erin.

A letter to the editor written to a major Ugandan newspaper (click to read):

Mt. Longonot is a dormant volcano in Kenya’s Rift Valley.  A climb of Mt. Longonot’s slopes provided close encounters with herds of zebras and thorny acacia trees as well as spectacular views of the valley’s geological scars: ridges, craters, rifts, mountains, and lakes.  On top, a 2km-wide crater is surrounded by a jagged rim with a 2777m summit.  The trek was dusty, windy, steep, challenging, and spectacular.

In the middle of a particularly long stretch of vacation travel in Kenya, extremely tired, dusty, sweaty, and a bit sick, we decided to pay the equivalent of about $1.50 to take showers in an extremely seedy hotel in Mombasa before boarding another long bus ride.  Luckily, we didn’t sleep there– the place gave me the creeps.  The New People’s Hotel did have an amusing notice pasted to the wall (see below, particularly item 10).

Lamu is a stunningly beautiful place off the Kenyan coast where I was lucky to spend several days of vacation, drinking fresh fruit juices and eating Swahili spiced seafood and coconut rice. The town is quiet and peaceful, at once ancient and alive. Intricately carved wooden doors dot Lamu’s maze of winding narrow alleyways that can only be navigated on foot or by donkey. Most women wear headscarves or full burkas. Calls to prayer from mosques on all sides overlap in accidental harmony. On the town’s waterfront, children play and swim amongst the anchored wooden dhows in the evenings. Elsewhere, the island’s shoreline is a tangle of mangrove trees along the blue-green water’s edge, except where it opens into wide stretches of white sand.