OKAY!
So first thing we wake up and have another great breakfast. Cool. Then the first dude in our party is there! He apparently showed up the night before with his son! Alas, not with his son’s baggage, but you take what you can get. So: hooray! We aren’t alone anymore. Still no word on the rest of our group. Or maybe word, but still no sight of them.
Mechanics.
Today the plan is to go see the Meru village and some waterfall. As it turns out, we linger too long at the Meru village and we don’t get to see the waterfall, though we’re suspicious about whether the waterfall was really ever part of the plan. Kind of a bait-and-switch from the touring outfit we signed up with. Turns out the bait-and-switch is their signature move. BUT I’m not here to complain.
The Meru village didn’t seem like a village village, but it’s kind of hard to say what we were really seeing, other than a tourist attraction showcasing their lifestyle. It’s kind of an odd experience, I think, but a pleasant one and one I’m glad to have had. We sat down for some delish tea, then they took us on a tour of their biofuel plant. Which was two cows in a stall, eating banana tree bits (I think) and sweeping their by-product into a tank where the methane was siphoned off and sent directly into the kitchen. Way cheaper than piping natural gas everywhere way cooler than just buying a propane tank or whatever. Plus cows are cute.
When the flame is yellow, you need to clean the filter.
We also got to walk through a coffee plantation, but not a massive one like I imagined sprawling for miles and miles, but like a little coffee grove, growing under banana trees- just one family’s plot. Apparently everyone’s got coffee plants they take care of and harvest and sell to a co-op. The men in the family are responsible for the coffee, the women for the bananas. Seems fine to me, as I love coffee and am ambivalent about bananas.
After walking around a bit and see other stuff they do at the village, like make furniture and dig for rocks mine minerals. (Dumb realization of the moment: mine and mineral are probably etymologically related.) Then we got to make coffee! We didn’t dry the berries, cause that takes time, but we husked them and sifted them and roasted them and ground them and (finally) drank them. Alas, it wasn’t good, but I suspect it’s cause they put a bunch of amateurs in charge of the roasting. The coffee I ultimately bought from them was pretty tasty when I made it at home.
Post Meru village, we drove to another market but decided to just take photos from the van, as saying “No thank you” over and over is tiring and makes you feel bad, I guess. So we went back to the hotel, where the rest of our posse had arrived. They basically had every flight issue you could have, and got rerouted through Nairobi, lost a ton of luggage, etc, but they were there and the luggage would get to teh hotel in time for our departure the next day. That night we had a planning meeting met our head guide (Raymond), ate a crazy overpriced dinner (even by American standards), and repacked our bags for the final time.
