Sensory overload

The previous post which is dated Sunday, is actually from Saturday. This is today's post (I still haven't completely figured out composing these posts).

I awakened to blazing sunlight (we are 25 mi south of the equator) and magnificent very large birds of every color on my porch. Buffet breakfast outdoors was lovely with every imagineable offering. I toured the extensive gardens and grounds and then we started off on what was planned to be a road trip to see and countryside and Mt. Kenya (which is quite spectacular).

We pulled into a tiny town with a dirt road and street lined with shops and many people wandering about. Peter said he was going to try to find his "uncle". I wandered the streets shaking hands with everyone and taking photos.

Michael, the uncle is 10 years younger than Peter, the product of Peter's father's second wife. He is a conservationist/environmentalist which all sounded quite like featherbedding to me; I sure was wrong on this one!

He took us to his place of employment, http://www.whwf.org/index.htm, and the excitement began. First he gave us a 2 hour tour of the most innovative, exciting sustainable project you can imagine. The place is not open to the public. 40 Kenyan students at a time can be accomodated for a 3 day stay during which they learn, thru very exciting hands on projects and demonstrations, how to cook with homemade methane gas, how the earth was formed and what it will look like in 5o million years, how to dispose of sewage and household waste without septic tanks, odor, sewer lines, etc. They learn how to farm fish, grow their own food, plant trees, reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, live in the outdoors, care for sick and orphaned animals and much more. Each group that comes plants a different specie of tree and does other projects. The grounds are magnificently kept and this is a truly exciting project funded by many movie star peers of William Holden, and is longtime girl friend Stephanie Powers. There is probably much more about this in Wikipedia.

We then went on a game drive on 1400 acres of land owned by the Foundation. We saw warthog, wildebeest, waterbuck, impala, reedback, crowned crane (one of the most magnificent birds you can imagine), regular zebras, albino zebras, greve zebras, Mt. Kenya hartebeest (there are only three remaining in the world and I saw all three of them), rhinocerous, elaud, bongo and bushbuck. I have never heard of most of these; they can likely be googled if you would like to see them (try google images).

We then went to the Foundation animal orphanage. So what is animal orphanage? It is a place where they gather animals abandoned by their mothers or whose mothers were killed. This orphanage raises them and then releases them into the wild. We saw ostrich, colobus monkey, four other species of monkey, cheetah, 4 species of gigantic tortoise (5 feet long), wild pigs, mt. kenya porcupine and many others.

Stopped a country "hotel" where you would not want to spend the night. We had a huge kikuyu lunch at 4:30, before dropping off Michael, visiting his wife and kids once again, and then driving nearly 3 hours back to Nairobi.

An amazing and completely unexpected day seeing and visiting sites not available to tourists in an area on no tourist destinations. My kind of thing.

Tomorrow I make rounds at the Kenyatta National Hospital, see patients in the outpatient clinic, and in the afternoon will run a cadaver workshop on the balloon compression procedure for trigeminal neuralgia at the Aga Khan Hospital.

This is a mere fraction of my experiences on a sensational day. I wanted to post a few pictures but somehow that part of the blog is not working for me at this moment