Friday, 23 January 2010- lost in the market!

Today started early for me- I went outside to shower at 4:40am in order to be ready for the 5:30am bus trip to see the sunrise at the top of a mountain overlooking Lake Nakuru. It still felt good to rinse off, however. The ride lasted for a while and the sunrise was beautiful! I will post pictures if I can sometime. We also saw more baboons, as usual. In the morning, baboons are very sleepy and don’t mind if you get close, although they still don’t let them touch you. Some of them also like to watch the sunrise from on the cliff. The baboons on the cliff are different from the ones that invade our living area- they are sweet and do not attack us! Later in the day at our camp, a bold baboon stole a bowl of sugar from one of my classmates and ran away with it!


Picture: A Mark Rothko-esque photo of the sunrise at Nakuru.

Picture: a tired baboon(of the nice baboons) greets the early morning sun.


Pic: Baboon (of the troublesome baboons) climbing over the fence into our compound to steal our food :).

After breakfast, the group went into downtown Nakuru to experience the market. People approach you to sell things all the time and we were supposed to learn to barter with them. We began to do this and then one of my other classmates and I started to walk down the main street in Nakuru where many people were selling things. Many of the sellers bring crafts from somewhere else in Kenya and sell in Nakuru, where they live. Some of them will try to get you to wear hats that say ‘mzungu’, a non-derogatory name for ‘white person.’ They will also try to tell you that the Swahili word for ‘no’ actually means ‘how much.’ They are clever, entertaining to talk to, and not dangerous at all to engage in conversation, although they will try many things to sell their merchandise. My friend and I began to wonder where everyone was as we didn’t see any of our classmates in the street. We walked into an internet café and began to e-mail. I was shocked when Simon, one of the MSID staff, walked in and said, “You guys are HERE?!” Apparently, we were not supposed to have left the bus and everyone had been looking for us! There was still another woman missing and we eventually found her back at the bus. Anyway, we stayed in Nakuru a little longer and then went back to the park.

I took a nap in the afternoon before we went on our final ride around the park to see the nature. In all of our transportation, we have taken the same bus that I mentioned earlier- it has ‘Komba’ written on the front, which means “Bush baby.” The busdriver is super impressive and had to back about 500 feet today after a tree blocked our path. Anyway, today on the ride we saw a waterfall. We were also VERY lucky to see a leopard far off in the distance in the tree! I used my (read: my mom’s) binoculars to spot it.

In general, the park is beautiful. However, it looks worn and many of the trees are falling down due to climate change. Our guide explained to us how one species of tree burned down and why we saw so many of them (huge trees) keeled over on the side of a hill. During a drought, there was a fire and many of the trees burned. Further, black rhinos like to eat the bark and so the rhinos destroyed the trees further after the fire burned them. Before the fire, this park had the largest forest of this kind of tree in Eastern Africa. This was a reminder to me that climate change is already affecting many places in the world and is not only a fear of the future!

Parting shot of Lake Nakuru National Park:

I will miss this place!