orienteering without borders

english version:

Firstly, thanks to all of you who have written comments – I’m always really pleased to receive greetings from home! Unfortunately, you will have to wait a bit for the first photos; I’m still a bit uncomfortable about going around like a tourist and taking photos. But it should at least be possible to take a couple of photos from the orienteering training.
Yesterday we trained for the second time in the nearby Ngong Hills, a training area which is very popular with runners. The range of hills is not too high, but as the only elevation on the plateau visible from afar it is quite impressive - and over 2 000m high after all. The so-called Ngongathon takes place here involving a crossing of the entire range of hills.We normally start in Ngong Town (a lot of professional athletes in particular live here) and our goal is of course the highest point of the Ngong Hills, but which we have not yet managed to reach. As soon as the last trees have been left behind, you come to a sort of African-Alpine meadow landscape which is in fact not so unlike the ones in Austria – there are even cowpats here – and a breathtaking panorama view where you can even see Mount Kenya on a good day. I made sure right after our first training there that our Kenya visitors in February will make a visit to the Ngong Hills – by running there of course. (Ngong Hills is a National Park and other travel groups etc. also visit the park)A couple of comments about the food here – this part of the training regime is almost the hardest! A soup dish full to the brim with potato stew and a mountain of rice on the top is counted here as a light meal! The meals always consist of a type of stew made of an array of different vegetables, and rarely any meat, and a Carbohydrate ‘bomb’ such as a mountain of rice or less often noodles, but mostly just Chapati (pancake-like, made of dough) or Ugali (dough of maize flour, mostly served in the form of cakes; when eating these with your fingers the dough is kneaded into small bowls). Many athletes – like our friend Laban – eat Ugali for breakfast, lunch and in the evening! At least for me there is daily fresh fruit available – mainly passion fruits and bananas. In Nairobi you can buy pineapple or slices of water melon everywhere from street-side sellers, or – and I have already had the pleasure of trying it – sugar cane! This is peeled, cut into pieces and then chewed or sucked – super!On Sunday we managed unintentionally to only take along three controls for the orienteering training , but – thanks to Esther’s creativity – we soon found a solution: We simply created one loop with three relatively far away controls and made a 4-person relay (without a mass start though) out of it, which seemed to be very well received by the runners. I used the training session to observe the runners in the forest (or Park) – and wow, could they run! Most of the adult runners also have a reasonable grasp of orienteering technique, though they have been training in the same park for ever. It would be very interesting to see them in “real” forest... in sprint-O (in a town or park), but right now they’re not bad at all.The following episode took place on our evening journey home (Sammy, Esther and I had five children with us whom we had to take home): After we had finally managed to get all of us safely on a bus (you often have to jump on board the bus when it is in motion along with lots of other people at the same time) we discovered that the bus driver wanted to charge a much higher far! – and as the majority of the passengers protested loudly, without further ado he turned round at the next roundabout and brought the bus back to the original stop. So we then had to go through the whole procedure again from the beginning...Today, we were again in the Children’s Garden. When I walk into the garden it’s never long before some of the small children come running up – especially the youngest ones learn my name very quickly and also pronounce it wonderfully too! I have been talking today with a couple of the older children who can speak a bit of English – half in English, half in Kiswahili – and this gave me the opportunity to learn from them how to count to 20 in Kiswahili. With the younger children I feel the language barrier quite painfully – often I don’t understand the simplest of things; on the other hand this is the biggest incentive for my Kiswahili lessons with Sammy and Esther that I have almost every evening.