Tom had introduced us to Natascha, an intern who was working for him at UNEP and we arranged to meet up sometime that weekend. We had expected beer and sandwiches in the park or something like that so when Natascha suggested that we go out to Ngong to see the horseracing we were surprised. And, like good backpackers on a budget, we jumped at the chance, met her outside the Nairobi Hilton and hopped on a bus out west.
It's a true flashback to the olden days – English chaps with impossibly high class accents commentating over the loudspeakers, expat women wearing outrageous hats, old Kenyan gentlemen decked out to the nines in their Sunday best, a type of person we'd be expecting to see in photographs from the 1950s. There was an African charm to the whole thing as well – the sound of people babbling in Kiswahili all around, the cold Tuskers at the bar, the fact that the first race was delayed by 25 minutes because an ambulance had broken down on the track.
Ambulance
The whole afternoon was an exercise in how to lose money for me, although M's “big” win of Ksh 1500, or 14€, (M: “Hey, at least I won!”) went some way to cancelling out the debt which I'd built up by betting on horses that consistently failed to come in anywhere near the front. My misery was compounded by the fact that I couldn't find any biltong – dried spiced beef specialised by South Africans and poorly plagiarised in the West as “beef jerky” – to go with my Tusker beers. Still, it was a good day out, we took it easy, and I got a terrible picture of M looking like the rich British ex-pat on a day out at the races (which she doesn't want to go public. Please apply in person). Good times.
Mine was probably the one in the red
Probably the world's easiest job.
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