Rondo Rondo

As mentioned in our last post, Marc, my mom and I are back from our week of vacation. We had a wonderful time and did not want to come back. (Even though Kapsowar is very beautiful, it sure is nice having gourmet meals made for you every day and laying around reading and walking in the jungle for a while.)

We went to two places on our vacation. The first destination was the Kakamega Rainforest. Here we stayed at a place called the Rondo retreat centre and I must say that it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We also went to Lake Nakuru to go on safari but Marc will do a post about this after.

In the matatu on the way there.

The centre is set up with a main house and several cottages around the grounds. We stayed in the main house and had the veranda and BOTH living rooms all to ourselves the whole time.

A crazy flower on the grounds. It was a type of banana plant!!!

Here is a typical day at Rondo:
Rise at about 7:45 and leisurely head down to breakfast. Breakfast was a piece of fruit (mango, passion fruit etc..) with cereal, followed by eggs made any way you like and bacon and toast.

My mom enjoying the fruits of her breakfast.

After breakfast we went for a jungle hike. The first day we walked through the rainforest and saw hundred of butterflies. Monkeys were also seen in abundance both days. We climbed up a lookout point and had a great view of the forest as well as some areas where some nursery trees are growing.

A blue monkey

A colobus monkey

A binoculus monkey

This is a parasitic fig tree that starts out as small roots and slowly wraps itself around an existing tree and strangles it to death. The tree then dies and all that is left is the fig tree and you can't even eat the figs!!
Inside the evil fig tree
On the trail

The second day we did the hill walk where we walked to to top of a hill (imagine that!) ;) and had a great view of the Kakamega Forest. We also went into a bat cave. We had decided the day before that the hill walk and bat cave would be a great idea and when I was imagining a bat cave, I was imagining a tall cave (at least 10 feet) and if the bats flew over my head it wouldn't be a problem because they would stay close to the top of the cave. However, the cave we went into was barely six feet high and in some places was about 5 feet high. This made from some very loud screams emanating involuntarily from my mother and I and looks of annoyance from Eunice (our guide) and Marc.

Eunice and the bats.

Crouching to get away from the bats. My mom is only smiling because she knew Marc was taking a picture.

Our afternoons were usually spent reading on the veranda. Here is the view we saw when we looked up from our books.

Sometimes we went for a walk to look at the beautiful flowers on the grounds!

At 4:30 high tea was served on the veranda with a very large piece of cake. We did A LOT of eating on this trip!

The view from inside our bed. After an amazing full course dinner we headed to bed to start another day of relaxing.