I remember sitting in a second year philosophy class arguing with my professor over the existence of a soul. He asked me if I could provide any concrete proof at all, anything physical to prove that souls existed. He asked me if I could see hear or touch my soul, to which I had to answer “no”. For a few years I went through my life thinking that it was my experiences and memories that made up who I was. That is, until my trip to Kenya where for the first time I felt my soul.

We landed in Nairobi at nine o’clock in the evening and the twenty-degree heat sort of took me by surprise but was comforting. I’ll admit that I had a bunch of ideas in my head about how things worked in Kenya but they weren’t founded on much fact, rather more on movies and television. Oh, and this Kenya video. Needless to say, my expectations were shattered rather quickly as I was taken to my hotel. I was amazed at just how influenced by Britain Nairobi was. I didn’t feel too displaced and I have to say that it was a perfect way to ease me into the biggest culture shock I have ever felt. I was persuaded to go on this life-changing trip by the pictures a friend took on his trip to Kenya. He spoke so highly of his time there ends the pictures said so much about the people and the landscape that I knew I had to see it for myself. They were the type of pictures that make you feel like you yourself actually experienced it, not the photographer.

Having traveled before, I knew what I wanted from my next trip and knew that Kenya can provide. My favorite feeling in the entire world is when you have learned something new, something so basic and obvious that you just didn’t think about before. Experiencing a new culture that you had only ever seen in National Geographic’s and on television can be incredibly intimidating but as it turns out, it can also be one of the most liberating and rewarding experiences of your entire life.

I started out my journey in Nairobi doing the stuff that stereotypical tourists do. I will admit that this is an incredible place for doing that sort of stuff, but I was looking for something different. Kenya’s hotels, golf courses and beaches rival those of any destination in the entire world but those are not the memories that I will cherish about this trip.

That is not to say that I didn’t take in a round of golf before leaving Nairobi. The day after I landed, I figured I could squeeze in a quick nine holes of golf at the incredible Aberdare Country Club a few hours drive outside of Nairobi. The course is a part of a country hotel so it would seem that people come here just for the golf. That being said, the course is full of hills and really quite challenging. I imagine that if you decided to play 18 holes, the second round of the nine hole course would me a little bit more forgiving than the first nine because of all the little nuances that can be created. Similarly, I could see playing this course 100 times and still being challenged.

It was an absolutely stunning site to see and was filled with incredible beauty. The course is on Mweiga Hill in the stunning Aberdare National Park and the view from the Hill of the sprawling plains below is one of the most beautiful and picturesque images stock in my mind right now. The Aberdare Mountains looked incredible as they crowned the western horizon and the snowcapped Mount Kenya in the East seemed to stand tall and proud on its own. It was right then that I realized just how beautiful Kenyans landscape truly was.

After the Gulf, I made my way back to Nairobi by car and got on the train for Mombasa just before dusk. I sat down to eat dinner as the train moved through the incredible Nairobi national Park and the sun was setting over the African landscape. I saw some of the most beautiful colors I had ever seen in my life. I stayed up late that night watching the unfamiliar southern hemisphere stars for hours; even they were giving me a feeling of culture shock.

When I woke up in the morning, breakfast was being served and we were just coming in to the beautiful coastal town of Mombasa. I told my guide that I wanted to walk around and see what everyday life was like for the people of Mombasa and he happily agreed to walk around with me. People were pushy but ultimately very friendly. I stuck out like a sore thumb as a tourist and everybody seemed to know it. People would come up to me and try and peddle their wares but my guide was very good at slightly telling them I wouldn’t be interested and it didn’t really bother me in the least. It seemed the people had become accustomed to tourists and new that a fortune to them was nothing to a tourist. I went to the world-famous beach at Diani and was greeted with the bluest ocean I’ve ever seen and beautiful sand for literally 10 km. I guess because it is so long, that people tend to be spread out along it but it honestly felt like I had the whole beach to myself.

See Reed was absolutely gorgeous and everybody I met wore a huge smile on her face but Kenya’s biggest cities and tourist attractions didn’t give me what I was looking for so I decided to make my way into the bush. Now, I guess going into the bush in Africa and staying with the tribe is really nothing original as an idea but it seems that people want to do it for any number of reasons. Some of the villages see many visitors every year and some huts are actually set up specifically for tourists and people coming to “find themselves”. As clichéd as it was, I knew there was something I wanted to do with every fiber of my being and no amount of trying to be different from everybody was going to get me to stop my journey.

We headed to Kenya’s southern region in a Land Cruiser from the mid-90s. Ironically, Is further south than the Masai Mara national park that I want to visit so we had to head north east Bexar Nairobi to see was supposed to be one of the largest migrations in the world. More than 1 million wildebeest and a whole host of other animals make the 500 km journey from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara and back again every single year. The phenomenon is a relatively new one and has become the largest migration of land mammals on the planet. In the late 19th century, a rinderpest epidemic broke out amongst the wildebeest living in the area. Realizing is happening, veterinarians inoculated the cattle to prevent the disease from growing any further. As a result, the wildebeest population absolutely exploded in the 1960s and 70s from 260,002 the astounding 1.4 million wildebeests that currently roam the land there. At the Masai Mara national park in late June all the way through until September, millions of animals are kicking around, playing in the lush grassed plains and you, the observer, can really see a whole ecosystem that exists here when food runs out to the south. It is an incredible experience and one that I wouldn’t trade for the world.

The whole wildebeest adventure was absolutely incredible and life-changing I knew I still had an experienced what I wanted from Kenya so we piled back into the Land Cruiser and headed up north.

It is nearly a 500km journey that brings us into the heart of Kenya’s country. It was a struggle to get my North American mind away from six hours for a 500km journey but after nine, it began to sink in. Everything is slower over here. When you’re trying to get things done, it is not uncommon for people to miss meetings and appointments by a day or two. I thought that at least my laid back west coast attitude would help me out and I would be able to just let things go but it really did start to get the best of me. The entire trip up to the central region of Kenya took nearly twenty hours due to poor road conditions, flat tires and a number of other complications. After a while though, I did get used to the fact that we would eventually make it to our destination and my company was good so I didn’t care. We took turns driving and when we finally arrived in Isiolo I felt more awake than I had in the last long while. That feeling didn’t last long after we got into our hotel room and my head hit the pillow.

I woke up just before noon the next day and bummed around town for the day trying to talk to any local that would talk back. I found the children really easy to get along with and for the most part no parents got in the way of our fun. We kicked a ball around and chased each other for what seemed like hours until I decided it was time for dinner.

Gambella was a weird story. Up until just last year, Gambella was basically a shining example of a town that had become recipients of aide work and money. Gambella is basically the first village after leaving the lush lands of Kenya and entering “the bush”. I for one was really surprised as to how quickly the landscape changed once we got out there. It is just one out of more than a thousand villages that make up the Borana tribe. I guess a few good Americans got in there with their positive thinking and tried to help out some of the poorest people in the world. They built a school that had 180 students, six teachers and a principle. They educated the people on how to produce clean water and gave them incredibly useful information on agriculture in the drought areas. What’s more is I couldn’t find anywhere where they made these Gambellans practice a different religion in exchange.

The children laughed hard, worked hard, and still had plenty of time for school. They seemed to love everything regardless of what it was. They loved school, they loved my sunglasses, they loved it when a truck rolled through the village, some of them even seemed to love work. I was an instant hit being a gigantic white skinned monster from a land these people couldn’t even comprehend and the attention was welcomed. There’s no way you can prevent a smile when fifteen kids with eyes wide charge at you laughing their asses off for no reason other than the fact that you are there.

I went to bed that night after the sun had set over the dry African horizon and felt it. I had never seen people live like this before and something about it seemed so much better than how I lived my life. For a few days I sort of got a glimpse of what it was like to be a part of this little, incredibly poor village and it felt incredible. Close friends and people who care about you are everywhere in the village and it seems that everyone is connected.

And it’s so true; no matter how hard we try to forget it, that we are all connected. We are all made up of the exact same star dust and are all basically the same down to the subatomic particles that make us up. Is it really so difficult to believe that way down there in the quantum world we try so hard to understand that there is a dimension we simply cannot feel with our poorly developed senses? These sense all evolved from somewhere and there’s no reason we can’t develop more as life moves on. I fell asleep that night feeling as much a part of those people as anything else in the world and really touched my soul.

We have to start seeing ourselves as one organism. If down on the subatomic level there’s another dimension we can’t quite experience where our souls exist and intermingle I do believe that the universe is absolutely chaotic, and simple, and beautiful.