Sawa Sawa!

...means "everything is ok!"

The kenyan adventure is nearly over. We will really miss the country and the lovely language. We are so used to say "Jambo!" to everybody, the first days in ethiopia might be a bit confusing when we have to switch to Amaric, the ethiopian language...

The 3 days in the Masai Mara National Reserve have been quite short. The place is like a huge zoo full of animals, because they had just migrated from the southern Serengeti. We stayed in a camp ruled by authentic tourist masai outside the park and made 3 so called "game drives" (trips into the park), with a typical 4WD car with a roof to open and all the time in a group of 8 people. Just after we entered the park we could see big herds of beautiful happy animals in a beautiful endless landscape: zebras, gazelles, wildebeasts (i would say gnu), diferrent types of antilopes and later we discovered elephants, beautiful huge giraffes and lions while eating, gepards, hyanes, big birds, sleeping hippos at the river and funny cute monkeys at the picknick place. all in all it was the nice experience, especially to meet other muzungus (white people) like for example a swiss couple who is travelling around the world for 1,5 years and was just coming from asia! surprisingly there was as well a group of pupils from a kenyan boarding school in the camp...

Back in Nairobi we immediatly prepared for Mt. Kenya the next day. George the organiser from the Alliance Francaise gave us gloves and warm socks and when we arrived in the basecamp close to meru in 2800m the director of the "mountain school of adventure and leadership" gave us rented waterproof trousers, shoes, jackets and warm scarfs. there was a group of 90 administrative kenians doing a 2 month team-training who we were joining from time to time.... the next day we hiked with them, 9 educators, 4 cooks and one porter for our stuff (very nice jakob) to the next camp called "solo camp" in 3400m. after the dinner we sat around the fire in winter-clothes talking to freezing kenyan educators about politics and differences between germany, france and kenya. Next day we joined them doing mountain-climbing and one day later we went with a guide, a cook and jakob to the next camp in 4000 meters, we carried only our nearly empty bags (10percent of what they carried) but it was so heavy after a while, and the way was totally fluted by water from the rain the day before, so we had to balance from stone to stone, we were lucky when we arrived after 7,5 hours. There after the sun went down around 7 it was so damn could that we could only go into our sleeping bags, and sleep...the next day we started early in the morning for point Lenana, the 3.highest place in 4900m...well i managed until Elephant Valley (because they found an elephant-skellet there) in 4300m then my feet gave up in pain. Margot went on and managed the way to Lenana and back in 10 hours! sadly we have no picture of it.

the way back to the basecamp the next day was like flying, our feet were walking nearly from alone and on the dry ground it took us only the half time. Back in the basecamp we enjoyed a warm shower and sleeping on matrazes with only minus 5 degrees at night.

this evening we are flying to addis, we are looking forward to see this new world of ethiopia from that we don't know that much yet.

we would like to thank again Laurent, a french guy we met in Lamu, that he kept our luggage all the time in nairobi when we made the last 3 trips. Thanks Laurent and sorry for disturbing you all the time during your work!

m+a.