Mud Mud Mud

It’s rained for the last all week with the exception of yesterday. At points the only way to get to and from our house has been through knee-deep water. Some how the poor weather has made the realities of living full time with most of my coworkers more achingly apparent. With few exceptions we all get along, but solitude is becoming a rare and cherished luxury. We took advantage of the one day of sunshine yesterday and took a day trip the Gede Ruins, which are about 70 miles from where we live. I kept feeling as if I were part of an Indian Jones movie. The ruins are from about 800 AD and very little in the area has changed. Because it’s the “off season” for the tourist industry here, we had the park virtually to ourselves. The ruins encompass most of a Swahili village though very few of the structures have had the vines and trees of the jungle cleared away from them. During our self-guided tour, I looked down at my friend Sam’s legs and saw that ants were rushing up them. In a panic I looked down and saw that the ground all around me was moving and furthermore that ants were now storming up my legs. I yelped and we both skipped out of the area frantically trying to get the ants off of us. This provided comic relief to the rest of the group who were looking at another building near by. There are so many things that I’ve seen on TV but never experienced; this is one of them. We had walked into what seemed to be a river of ants fifteen feet wide or so. You could see the ground but barely. The day went mostly without huge events after that, other than the fact that the 65 mi trip is a 2.5-hour bus ride.

In other news, earlier this week at work a few of us interns decided to take the sub par internet situation at the office by the horns but ended up starting a little war in the process. In doing some research at a cyber café I had come to the conclusion that (what we thought was) our router was too many generations from the office’s modem to connect us to the Internet. So we decided to move it to the other side of the building and connect directly to the modem bypassing several hubs in the process. Weelllll turns out that we disconnected the receiver and not a wireless router!!!! I guess in Kenya the Internet is received wirelessly from main transmitters in town and your receiver must be in a direct line of site with the ISP’s transmitter and then sent throughout the office. So we single handedly knocked out the Internet connection for the entire office. OOPs? Aw well, it was a humbling experience and we know whom to turn to now for our “IT needs”. More news later.


We were soaked after our first run. My shirt is light gray when not drenched.


This is a great depiction of the ruins. Notice the vines in the foreground. It was all so surreal.


The Palace is the center of the village and the largest building.





This monkey was running around on top of the walls of the first mosque we walked through.


Boabo Trees like these dot the country side in this part of Kenya. They are so bottom heavy. This one was only 2 stories tall but as big around as a VW bug at the bottom