You’re in luck! This is a very efficient blog post because it is three separate posts all rolled in to one! Though it’s really just a recap of our past three weekends in Nairobi with lots of pictures…

Three weekends ago we spent Saturday afternoon in the neighborhood of Karen. Bill, his colleague Victor, and I took a taxify to the Kazuri bead factory. “Kazuri” means “small and beautiful” in Swahili, which is a perfect name for the company, as they hand make small and beautiful things, mostly beads for jewelry. The mission of Kazuri, while beautiful, is anything but small, as the workshop employs over 300 disadvantaged single mothers from around Nairobi. I feel very happy purchasing beads, necklaces, and earrings from their shops around Kenya as I know I am supporting a great company.

We were given a free tour of the factory which was really cool! After we saw the big machines that make clay from processing soil from around Kenya, we walked around the first room where women were molding all different beads from the wet clay. There are so many different shapes, and each bead has a form mold made out of clay, so that each bead is as close to the same as possible. Then we moved to the next big room, where the kilns are and the hand painting happens. And the big painting room was so fun and lively, and beautiful things were everywhere! There were bins and bins and bins of beads! Bill wants to remake the necklace he made a year and a half ago for me, so we spent a good thirty minutes digging through the mixed bead buckets looking for the smallest blue-ish beads possible. It was fun! Then we had lunch at Talisman, arguably the best restaurant in Nairobi. It was a great day! Then the next day we had brunch with Bill’s colleagues/our friends Victor (again!) and Priscilla, then we played tennis. That was a good day too!

 

Two weekends ago I had a work team building event at The Forest, so Bill went on a hike with a group of folks from Active Motion, a local guide company, to Ngong Hills. He sent a lot of great selfie snapchats! The team building event was lots of fun, even though (in true Kenyan fashion) it “started” 2 hours late. The plan was to get to The Forest for lunch at 12:30, then do archery at 2:30, then do ziplining at 3:30. Well, we basically skipped lunch and did the activities out of order. But it was a super casual day, so we really didn’t need to have a schedule. I have never been ziplining before and it was so much fun! And then at archery I got a bull’s eye on MY FIRST SHOT!!! Right on the pupil! I should have just stopped right there because I could never repeat the feat. Then on Sunday we played frisbee. Boring for you guys to hear about, but really fun for us to do!

 

One weekend ago, last weekend, was a really eventful weekend! On Saturday, we left the apartment at 5am to meet up with the Active Motion tour group to drive to the Aberdares Mountain Range for a full day long hike up Elephant “Hill”. I write “Hill” in quotations because this “Hill” has a 3,000 foot change in elevation from trailhead to summit. So yeah, it’s a really really really large “Hill”. I was not completely aware of this fact when we signed up for this hike, but I did warn Bill that I do not fare well in high elevation, especially if there is a pretty drastic and fast change in elevation. I was quite light-headed and short of breath for the last hour and a half as we neared the top. I kept being told by fellow hikers to drink water, but my Camelbak water bladder backpack has that drinking hose thing, and the suction hurt my ears and head so I didn’t want to drink water. Luckily I had a Nalgene water bottle too, but by that point, Bill was carrying most of my stuff and my water wasn’t always at the ready.

There was a big group of about 30 people, including a few frisbee folks and our friend Victor (from the previous weekends) and his friend Joy. The hike began with an easy first hour of warm up hiking, followed by the beautiful bamboo forest. After the continuous uphill climb in the bamboo forest, we reach The Point of Despair. This is a flat grassy plateau – perfect for lunch – with an amazing view of where we came from, and the daunting view of where we need to go; about a mile straight up. By this point in the hike, the 30 of us have broken off into smaller groups of varying speeds, and Bill and I are now hiking with 3 other ladies in the second half of the pack. Us 4 ladies were definitely happy to have a brave strong man in our company because this part of the hike was a bit scary! #feminism

We were now so high up that even though we were above the rain clouds, there was so much fog we could only see like a 30 foot radius around us. Except when the fog lifted for less than a second and we saw a cool looking lonely tree on the summit! YES! We pushed really hard for those final 500 feet of straight stairs… except that since there was no one up there, we realized it wasn’t actually the summit. The fog lifted again, and we saw what we now thought was the real summit so we climb that one! Now repeat that last sentence FIVE TIMES!!!!! It became a hilarious yet not hilarious running joke because every time the fog lifted for a second, another summit was revealed and one of us would incredulously shout with despair “Oh my God!”. What made this part scary was the lack of visibility, not being able to hear any of the guides or other hikers when we would yell out because the wind was howling and the thunder was so loud, and we weren’t always 100% certain we were following the “trail”. There were little white plastic ribbons that we were following, but then those white plastic ribbons turned to red cloth (permanent) ribbons which registered in my head more as “danger!” and not so much as “this is the correct way to go, yes keep going up and up”. After our 4th fake summit, we yell out and hear a response from a group behind us!! I was so happy to hear that one of the guides was with that group because it meant I wasn’t going to die on that mountain! We are now on our way to the real real real summit, and run into the group on their way back down! They didn’t wait for everyone because it was quite cold up there, but seeing everyone alive really gave me a second wind, because I was ready to turn back. But I 100% could not have done it without Bill. He waited for me. He carried things for me when I couldn’t. He made sure I was hydrating. He told me I can do it when I was too terrified to move because I thought I would fall off the mountain at the parts where there’s a little bit of pathway next to a sheer cliff. There was one last vertical ascent and we made it! It was hard and I was very scared, but I am so glad in hindsight that we made it to the top. All in all, it was a successful 9 hour hike, and part of what powered my descent was my extreme desire to just be back on flat ground. #myeverest

The next day we deservedly slept in a bit and had a lazy morning of laundry and breakfast. Then it was time to get dressed up to go to the Kenya Derby at Ngong Race Course! One of the design projects I managed was a revamp of the VIP areas of the grandstand at the horse race track, so I got a handful of free tickets to the derby and gave them out to colleagues and friends. All the VIPs said the space looked fantastic! Since this was the biggest race day of the year, it was a huge event, with lots of vendors with food, drinks, games for kids, live music and entertainment and lots of people! We bet on every race and came up net negative 1,000KSH (about ten bucks) BUT we picked the winning horse for the big Kenya Derby race! It was a really fun day and the weather was perfect! Lots of friends came out too, so it was a fun social event for everyone. There was a funny moment when a horse got lose before his race and just kept running up and down the track having a great time while all the handlers were chasing him. It was quite entertaining. I also had popcorn, ice cream, and two dawa cocktails (see previous post in which I talk about Bill’s birthday), which was a perfect ending to a great past 3 weeks in Kenya!