Adventure Day!

Here's the pics from the trip!
1. The kids who came on the trip, from l to r: Simon (9th grade), Agape (8th grade, also John's oldest child), Ann (8th grade), Joseph (5th grade), and Jeffrey (7th grade, the one who ran away from school a few weeks ago).
2. Here's a pic of the water hyacinth covered river, with Kilimambogo in the bakground. The distubed section of green in the foreground is where the hippos have been eating it.
3. One view of 14 Falls
4. Check out the tree growing out of that rock- sweet roots!
5. All of us, me in the foreground, and about 60% of the falls in the background.

So...
I'm planning/hoping/praying to hike up Mt. Kenya in about four weeks. It's a 17,000 ft. mtn (although I won't be topping out because the last few hundred feet are technical rock climbing and I can't do that anymore) so I figured that it would be wise for me to do some training/see where my knee is at before I attempt such a venture.
So, with that in mind, yesterday I led a trip of myself, teacher Nancy, and five of the best academically performing kids from AMCC to Kilimambogo, the highest mountain around. I've been looking at it since I got here, and had spoken with many people about wanting to walk to the top. It actually doesn't look that big, but since it's in the middle of a plain it sticks up pretty well. I thought that by myself it would be about a half-day of hiking, but since I had Nancy and the kids I planned for the trip to take the whole day.
Boy did it.
Yesterday was definitely an adventure, and a reminder that I'm actually not as adventurous as I had thought. Things started out normally (we left late and took too long in town gathering supplies), but as we came upon the hill there were a number of surprises in store for us:
1. The matatu does NOT drop us right at the gate to the park.
- So all seven of us got on 3 motorcycles and paid a dollar each to get to the gate to the park.
2. It's a Kenyan National Park. Meaning that it is not so expensive for Nancy and the kids to get in (the kids were about 60 cents each) but is for me ($20) b/c I'm not a Kenyan citizen or offical resident.
3. In order to be in the park, Kenyan or not, I have to have a Kenyan Wildlife Service Guard with me the whole time, which costs $20 for the first 6 hours, and $40 if I go over that.
- All of this meant that I didn't have enough money for us to get into the park. This was pretty deflating for me, because I was wanting to hike, but mostly because we had told the kids that this trip was a reward for doing well on their recent end-of-term exams. I had taken them on this 2-hour long trip to get to the gates and get turned away. Bummer.
So, we called the motorcycle-taxis to come back, and paid them again to take us back to where they had picked us up in the first place.

4. The fourth thing I found out was good news: Fourteen Falls is very close to Kilimambogo!
So close, in fact, that we decided God was telling us to go there instead of Kilimambogo! So we took a short matatu ride, got out, and enjoyed the day at Fourteen Falls (see pictures). We got to see a river covered 100% in water hyacinth, Hippos feeding (though really we just saw like the mouth of one for about three seconds), a 140 yd-wide, 25 ft. tall waterfall, a tree growing out of a rock, and more mzungus than I've seen in this area (4 total). We had a nice day, ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches and fruit for lunch, and had a really fun time playing on the rocks in the river.
We also noticed that Kilimambogo (about 4 miles away) was rained on but we stayed pretty dry, so that was cool to see that if we had gone there we would have gotten soaked but were dept dry at the waterfall (ironically).
Other things that I found out about Kilimambogo also made it apparent that it was good we didn't go:
- It's a 1800 ft. ascent from the bottom to the top
- It's 6.4 miles from the gate to the top, making it almost 13 round trip.
- It's completely forrested except for a small area at the top. I had thought it was completely bald (that's what I get from judging the mtn. from 30 miles away).

So it turns out that we wouldn't have been able to do it like I wanted to anyway (I had thought it would be like 5 miles max). In the end, the kids had a good time, as did Nancy, and we were all safe so it was a succesful day.
Except that this whole trip originated as an opportunity for me to test my hiking ability, and that didn't happen at all. Therefore, I'm thinking of going back to Kilimambogo this Thursday and trying to get to the top and back in under 6 hours (so I don't have to pay an extra $20). I haven't done much touristy stuff since I've been here, and I'm spending my own money, and it's my day off, so I'm feeling good about it. Feel free to pray for me! It'll be just me and the guard, and will be the longest hike I've done since my knee got jacked.