Butterfly Journey: Odds and Ends

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, nice breeze, warm sunshine and the carpenter bees are busy boring their holes in the wooden eaves outside my living room window. My little house is all clean, clothes folded and cobwebs wiped from the window sills and ceiling. Tomorrow morning I will have to wipe them all away again as the spiders will have launched their webs to catch their evening meal of skeeters and gnats.

Time to catch you up on things for the past few weeks. Work is still incredibly slooooooow. Watching paint dry would be more exciting!

I remembered I had yet to share the story of the International Camel Derby that took place the very first weekend I arrived in August. I had actually read about it in my travel guide once I learned I would be posted here. I guess the writer never attended because what a joke! Don't understand why the call it "international" unless it's because the heritage of the camels must be from somewhere outside Kenya. Nothing international about it. The Derby has been going on for about 10 years and was intended as a fund raising event for local charities. They don't charge to attend but if you want to actually race a camel then you pay. The price is negotiable and you do that directly with the camel owner. Then you get to hop aboard the makeshift saddle, race for a quarter mile, hop on a bicycle and ride for the same distance and then turn back around and run it. Somehow it never really works out that way. Most of the entrants are muzungu tourists passing through on their way to somewhere else and they heard about the Derby. There were only five people who actually raced and only one that made it to the end. The judges got confused about the order of the race so the bicycle part never happened. Some people fell off the rickety saddles, some jumped off (that thing hurts your ass!) and some of the camels just quit. At least it was a nice sunny day for all the mishaps.