voi town

sunday was fairly dull, not too much excitement. we drove out to voi town and stopped off at the 'supermarket' (tiniest convenience store ever) so that people could use the internet. it was 1/6th of the price it is at forty thieves so i was ridiculously excited (: unfortunately it soon became clear that the connection speed was probably 6x worse than at thieves and i spent a very frustrating 45min attempting to talk to kids back home and update my blog.. i've been ok with not communicating much given our scattered internet access times but having a computer right in front of me and internet that just refused to make anything work was so infuriating..

anyway. i needed a few hugs to shake off the rotten feeling of it all, bought a few red bulls and we re-embarked the safari bus to continue our journey to the pool. the said pool was part of a hotel called the 'leopard lodge' and we unfortunately had to pay to use the facilities (camps international do this really annoying thing where they'll take you out for day trips you assume are part of the program and fail to tell you you'll need to buy access to a toilet, access to a pool, lunch, guides, whatever..) but regardless of price i was just so hot and sticky and exited to go for a dip. we started up a group volleyball game without a net that pretty much turned into don't-let-the-ball-touch-the-water-and-peg-it-at-the-other-team.. sam, being the annoying child that he is, decided him and i should compete for every ball we hit and spent the majority of the time just unnecessarily diving across the pool and splashing everyone in his attempt at sporting success (; there was also a general opinion that i was a very aggressive hitter of balls, which i thought was amusing..

it soon grew too chilly to stay in the pool - the sun vanished and there was a quite prominent breeze. from then on i don't really know what i did.. i downed a few red bulls and spent most of my time wandering from inside the bar area to the pool to the bar to the pool and talking with whoever was there at the time. i was so restless. we were all fairly bored and the pool soon got annihilated by 50 odd locals and a giant boom box run by what was probably the worst dj in the world. it was actually hilarious - he'd be playing a heavy gangsta rap song and it'd all of a sudden keep stopping and starting again really weirdly? and we eventually realised he was doing it on purpose, thinking it was epic mixing skills. funny shit.

back at camp was the general afternoon routine of football, dinner and fireplace chillout. fairly late into the night a group of kenyans (who were spending the night at tsavo) came to sit by the fire with us and to be honest none of us were really in the mood to make an effort and try to make small talk with them in broken english.. so we sat there and carried on our conversation and somehow it turned into the biggest fit of hysterical laughter i've experienced in a long time. jasmine has an absolutely incredible laugh that sounds like a hiccuping, dying pig-monkey-crow in labour and sam was laughing at jasmine and i was laughing at them both and then one of the kenyan men just lost his shit and could not stop. every time he and jasmine looked at each other they'd explode all over again and no joke we were there for a good half hour with tears streaming down our faces.. the night guards even came to see what was going on due to the intensity of jasmine's laughter.

in retrospect i think it just bears witness to the humanity in each and every one of us.. the fact that two groups of people facing a language barrier could be on exactly the same wavelength and united by something as simple as laughter is just awesome.