Hell's Gate

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This past weekend I traveled to Hell’s Gate National Park in Naivasha. This is the park that the Lion King was inspired by. It’s about a 2 hour drive out of Nairobi northwest. On Friday a group of 10 of us waited 2 and a half hours for our driver to show up with the matatu (a 14 passenger van; I guess there was an accident on the road and that made him so late); this set in motion a trail of events. We left in the rain around 4:30 from school and finally got to Hell’s Gate around 6:30pmàafter it closed. Someone came from the park to talk with us and didn’t want to let us in because it already closed (but said he would do us a favor) and then he wouldn’t accept our student pass and give us the student price. On top of that he wanted to charge us 2,500 /= (Kenya Shillings, around $30) just to bring the matatu into the park and drop us off at the campsite (about a 2 mile walk from the gate).

Instead, we decided to camp at a site down the road and walk to the gate on Saturday morning with all of our gear. So, Friday night we went to Fisherman’s camp, set up the tents and sat around the fire for a while. We awoke in the morning pretty early (after very little sleep) and ate breakfast with the monkeysàthey surrounded us looking for food, and our guide, Sirus, started feeding them, so they wouldn’t leave us alone all morning. After this, we packed up camp and started on our 5 km walk back to the gate with all of our gear. (By this time, I was wishing I had bought one of those hiking packs.) After we reached the gate, we met up with 3 other students who had spent the night in Nairobi, paid, and headed into the park. I took a bike and thought it would be so much better after walking so far already, but about 15 minutes into my ride, I realized that I would have to walk the bike most of the way because of a mixture of sand and a hard bike seat.

After the ride, we ate, rested for a few minutes, set up some of our camp, and started our journey to find Pride Rock and walk through the gorge. We walked about 2 hours to the gorge and through it and then all around streams and up the side of a mountain, it was beautiful! It was definitely worth the walk. Hell’s gate was breathtaking. I’m pretty sure that we found Pride Rock about 5 times and saw lots of other beautiful natural structures and camped within it.Waking up this morning to see the beautiful trees and everything was awesome!

Kwaherini!