The next morning we ate breakfast at the Vike (more toast!) and headed out for the rainforest. The lady at the front dest set us up with a cab driver to take us there. We thought he was completely ripping us off with the price he was charging, until we were a half hour down the dirt road (my head hadn't hit the ceiling that much since I'd been in Tanzania) with no end in sight.
When we finally got to the park headquarters, we were matched up with a guide named Humphrey who took us on a nice little walk through the woods.
This nice little walk turned out to be five hours long. We got to see a lot of really exotic butterflies and birds and many species of monkeys different from the same old, same old we saw every day around Maseno.
Now I am a true Minnesotan, and I spent a good chunk of my childhood wandering around the woods at my cabin. I love the woods more than just about anything, but oh my goodness Chris loved it more.
The kid is from LA and apparently he hasn't seen many trees before. Or birds. Or butterflies. I'll give him the monkeys, but I don't know how one person could take 45 pictures of every bird they saw for five hours just because they had a shiney blue spot on their wing or a speckled tail. Somebody please show the kid a blue jay or a cardinal so he knows that he doesn't need to go all the way to Africa in the future to see pretty birds.
Toward the end, Humphrey had us climb up one of the bigger hills (small mountain in my opinion) for a view of the rainforest canopy. I get hardcore elevation sickness, and seeing as we were at 4,000 feet and had been walking and sweating and sweating and walking for hours already, I parked myself next to the trail when we were almost to the top and told Humphrey I would enjoy the view from there.
Humphrey was a bit taken aback that I didn't want to go to the top and kept insisting it was so close (this from a man who did the whole hike in rubber boots that were way too big for him and with no water) until I firmly assured him that I didn't care what the top looked like. My view was plenty good from where I was at.
When my counterparts came back down, Humphrey led us into a cave in the side of the little mountain. It was man-made from a time when they used to mine something there. All we had was a little pen-light attached to somebody's keys, but I was really excited about the prospect of getting to explore a cave so we went for it.
The bottom of it was even and had a lot of standing water. We were somehow able to make it all the way in without falling and hurting ourselves. At the end, Humphrey flashed our tiny light upward and I saw rows upon rows of beedy little eyes staring back at me.
"ARE THOSE BATS????????"
"Yep."
"DO THEY BITE??????????"
"Yep."
I love all animals and wildlife. I can catch a snake with my bare hands with the best of them and trap spiders and let them outside rather than stepping on them. The bats were actually really cool to look at, with about a hundred of them all hanging upside down in neat rows right there in front of us, their eyes reflecting the light we were shining at them.
But the more we moved the light around, the more they started getting out of their little rows and flying around.
Now, all I could think was that I had not successfully survived nearly three months on my own in East Africa, including a Kenyan border crossing, only to get bitten by a bat with rabies right at the end. The moment Katie reached for her camera, I was outta there. I'd be angry if I was woken up by flashing lights in the middle of a good night's sleep. I didn't want to wait around to see how 100 bats would feel about it.
The going (without a light) was much harder than the coming. My shoes and pants were absolutely soaked by the time I made it out and my hands were covered with a slimey white substance from trying to guide myself along the cave wall. But rabies free I remained!
Our cabbie picked us up at our arranged time and took us back to Kakamega where we decided to be brave and take matatus home. Several flapping chickens and a police interogation later (I was terrified of the police and really got scared when this one came tapping on my window and started asking my name and other information) our series of matatus brought us back to Maseno and I took one good long shower.
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