Kintengala

While the scenery in Kenya is absolutely stunning, there has been one glaring negative issue that I have noticed everywhere that I have been in Kenya: waste disposal. It seems like everywhere there are plastic bags on the side of the road, or empty bottles. There are mountains of trash just outside of the city that look like a scene out of the movie Wall-E. This saddens me, because it is a black mark on an extraordinarily beautiful country. Today we went to a place that does wonderful things to clean up the trash problem in Kenya.

Kintengala glass factory is on the outskirts of town near Nairobi National Park, and the scenery driving towards it quite unique. The area around Nairobi National Park looks like any picture you would see of a Kenyan National Park: the rolling grasslands with the big trees spread throughout, although this national park is different because you can see the skyscrapers from Nairobi looming off in the distance. As we walked up the path to Kintengala, it was a rock path with pieces of coloured glass lined periodically throughout, with glass and modern-looking sculptures around reminiscent of the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Kintengala is amazing because it takes recycled glass (from soda or beer bottles, from broken windows, from any discarded glass materials), and melts them down and blows them to make glasses for drinking, vases, pitchers, and other artwork out of this glass work. It was very interesting to see the workers taking this glass and heating it up in a furnace, and then spinning it around when it was semi-liquefied and moldable to form the shapes they wanted to make. Walking around the gallery there were many different glasswares to buy, and since each piece is uniquely made from recycled glass, no two glasses or works were exactly alike. Walking around the paths to the different galleries (stained glass sculptures, beadworks, even a guy hammering down aluminum to make belts and hats and other art with), there were glass wind chimes and mosaics and art everywhere outdoors. I think that it is great that a company exists that takes a problem in Kenya, and turns it into artwork and uses recycling for these practical purposes. Apparently, from what I have heard, Kintengala glass is very famous worldwide and is found at all he high-end housing stores in Europe and even the United States. The place is absolutely amazing and created a Willy Wonka like atmosphere.

This was only half of the fun of my day, however as we had to cross a very narrow suspension bridge across the gorge that surrounds the Kintengala and the Massai Lodge that we parked out. This suspension bridge was way up and relatively long, and only a couple people could cross at once because it swayed a whole lot with every stop. That was an adventure in itself, but after that we had to walk down and around different parts of the gorge and cliffs, hiking up and down and across a river. In order to get around certain parts we had to cling up close to the rocks and grab ahold of the buttresses of this natural rock area. It was a lot of fun and I look forward to doing more nature hiking while I am here in Kenya.