We had a great little tea plantation tour on the morning of the 11th...and discovered just how close to the equator we are with the sunburns on the back of our necks from walking through tea for an hour! We learned how tea is pruned and harvested and just what parts of the leaves to pick. The guys demonstrating on the tour were so incredibly quick at it...quite impressive. Lipton Tea is among the three major companies who purchase tea from these immense fields. Kericho is the largest tea exporting region in the world (though not producing...India is, but much is used there for consuption rather than exports), and it was interesting to learn the process from picking to cutting to drying to packaging to shipping.
The main guy giving the tour (not a tea picker...clearly works in an office somewhere) gave an interesting and presumably skewed perspective of the conditions in which the workers work. He was quick to say that the housing provided for the workers (most of whom are migrant workers) was more than adequate (though they sure didn't look like it from afar) and the poridge they were fed for lunch was nourishing. He noted that it was a good job that earned a respectable salary (they are paid per kilo they pick per day). He also commented that the tea bushes were cut at a level so the bending over for the workers was minimal and that their backs were not sore at the end of the 8 hour work day (this was clearly not the case since our backs would have easily been sore had we really been picking tea out there much longer). We apprecieated the tour and learned a lot, but made mental notes to ask Justus about the accuracy of the information the guide was so quick to offer. Justus nearly laughed when we told him the information we had learned...he said if all those things were true, he would have not left home to go to the city looking for work (ultimately finding a well paying job as a school bus driver at Pat's school). He said, in fact, that the housing and "provided medical care" were not nearly sufficient, especially considering that entire families lived in these tiny one room houses. He also said the actual pay is less than 1 USD per day which was too little for him (or anyone desiring a small amount of comfort) to take a job in any of the plantations. He suggested that an interview with one of the workers would paint a very different picture than that which was created by the guy giving the tour...as we suspected.
We headed for our last destination on our Western tour, Lake Baringo. We had actually not planned on going here but Justus said it would be well worth the 2 hour drive north and moving hotels yet again to see the lake and the wildlife there. We agreed and set off. Again, we watched the scenery change from lush to dry to incredibly dry and scarce (in between intense card games of Gin Rummy and War). We had to puase a couple of times for big heards of cattle or donkeys taking up the whole road...love it. Didn't love the seeing how the cows get skinnier and skinnier the further out we went.
We arrived at Lake Baringo around 4pm and crossed our fingers that the one "midrange" hotel, according to our guidebook, had available accomodations. There were a few places costing 300ksh per night and a bunch of extravagent places costing around 200USD. Robert's camp, the book said, had some bandas for around 40USD. We got the last one! It was a cute little hut with cement walls and a thatched roof and we were loving it. We wished we had our own tent so that we might camp for much cheaper and sleep outside with the 450 bird species that live around the lake...their chirping is LOUD! We were loving this place... we dropped our stuff and headed to the bar to grab a Tusker and see if we could sneak in a boat tour around the lake to experience the crocadiles and hippos the guidebooks boasted. We ran into a couple from Slovakia who was looking for others with whom to share their boat (3000ksh per boat, seating up to 7 people). Perfect timing! The two of us and Justus hopped on with them and a teenage kid named Robert, who lived on the land around the lake, took us on a well informed tour for about an hour.
The boat ride was awesome...it was an aquatic safari! Robert kept motoring into the marsh so we might get up close and personal with the crocodiles (which was not cool...at least mer didn't think so, being the front passenger in the boat). 5:30pm with the sun setting on the lake was a beautiful time for a ride, and also convenient (or not) because so many hippos were in full view in the water just 10 ft from the boat. Those are some big ass animals, for real. Dangerous also, and whenever one would go underwater, Robert would quickly motor away... It was a pretty amazing sunset cruise! And Tusker tastes even better on the water of lake Baringo.
We walked back to the camp with our new friends from Slovakia and sat and exchanged our travel stories and advice with one another before dinner. They were heading to the coast from there so we exchanged information in hopes of crossing paths at the beach in Mombasa. We had a great pizza dinner (the spiciest pizza either of us had ever ingested...), Jessie dominated Mer in scrabble, and chatted about our experiences. As we got up to head to our banda, one of the waiters said, "whoa, whoa, are you walking to your banda alone without a light?" "Well, yea, it's just around there and the bathroom light, just across from our banda, looks like it's on". Two other Kenyan residents and the waiter shared a chuckle and said, "No, we must take you with a spotlight. You don't walk around here at night without one...these hippos are mean to come across and they come up on land at night. We will take you." I mean.... So, we were glad for the escort but sure as hell were not walking to the bathroom to use it or brush our teeth...the dirt outside our banda door and sprinting back in was just fine (and hilarious). ; )
We were greeted in our banda by a truly gigantic spider and Mer nearly hypervenelated while Jessie begrudgingly killed it with her shoe ("spiders are good, they eat mosquitos," she kept saying). This thing would have eaten us...it had to go. Uggghhhh. Other than that, it was a peaceful night and we could hear the songs of hundreds of birds through our thatched roof, which got about 20 times louder as the sun rose the next morning...no alarm clocks needed here! We had a beautiful, if brief, time at the Lake and only wished we could have stayed another night. We were grateful Justus recommended it!
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