A family trip to the equator

With the in-laws visiting from abroad, we have been going on some extra trips this month.  This weekend we packed up the family and drove towards the equator.  Not a long trip since it is located about a good two and a half hour drive North of Nairobi.

Somehow the drive up North is easier and the windy roads toward Mount Kenya are rather decent.  We left Nairobi on the super highway that brings one to Thika, also known as pineapple country to our kids, as one sees large fields with pineapple plants along the road along with large green/red signs and yellow lettering of the company who owns the pineapples.  As a matter of fact, you might easily find them back on your supermarket shelves in a can!

We found a lovely place to stay on a trout farm, in the so-called 'Creaky Cottage', a little rustic house build around a tree.

Creaky Cottage and the tree that comes through the roof on the left

The tree trunk in the sitting area and the ladder to the loft bedroom

Peekaboo through the floor planks

Not only was the cottage build around a tree, the restaurant of the trout farm, was also build around an enormous fig tree.  In the foreground a few branches of a different tree, but you get the idea when you see the massive trunk in the middle and the foliage about the tented roof.

Trout Tree Restaurant

As you often have here in Kenya, there were all kinds of nosey visitors.  The kids were not sure if they liked the Colobus monkeys or not, but they certainly came close to us.

While the onlookers were sitting in the forest around us, there was also lots of time to explore in the rushing river.

We also had a chance to drive a few miles onward to the equator, a place well sign-posted and explored for commercial opportunities.

I love it how shops are named in this country.  Full of opportunity and flair.

For those of you who are good at geography, you would know that we were just alongside Kenya's highest mountain all along: Mount Kenya.  A quite impressive mountain, which I managed to summit a few years back.  However, on this trip we only saw its outlines in the morning haze just once, and for the rest it was mostly veiled in clouds like this

Elusive Mt. Kenya

We also undertook a safari, but more about that at another time. . .

Andrea

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