Day 5: Torture by Music

Today wasn’t very eventful. We rode uphill most of the day again. We passed into a drier area so we didn’t see much tea growing; mostly just corn and sugarcane. We slept in Kangema, a small town about 40 km south of Nyeri. The workers there wanted to give us the royal treatment, considering that we were among the few actual travelers who actually stayed there and perhaps the first cyclists.  They claimed that they were giving us the best rooms, with new mattresses!  For $5 a night, this was quite a treat. The room had only a bed, which is all that is usually needed since they are mostly rented by the hour. After 15 minutes, just as I was about to step into the heated shower, the lights went out and the heater for the shower as well. So I took a cold shower, in the dark. We walked downstairs to the bar/disco (which should have been a red flag) to complain about the lights. They didn’t know where the fuse box was so we had to move all of our stuff to the 2^nd floor to new rooms. The place started cranking up the music about 9, just as the France vs. Germany game ended. The music was so loud that I think we all lost a portion of our hearing. It reminded me of movies I had watched about secret prisons where a form of torture was playing loud music until the prisoner confessed everything.  Seriously, it was THAT loud in the bar. Upstairs, where our rooms were, it was almost as unbearable. When we asked them to turn it down, they just turned it up. Clearly, our presence did not mean much as the hotel can make a lot more money from the men who come to the bar and then rent the rooms by the hour. The music finally stopped at 4 a.m. Toto told me he finally got to sleep around 2, but actually woke up when he sensed the silence two hours later. We all woke up exhausted when the maid banged on our doors for the sheets at 8.