Sunday is a serious day of rest. Kenya is a very religious country with posters in all the houses depicting god as not only great and glorious, but also as the government. One particular poster compares each ministry (finance, transport) to sections of the bible explaining why god is government. I found this pretty wild. Anyways, Since there is no working on Sundays, we took the opportunity to get a bit of an adventure in the wilderness that western Kenya has to offer. We got a ride from our new friend Jona, who has been driving us around to Mount Elgon National Park which encompasses the second highest mountain in Kenya, some enormous caves, a host of wild animals and some spectacular bluffs.
We got to the gate and signed ourselves in, we were the only visitors that day and we had to sign the liability waiver because of the wild animals in the park... Leopards, Hyenas, Elephants, baboons and more. I was perhaps a little over excited that we were going to see some of these and we did see some, but not the leopards, elephants and hyenas. We hiked up the foot of Mount Elgon to Kitum cave and Makingeny cave and on the way we walked passed some baboons, bush bucks, water bucks and saw some footprints of what looked like they could be elephants and some smaller cats.
Once we got up to the cave I was awestricken, these caves were huge and there was absolutely no one there The mouth of the Makingeny cave must have been close to 100 metres wide and over 50 metres high at least. And to fit the jungle scene there was a trickling waterfall coming down the middle of the cave. At the entrance to the Kitum cave, we fitted ourselves out with lights and ventured in. The caves were known as salt licks for the animals and a nesting spot for bats and birds, we saw a lot of bats and a lot of salt crystals, but not many animals. As we ventured further in to the kitum cave, the bats started to swoop down and buzz our heads, just brushing our ears and hair. We crept low to avoid this and tried not to spook them with our lights and as we got further into the cave we saw a massive skeleton of what must have been a water buck... It was that point that I decided I didn’t need to go any further into the cave. Something about thousands of bats and skeletons made me anxious to get out of the cave.
Leaving the caves, we wanted to make it up to the Endebess Bluff before we left the park so we started up hill. It was here that we saw some monkeys and the black and white colobus, which were both very hard to get a good view of as they would take off before we could even see them. I guess they weren’t too used to humans, or at least ones who are stomping through the jungle. We got to the bottom of the bluff and it looked like it was going to rain, we wanted to get a good view from the bluffs and we couldn’t do that in one of these mini monsoons that hit for about 30 minutes to an hour. We had two choices, go around or go straight up, so we strapped our bags on and headed straight up, a bit of sweat and heavy breathing and we had beat the storm. We had an amazing 360 view from the bluffs of Mt Elgon, the fertile valleys below, mt longot in the distance and Kitale in the distance, where we came from. The wind picked up a couple minutes after we got to the bluffs so we couldn’t enjoy it for long and we turned around to get back down before the storm would drowned us and make the path down impossibly slippery. Putting a bit of pace in our step, we have jogged and half jumped down from the bluff as the sky started to open up, once we got down to the wider road it really started to rain and then.. just like that it was over. That was the end of our hike through the park and we started our trek back to the gate. Oh and we also saw some baboons mating in the grass.
