I was going to write about the time we had meeting our sponsor child, but I still need time to reflect on this. So I’m going to move on for a bit and talk about some of our experiences afterward. After visiting faith, we traveled up to Mount Kenya to a place called the Castle Forest Lodge. This was our time to stay in a place that looks like the kind of Africa people see on TV. It had lots of natural beauty, if not much African culture. I was told that occasionally the forest elephants would come into the clearing and could be seen from the hotel, but that it was very rare. Well, we must have been very lucky, because on the second evening of our stay they appeared in the clearing and came quite close.
Then on the third evening around dark they came back again. This time they stayed around, though we didn’t realIze it until after dinner. When we finished dinner and went to walk back to our cabin, we saw a few of the staff on the porch. They told us the elephants were in the way, and we couldn’t go back yet. You have to understand just how dark it is at Mount Kenya, so I questioned them about it. One of the staff shined a flashlight, which lit up the side of an elephant not forty yards away, right in the path to my room!
The elephants finally moved, but we heard them grunting and crashing through the underbrush for the next few hours, scaring the cattle and horses in the field next to the hotel. It was truly an amazing experience. Here are a few pictured from the second night. They are uncropped and unedited.