the night. Anyways, Crescent Island. It is the remains of an erupted volcano from way back in the day, so it is basically what it sounds like…an island in the shape of a crescent. From the top of the hill, you get a pretty good view of everything around there. Besides that, I don’t think any of us realized we were just going to be walking around with the animals, but that is what happened. On this island, there are just free-roaming giraffes, hippos, wildebeests, and some other animals. It was really cool because they weren’t in a cage or anything. You would see herds of them run by and I kind of felt like I was in the Lion King. It was the highlight of my weekend.
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| View from the hill |
After we were done there, we went to a campsite. However, on the way to our campsite, we took a very epic matatu ride. For one, we split up into two groups, so my friends, Dana and Devin, and I ended up riding in this lime green matatu. Keep in mind that these buses are designed to hold 14 passengers, but there’s always room for one more! I would say we had about 28 people in this one, including 9 in the first two rows. It was pretty awesome because we had our big bags of stuff, as well as people basically sitting on us. I also had some random man breathing on my shoulder/in my hair. It opened a whole new world of matatu-riding for me.
Once we all made it to the campsite, we had an awesome time. It was really relaxing. There was a restaurant there, so we didn’t have to worry about dinner, as well as tents to rent. I set up my hammock for about the second time! The cords weren’t quite long enough, so we rigged this ridiculous looking thing together because tents were somewhat expensive to rent. The dinner was one of the best I’ve had here, and the lack of stress within the group was great. We pretty much just chilled out the rest of the night and went to bed.
BUT, when we were going to bed, we heard some noises coming from the water. We looked over and there was another group shining their lights on a hippo! It was super exciting because we wanted to see some earlier in the day and were not able to. Then, the hippo got angry and started charging towards us. Good thing there was an electric fence! The hippo got even more angry and ran into the water, but it was a good end to the night.
We woke up this morning, planning on going to Hell’s Gate, but when we got there, they told us it was going to be $25 a person. In Kenya, that’s extremely expensive, and I don’t think we had that much on us. So we left and started the extreme matatu-sitting in the aisle-riding home. Maybe we can go back another time…
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