An eventful stroll up Mt Longonot- the full guide- how not to climb it

Now for some hefty writing to tell you about Kenya. This is all about a trip we did, just for a day, up mount Longonot. Mt L is a volcano on the floor of the rift valley, about an hour's drive from Nairobi. It's very close to Lake Naivasha and to Hell's Gate. Lake Naivasha is where all the flower farms are that grow flowers for Europe. This is slightly controversial as there are people who say that they have been polluting Lake Naivasha and draining off the water. There are also people who say that this is not true. I would say that it probably was true but they have been trying hard to sort it out for a while now.
Hell's Gate is an amazing place, crammed with landscape (most of Kenya is vast open plains, the rest is all at Hell's Gate, jammed into a tiny National park) In Hell's Gate you can walk which is pretty unusual for a National Park, this means that you can go climbing in the ravine, and take cooling baths in the water surging down.
. This also means that you can be chased by angry looking Buffalo (not recommended).
Anyway, back to the day in question.
Well to the night before...
There is a nightclub in Nairobi which opens once a month, with of course the resultant carnage! It's on the first Friday of every month in Langata. There is a fire burning at the end of the drive on the main Langata-town road on the night when it's on. It starts at about 11. It ends at about 7 and the funniest site is the convoy of cars crawling out at about that time. Don't ever drink and drive but in low ratio, when you can't go any faster than a slow walking pace, it all seems quite funny.
So there we were the next day, feeling brilliant and we decided to go up Mt Longonot, the volcano that I mentioned quite some time back. We set off in bright sunshine (We is Seb, me, Lexi and her sister Sam). Shorts and tee-shirts for a hot climb up a hot hill in a hot country in the hot season.

But as you can see, we made it! This is us at the top, we had had our picnic, passed the mandatory American missionaries with their mandatory 4 children (all regimental blond and skinny) but as you can see, the sky was not the usual blue!

Cue rolling of drums and flashing of lighting! This is where it all got more exciting.

In the distance the rain clouds had been forming and on the last climb to the top we began to see flashes of lightning... Ah well they were miles away. Slowly rounding the corner, pausing to take artistic pictures of pretty flowers...Which I'm having difficulty uploading, ah well they can wait, we began to feel some rain. Oh well, not a problem, it was only light rain.

So then we found our next excitement, buffalo poo and hoof prints. Slight problem, only 1 set of prints so it was probably a loan male buffalo, which are far more scary than lions, rhinos cheetah, leopard etc. Oh well, we made lots of noise and hoped it would go the other way. Although we did seem to be following closely behind it (plenty fresh poo to stand in)...!

So our next excitement was that the rain stopped. Sounds great until you remember the lightning. I distinctly remember that in Physics we were told that it doesn't rain under the lightning. Ho Hum. So we were on the lip of a volcano, on the, suddenly, very flat floor of the rift valley and the lightning was above us, Great!

Cue running very fast (only slowed by the thought of the Buffalo in front of us somewhere) Gulp! Continue running. Seb feels his hair standing up on end. Gulp Gulp, throw ourselves off the lip of the volcano and crouch, trying to be smaller than the extremely sparse vegetation, giggling hysterically (except of course for Seb who was being very manly). At this point I'm afraid, no photos for some reason.

The rain then decided to come down, suddenly, at first to our relief, wahoo not going to be struck down by lightning! Then we realised quite how soggy everything was getting, and once again we were on top of a volcano and had to get to the bottom of it. We legged it down the mountain, all thoughts of the buffalo at least put aside, if not forgotten, for now.

Sprinting down the mountain was pretty exciting in itself, we kept overtaking little rivers starting up, and of course the worn away path makes a pretty good river bed. It's a little scary when you're not the fastest runner in the world to know that if you don't go fast enough it is all going to much worse!

So we did get there, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this, now would I?

We arrived at the Park Gate (Kenyan Park gates aim to be as big as their parks, they don't quite manage it but they're still vast structures) and the KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) chappy was brilliantly confused as we stood dripping. But the excitement was not over yet.

We were still a good mile from the road and the river that had sprung from nowhere was getting pretty huge and was straight across the track. Hurray for 4x4 cars (yes they actually do have a use in some countries other than doing the school run) We drifted, floated and powered our way through the torrents, past the pickup which wasn't going to be much use again as the river was surging though it, and eventually out onto the road. Where it didn't get much easier.

Here we found a horde of matatus (Kenyon minibus taxi/bus/deathtraps) sitting at the end of the track, we maneuvered around them with some difficultly then realised why they were there. The river we had just navigated was nothing compared to the one on the road. There were people standing up to their thighs in water everywhere, pushing matatus around aimlessly, and huge dilapidated lorries barging through regardless. At this point I should say how much we didn't want to get out and push our car, though I have done it many many times, this was not the moment. We had got a warm fug going on in the car and were all down to undies and newspaper for modesty, except Lexi who had a Kikoy with her (a Kenyan sarong). The newspaper wouldn't have held long.

Having waited our turn we eventually churned our way through gesticulating wildly to the lorry drivers to wait, and trying to avoid the people on the road who were trying to get a closer look (Lexi and Sam are very pretty).

The trip back to Nairobi was calm compared to this although it's never calm driving on Kenyan Dual Carriageways where the only right side of the road is the one you are on. This was only punctuated by a quick trip to the shop where Lexi volunteered, as the best dressed, to nip in and get milk. She ran bang slap into the boy she liked who had been coming out of the shop, no surprises,when he saw her scantily clad dashing in, he promptly turned back in to the shop!

So that was the end of that story.