We visited the biggest safari park in Kenya. It was amazing. It was completely new experience to me. I’ve heard people talk about safaris but having never visited one I was surprised. I was able to see live animals up close both in the wild and together in cages. This trip was the first time I heard a lion raw in real life, and was taken by surprise by how loud they can actually raw. Seeing the monkeys jumping from one place to another, hearing the elephants thumping their feet making loud noises, seeing really how big giraffes really are put a smile on my face.
Another place that I remember from my time in Kenya was ‘Turtle Bay Hotel’ in Mombasa, which had the most beautiful beach and scenery I’ve ever seen. I remember waking up and looking out of the balcony at the view. It felt so peaceful as I looked into the distance, overlooking the beach and Indian Ocean. You could also hear the birds sing in the morning and see the coconut trees shed leaves at night. The beaches there were made of white sand and were so soft you wish you could walk on them every day. Because the sand was so soft, it was easy to build sand castles, but very hard to run on!
Worst place
The worst place I have ever been to surprisingly also came on my holiday to Kenya. I remember on the way to Mombasa, passing through villages where I could see the extremes of poverty. I saw people who were living in huts made of any scrap material they could find, forming little shantytowns. These people were so poor they could not even afford necessities such as food and water. They would have to travel miles every day to get clean fresh water, most of them barefoot. Seeing these events live is completely different to what you hear and see on television. It was depressing.
The streets surrounding these shantytowns were, dry, dirty and dusty. As we rode by in the car, you could smell the rubbish, which surrounded this area. From my point of view, I couldn’t stand it, but I had to realise that these people have to live with this smell. What I had to stand for a few minutes, the people that live there have to stand for the rest of their lives, which gave me a dampening feeling.
My uncle decided to take us to a rundown building to show us the harsh reality of where people have to work in order to earn a living. You could see the plaster coming off the walls, cracks in the windows and cobwebs everywhere. This experience showed me how lucky we really are living in England leading me to wonder is what we define poverty in this country, the same as these people would define poverty in their country?
