"take your bananas and shut up!"

apologies for the long blog-silence. february has been a crazy month and in the last three weeks i've been online about three times.

our very belated family holiday finally got going on the 14th with a very emotional reunion in the hotel in nairobi. i arrived halfway through the safari briefing which was totally disrupted by mum shrieking, leaping into the air and trying to break the land speed record to come and hug me. promptly followed by dad and alex, much to the surprise of the five total strangers also in the briefing. i think we're allowed that after five months apart though. i'd been kind of worried that, like it often is when you see people after a long time, there would be this awkward silence even though we had a lot to say but it was nothing like that. one trip to the giraffe centre later and it was pretty much like i hadn't been away. what was a bit weird was being a tourist again, but it meant nice food and comfy beds so, y'know, i got over that! other perks included being whizzed around in a big 4x4 safari van thing, instead of a diddy little matatu and staying in INCREDIBLE lodges. i've been here five months and hadn't realised service like that existed in kenya, but apparently it does. exclusive to simba lodges.

the safari itself was just incredible but i don't think travellerspoint allows long enough posts to cover the whole thing... just a few of the highlights were the leopard (finally!) and a performing elephant in samburu. as we were driving back to the lodge we passed an elephant having a slurpy drink from a puddle by the track and when we pulled up to take photos he started to dance about for us and wiggle his trunk around his tusks. cute isn't a word you associate with huge grey leathery things, but this really was. samburu is a weird place, the landscape is so, so arid (even after a thunderstorm) and it changes totally every few kilometres. there's not quite as much to see as in the mara though, because the animals are much more thinly spread. maybe it's just too dry to support as many?

after the samburu we headed down to the aberdares and treetops. we managed to upset our driver here, because i'd planned a trip back to kabiruini (the village where helen grew up) but the managers at the outspan hotel (the check in base for treetops) took a real dislike to our daring to plan our own itinerary. the way it works is that you check in and have lunch at the outspan in nyeri, then you're shuttled to treetops. all we wanted to do was to take a later shuttle, but apparently there wasn't one. after some nagging it turned out there was one, but it'd cost $20 each plus 2,800/- for the vehicle. more nagging. ok, the guy driving you to kabiruini can drive you to treetops, that'll be 600/-. we settled on that, but when we arrived it turned out that there was actually a later scheduled shuttle which we got on without paying anything extra. generally, people here go out of their way to help you, so a bunch of jumped up receptions doing their best to trash your plans is as surprising as it is annoying. it was worth it though - we got a lovely welcome at kabiruini and it was great to get away to 'real' kenya for an afternoon. i really enjoyed treetops itself as well, but i think the 'rents found it a bit too touristy and pretentious. true, the rooftop viewing place was jam-packed with chubby americans yelling about the fortunes they'd made it real estate, but i've been away from these strange people for so long that they were nearly as interesting as the elephants (which, by the way, had a scrap right under our cabin window. woweee)

we spent the next night in lake nakuru national park, which i hadn't visited properly before despite living right next door. the lodge was fine but nothing special...but we saw EIGHT rhinos, so who cares about the lodge?! i hadn't seen rhinos properly before so this was a real treat. they are actually enormous. the little ones are very very cute though, but sadly not little enough to fit into my rucksack.

and on to the masai mara. the contrast between this visit and when i went in september really couldn't have been greater. goodbye concrete shacks, hello phenomenal luxury. complete with 'house hippos'. the restaurant overlooked a hippo pool, and when we finished ordering drinks one night the waiter just goes 'and have you seen the hippo? it is walking' like he was just offering us another drink! about as casually as the black rhino which just wandered out of the bushes in front of our van on morning. it was so close we could hear it chewing it's breakfast. amazing - these are my favourites but i hadn't seen one properly before. probably because they're incredibly rare and we were incredibly lucky!

so on monday we finished our time as true tourists and were sort of catapaulted out of the luxury and into, er, nakuru via downtown nairobi. this was more like normality to me, but obviously not for the fam. they just went with it, right from the chaos of the shuttle stands to the very dilapidated taxi i bundled us into in nakuru. we spent the week moseying around nakuru, meeting people and visiting the placements. they were made really welcome at both baraka primary and jamii children's home. all the kids really love visitors, so a whole family group to stare at was just like christmas! they had a go at playing hangman with 6N, until we got told off for making too much noise and hangman became PE. they all really liked 'real' kenya as well as tourist kenya, although maybe kenyan timekeeping and forward planning was a bit of a shock.

so that's my attempt at cramming two packed weeks into a blog. mum, dad and alex will know i've missed loads of stuff off but you get the idea - it was great

as for me, my planned trip to rwanda next week has totally hit the rocks and i've changed my flights and everything again. it turns out that when my KENYAN visa expires i have to leave EAST AFRICA before i can come back into KENYA. anyone else see this as a bit odd? rwanda is still part of east africa, which left me the option of entering one of the warzones surrounding east africa (no) or accepting the immigration official's offer of a bribe for a new visa (also no). i'm still really quite crushed about it all, because i really wanted to visit rwanda, and i'm also really not ready to leave kenya, but i've rebooked my flight for tuesday and am trying to remember that being deported from rwanda to the uk (with all my stuff still in kenya) would have been considerably worse. so now i'll be arriving home on tuesday night. form an orderly queue guys...and bring hot water bottles because i hear it's still around 4 degrees? so this will probably be my last blog from kenya itself, but the weirdness of the reverse culture shock will probably be worth blogging about.

until then... xxxx