hell's gate and beyond

well our good friend josh is coming to visit us for the weekend today so i thought i should tell you about the last half of our trip with greg before he arrived. josh is currently living in the nuba mountains of sudan... and we thought the kenyan facilities were primitive.


after climbing mt. longonot we ventured the next day to hell's gate national park, one of the only parks in kenya where you can walk or ride a bike, so we did both. the bikeride was through a beautiful red cliffed and towered landscape where we interacted with giraffes and zebras.



the hike was through an incredible canyon with several offshoots, intimidating depth and tight sections, including one bottleneck that we had to wait for over 200 schoolchildren to pour through in order to get back up.



the next day we took it "easy" with a boatride on lake naivasha to see the fisheagles, malachites and hippos and then did a 2 hour hike to a beautiful flamingo frequented craterlake. on the way we hiked through a relatively open area of forest and suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a group of 20 or more giraffes. we would walk past a stand of bushes to find them napping 40 feet away from us.



finally we headed for nairobi where we spent a packed 2 days before seeing greg off to the airport. greg quite enjoyed bargaining once he realized the power inherent in walking away. kylie was a bit more emotional about the whole thing, especially when the hawkers pulled dirty tricks like being really nice and friendly.