It has been a while since my last post, but I wanted the interested parties to know that we are still alive. Last weekend we took a very interesting drive to the Nandi Hills region of Kenya. It is one of the major tea producing areas in the country, and it was quite pretty. Tea grows very low to the ground, so picking it must just be hell on the back. And there were huge expanses of tea plantations throughout the hills, apparently most still owned by whites living outside Kenya. We also visited a tea factory, which would make for a very interesting Food Channel show, if they haven't already done one. It's a very complicated process that involves airing and drying, cutting, and several other things. There have been some issues in the tea industry, and of the seven factories in the region, only a couple are open right now. I don't know if this means that soon tea prices will be going up, but there are clearly some problems. The dry season, which we are in, has apparently been drier than usual, and at night the temperatures have fallen to where there is light frost on the tea. That has cut into production.
After that we took an incredibly long right over the worst road either one of us had ever been on, all the way to Kisumu, which is pretty far. I was so turned around I thought we were heading back to Eldoret. In fact, we were heading in the opposite direction. Some geographer. We got back to town at around 8:30, and this in a place where everyone is saying "do NOT go outside at night." There we were, thirty miles from the Shack on main campus. Luckily we got a ride to town. It was dark and felt incredibly long after being in a bus for nearly twelve hours. I don't think we will be doing that this weekend. Still, Nandi Hills, very pretty scenery.
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