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Location: British Columbia, Canada

I'm a thirty-something girl who wants to see at least a thousand more amazing things before I die. I live for travel, good books, and amazing conversations. I'm a sometimes belly-dancer, a perpetual junk merchant, and spiders like me a lot. I have fooled myself into thinking I have a green thumb in the garden, but I do at least take some amazing photographs of flowers if I do say so myself. I used to be a "goth" but I'm way too cheerful nowadays, not that it's a bad thing but it's sometimes hard to reconcile skull-collecting and liking Martha Stewart in the same lifetime. I started out wanting to be a mortician and here I am a preschool teacher. You just never know how you'll end up. Oh yeah, and one of these days I'll retire in a little villa in Italy or France with Jeff and a couple of cats.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Entering Tea Country

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

By late afternoon we were passing through tea country under skies threatening rain.

As we approached Kericho, we saw fields filled with identical low white houses. These were the homes of tea plantation workers who spend their days picking tea for a living in the surrounding countryside.

We stopped briefly at a roadside store that sold tea. It resembled a big red metal box, like a jail cell with a barred metal window on one side through which a young man passed you the boxes of tea.


Jen bought half a kilogram here. It was a nice idea to have some tea from Kenya to take home, but I figured it would weigh our luggage down, and unfortunately Jen also came to that same conclusion, jettisoning her tea before the trip's end. On the bright side, we could sample African tea at breakfast every morning anyway.

We reach our pleasant campsite on the grounds of the Kericho Tea Hotel just as the sun began to break through the clouds with great fingers of light. We set up our tents in the hotel's grassy back-yard. We are very near to the sunlit green tea fields, and the hotel grounds have manicured gardens. Hornbill birds call and flutter in the trees and there is also a pool available.

More importantly, we campers are allowed to use the pool's shower facilities and there are westernized toilets, instead of squat toilets.

The shower is freezing cold, won't drain, and is so horribly clogged that one must either stand in five inches of soapy water or just stand on the outside and lean in to douse one's head. It doesn't matter: I still feel like a new woman with clean hair.

Before dinner I wander through the hotel gardens and admire the flowers.

Five children playing ball in the cement yard next door kick a soccer ball my way and call out to me: Jambo! Jambo! Come and take our photo!"

I go over to talk to them and introduce myself. The girl is Jaqueline, the little one is Gideon, the two eight-year-olds are Dennis and Nixon, and I'm afraid I've forgotten the last boy's name. They invited me to play ball with them. I thanked them, told them "maybe later", and pointed out where we were camping.

I had to get back to join a guided tour of the tea plantation which was just down a little dirt lane from where the children were playing. I waved to them next time I passed by.

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