If you want to get to know someone well, even if that someone is yourself, I recommend a hike. Not just an easy breezy hike with flowing rivers and butterflies on flowers, I am talking about at least 14 km of relentless uphill stretches, narrow trails just inches from a dizzying 2800-meter drop, dense forest with gnarled roots and fallen trunks to hurdle over, stinging nettle lining the path or worse dangling from branches waiting to brush against exposed skin leaving a burning sting. What goes up must come down. You get to this sharp decent and because this is a thick forest, the ground is moist and slippery. This is where you get to find out if your really cool looking hiking shoes are also handy or, they are weapons formed against you. Just after conquering the ascent then descent, you emerge into a gorgeous clearing where the trail widens onto a soft spongy carpet of lush grass.

 Now that you are not fighting for your life, you get to look around the forest and you can spot a family of colobus monkeys swinging away on the trees and a sighting of the rare and endangered mountain Bongo. The sun throws beautiful golden rays through the trees, the forest is filled with chattering, whooping, melodic chirping and distant hoots with butterflies flying around. By this time, you already drank all your water and since the air is just perfect and you are neither inclining nor declining, you actually start to chit chat and call different people to find out where they are because at this point the group has broken down to three or four distinct groups. I will proudly mention that I stayed in the first group keeping up with the elites. I even started to think about my kids, guessing what they could be doing. This is getting easy we are descending. In any hike that you will ever go, please note that if you are going down, you will have to climb up.

You start another grueling incline and you can feel the burn in your thighs and just like when you are doing squats, you are advised to keep your back straight and let your knees do the bending. Your mind starts to question things. In my case, I thought about a number of scenarios to get out of this situation. I settled on the idea of collapsing right there because I could tell that a good land rover could get there if called upon by our KWS trained forest guide and pick me up from the forest floor. If only I could faint on command but with my current Global Fast Fit time of 3 minutes and 40 seconds, my cardio health is pretty good. This is where sticking with the elites pays off. A club member pulled me by my hand through every incline. Chivalry is not dead. The air grows cooler until we enter an otherworldly bamboo forest. The tall bamboo forms an eerie looking canopy over the muddy path riddled with dead and sprouting bamboo stumps, so watch your steps. You clear the enchanting bamboo forest and branch off to a wide dirt road. The guide stops for a bit so that you can catch a breath. You then watch in disbelief as he asks if we would like to extend to the other leg of the trail and make it 22 km instead of the 14 km that you are currently tackling. You firmly decline and ask to proceed with the trail at hand.

Onwards and frontwards we go, tackling another incline. The very last one. On top of this climb, the group is watching a small coffee brown snake trying to cross the road. Our guide is from the Maasai tribe and tells us that in their culture, a snake will stop slithering and turn towards a pregnant person. The snake stopped slithering and turned towards us. I can’t speak for everyone else but there are 3 places you won’t catch me this year: back and forth, out of my way and-most importantly-labor and delivery.

Eburru forest is a prime indigenous forest that overlooks lake Naivasha to the south, lake Elementatita to the north and lake Nakuru to the north west. At the Ol Doinyo Eburru peak, all the 3 lakes are visible. The forest is nestled within the folds of a geologically active volcanic mountain that has a geothermal power station. The white cloud of gas rising high into the sky is visible from quite a distance and with it, a pungent rotten egg smell. The hike trail is just adjacent to the Wellhead geothermal power plant. The highest peak of this active volcano, the Ol Doinyo Eburru stands at 2820m above sea level. It is quite the experience to do a Global Fast Fit routine; 15 pushups, 15 plank leg lifts and 15 squats at this peak. Eburru forest hike really is the ultimate hiking experience. We will return to Eburru forest to unlock Ol Donyo Eburru once more.