After finishing up a stressful week of final exams and papers including our 25 page grant proposals, we got to spend a week in the Mount Kenya region for our end-of-semester retreat. Our week started with a visit to a coffee farm, an organic dairy farm and milk-processing factory, and a tea farm and processing plant organized by a member of the Kenyan Parliament. It was really interesting to get to see some of the different industries in the region, particularly the tea industry, which is one of the largest in Kenya.
We spent the next few nights at the Castle Forest Lodge, situated on the slopes of Mount Kenya. The place was resonant of huts in Northern Europe. The buildings looked straight out of the hobbit and each room had rustic wood furniture and a stone fireplace (which was great because it was freezing at night). The cottages overlooked a lush green forest/jungle and when the sky was clear the peak of mount Kenya was visible in the background, the whole place was absolutely breathtaking. The next day we hiked for about five hours up part of the mountain and I can easily say it was one of the coolest hikes I have ever done. We spent a lot of it trekking through the jungle and skidding down precarious muddy slopes. We all ended up covered in mud with scratches and burns from the stinging plants. At the end we reached the most incredible waterfall cascading from a cliff above. We waded in the ice-cold water and admired the rainbow in the mist.
The following day we visited the Mpala research center and camped in basic permanent tents. We spent the night around a bonfire singing Maasai songs with the guards and teaching them some of our own. The starts were breathtaking and we spend hours looking up at them. The next day we did a brief game drive and then got to hear from some of the researchers at the center about their projects. They ranged from tracking the behaviors of lions to developing rain gauges to assist in agriculture to cataloguing insects on a specific plant species.
After Mpala, we drove to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, situated on the equator, where we stayed in luxury tents (which could hardly be considered tents) that overlooked a watering hole where animals gathered all throughout the day and night with mount Kenya looming in the background. We spent our few days here relaxing by the pool, going on early morning sunrise game drives, visiting a chimpanzee sanctuary, and getting to feed a black rhino. Ol Pejeta is home to three of the six remaining white rhinos in the world, although we didn’t get the opportunity to see them. We did see cheetahs, elephants, buffalo, rhinos, giraffes, and many other animals though. The week was a wonderful end to the most incredible semester in the most beautiful country I have ever visited.
We spent the next few nights at the Castle Forest Lodge, situated on the slopes of Mount Kenya. The place was resonant of huts in Northern Europe. The buildings looked straight out of the hobbit and each room had rustic wood furniture and a stone fireplace (which was great because it was freezing at night). The cottages overlooked a lush green forest/jungle and when the sky was clear the peak of mount Kenya was visible in the background, the whole place was absolutely breathtaking. The next day we hiked for about five hours up part of the mountain and I can easily say it was one of the coolest hikes I have ever done. We spent a lot of it trekking through the jungle and skidding down precarious muddy slopes. We all ended up covered in mud with scratches and burns from the stinging plants. At the end we reached the most incredible waterfall cascading from a cliff above. We waded in the ice-cold water and admired the rainbow in the mist.
The following day we visited the Mpala research center and camped in basic permanent tents. We spent the night around a bonfire singing Maasai songs with the guards and teaching them some of our own. The starts were breathtaking and we spend hours looking up at them. The next day we did a brief game drive and then got to hear from some of the researchers at the center about their projects. They ranged from tracking the behaviors of lions to developing rain gauges to assist in agriculture to cataloguing insects on a specific plant species.
After Mpala, we drove to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, situated on the equator, where we stayed in luxury tents (which could hardly be considered tents) that overlooked a watering hole where animals gathered all throughout the day and night with mount Kenya looming in the background. We spent our few days here relaxing by the pool, going on early morning sunrise game drives, visiting a chimpanzee sanctuary, and getting to feed a black rhino. Ol Pejeta is home to three of the six remaining white rhinos in the world, although we didn’t get the opportunity to see them. We did see cheetahs, elephants, buffalo, rhinos, giraffes, and many other animals though. The week was a wonderful end to the most incredible semester in the most beautiful country I have ever visited.