In Top Gear (not.)

13^th - 23^rd March – Days 165-175 – Nairobi and Ngong, Kenya

We made it in the end, as we always do. This time the trip could even be described as uneventful on our scale. Never mind that T nearly got fined Tsh 50 000 at Moshi bus station for throwing a cigarette butt onto the ground (but talked his way out of this desperate milking attempt by the local council worker with support from other locals around us) and I got horrendously taken to the kebab kiosk (as we say in Finland) on the Kenyan side of the border when charged Ksh 400 (nearly 4 €) for three oranges and a bag of popcorn. I reacted to this in my usual way, i.e. by abusing the whole of Kenya out loud on the bus and responding to a question posed on my well-being by some guy on the street by yelling back «I'm rather shit actually! » from the bus window. Yup, another one of those proud moments. Should know better than to let my blood sugar level drop too much. We arrived at Nairobi at 2am instead of the estimated, or even promised, 8.30pm.

T takes inspiration from the old man (on the right). CITES' tuna proposal was sadly rejected.

Our week in Nairobi was even more uneventful and consisted mainly of about 20 episodes of the O.C., 10 episodes of Top Gear, lots of football, a few movies and hours and hours of Al-Jazeera, during which we also managed to spot our eager commentator Old Dave (T's dad to whose who haven't heard of this celebrity) at work in the CITES conference in Doha. We also paid another visit to the Aga Khan hospital after T got his lip inflated by an attack of some green monster bacteria who decided to make a nest inside it and hence caused T to become a sweaty, feverish blob of uselessness.

Men of the world - want to be attractive to women? Follow my lead and you will never be lonely again...

While he was growing roots into the sofa, I was left to play the role of a desperate housewife cooking and cleaning and doing the laundry for the better part of the week. Thank you again Tom for letting us stay and Natascha for providing the much needed human company to keep us with it! And Clarkson, Hammond and May for the entertainment – now I know that someone has been mad enough to drive to the North Pole with a can of Spam as their celebratory meal for when they get there. Too bad Clarkson actually blew up May's cherished tin before they reached their destination.

One of the fine days in Nairobi we did actually manage to contribute to the greater good. We took a bus to Ngong to visit yet another one of the 1% projects, this time it was a Maasai Women's Group that makes beaded jewellery. Two of the women in the group met us in Ngong and accompanied us to the working compound a few miles off in the Rift Valley. We spent a nice afternoon at the compound, making an investigation into the running of the scheme and admiring the bead work they are doing. In good spirit we also participated in the task of dividing the newly bought beads into batches which would then be made into certain types of key rings, bracelets and so on.

Maasai women hard at work.

Finnish woman hard at work.

There was nothing that spectacular about this project as such, but it was still yet another window into the local way of doing things around here and into the Maasai community in particular. There just is something truly overwhelming about how the Maasai greet you and wish you well when saying goodbye. I never quite know whether to just stand there and take it in when they are singing their lovely songs or to at least join in to the swaying dance they do at the same time. The only thing I'm capable of is just smiling warmly and wishing that it communicates my respect and good wishes back to them. We're becoming very good friends with these people at this rate. Plus, I got to purchase a nice beaded bracelet for myself.

M inspects the delightful bracelet which she will eventually purchase, having determined that it is not, in fact, a slinky.

Generic African road picture #53298759788(b)

Average Beach Holiday

16th February - 19th February 2010 – Days 141-144 – Ukunda, Kenya

It all started so normally – the matatu had dropped us off in Ukunda town, we had a cold Coca Cola and started off on the long trek towards Diani Beach where we had a campsite lined up. Diani Beach, by all accounts is a tourist resort plagued with beach boys who wander around trying to trick tourists into giving them money, old sex tourists – both men and women (and we saw plenty of evidence of that) – and the usual soulless establishments that you generally find at tourist resorts on the coast. Our purpose for being here was rather that it was the nearest jumping off point to visit Kaya Kinondo, a sacred forest which M had read about in a Kenyan travel magazine in Lamu and taken an interest in. As soon as we arrived though, things started deviating from the plan in quite a spectacular way. After taking a few cooling off beers and a pizza, we had a chat with an Australian guy, a British girl and an American girl who, despite looking like beach bums themselves, told us unconditionally that Diani was a dump. After a few more beers we went out into the garden, pitched up the tent and clambered in.

As M fell asleep I was getting too much pain from the ever growing lump on my arm to get any sleep and so I tossed and turned until about 5am when I heard someone going through the plastic bags outside the tent where we had kept our pasta and juice for the next day. As I peered through a hole in the tent, a telltale long black tail revealed that our unwelcome visitor was the advance party of a troupe of monkeys which was coming to raid our supplies. I hit the side of the tent a few times to try and scare this marauding monkey away but instead of taking fright, it just punched me back a couple of times and more monkeys jumped from the trees. For the next 3 hours they were screeching, munching on raw macaroni, and jumping around on the tent. True to form, M slept through 2 hours of this but eventually I woke her up and we lay around for a bit, waiting for them to calm down and semi-hoping that they would take our small reserve of Tuskers – it would be annoying to lose them, certainly, but the sight of a drunken troupe of monkeys would definitely have compensated for the loss of the macaronis. As we broke out of the tent and inspected the damage, it turned out that not only had they not stolen any of the beer, but they'd broken one of the bottles. Half a kilo of pasta had been destroyed as well as a half kilo pot of creamy cheese sauce. M's towel, which she'd hung up to dry the night before, had been dragged off the line and used as some kind of plaything. The tent next to ours had had its top ripped off, and the frame of ours had been snapped. Nice work, monkeys!

The guilt on her face tells it all

As we had breakfast I looked at my lump which had by now a large black blob just under the surface. M's was giving her trouble too although hadn't grown quite so much and looked like a big spot with a large reservoir of goo inside. She inspected mine and declared that the black blob looked like it had wings and legs. We had breakfast and then decided that it may be a good idea to go and get a doctor's advice about what to do in cases of having flies growing inside one's arms.

Off we headed and one thing led to another, and before we knew it we'd been pumped with antibiotics and lined up for surgery to remove the offending lumps, and shown to our rooms where we were to stay for the night. It seemed a bit excessive for what was effectively just an abscess but we wanted to get rid of these and did as we were told. We were fed fish and chicken, watched al-Jazeera news for the first time in a while, and when afternoon came I was called over to the operating theatre where I spent probably the 30 most unpleasant minutes of the whole trip, having the lump excavated. No flies or spiders or small aliens escaped from the resulting chasm and so I was left to suppose that the big black blob was something altogether less cool, like dried blood or something. Dammit. M went after and came back smiling and in an altogether more composed state than the shaking, sweating mess that I had been after mine. We looked great as a pair with our patches on arms and a drip plug in the back of our hands. As we got ready to go to sleep in the “Palm Beach Hospital” in Diani Beach, we reflected on how we had spent the afternoon in an operating theatre rather than an ancient sacred forest as we had planned. But then again, if adventure always went according to plan, it wouldn't be adventure any more would it?

Things continued not going according to plan as we sat around in our room all day getting pumped with antibiotics, although the doctor did come in at one point to talk about football and inform us that we could be let out tomorrow. My dressing was changed and underneath it was a large black crater, which apparently was a “necrosis” which was basically not a good thing. We sat around watching more al-Jazeera, growing restless and wandering around the hospital trying to find something to do, before realising that a hospital is not necessarily the best place for this and settled for going back to the room to watch more al-Jazeera news. M had started getting strong pains from the IV antibiotics and it became clear that we both wanted to get out as soon as possible. Fortunately my crater looked a lot better the next morning, and we were unleashed onto the streets of Diani Beach.

War injury gallery picture #2347349

Not that we had much time to be there – just the time to go and pack our monkey-wrecked tent and have some lunch before heading out to the main road where we flagged down a matatu to yet another wonderfully named place, Lunga-Lunga, where the Kenyan border post is. Over from there the Tanzanian border post was at the equally well-named (apart from for the Finns, for whom it's much funnier) Horohoro where we got stamped in quickly and painlessly, hopped into a dalla-dalla (what the Tanzanians call a matatu) and, once it had been crammed to way over capacity, rattled off over the corrugated road to Tanga, where we were to spend the night.

This was possibly not one of the most successful legs of this trip.

Breakdown, Madman, Overcrowded Ferry - This Is Africa..

15th February - 16th February 2010 – Days 139-140 – Mombasa, Kenya

After four disastrous nights in Lamu (one interrupted by me kicking the mosquito net out of place, leading to us getting completely eaten alive and followed by over an hour of mosquito hunting; one shortened by me getting accidentally locked out of the hotel and M locked into the hotel until 5am, leading to very little sleep; and one delayed by 2 cats fighting extremely loudly in the courtyard) the bus ride back to Mombasa was largely spent snoozing in the hot Kenyan sun, aside from one incident which happened about an hour after leaving.

African roads are generally pretty rough and distances are long, and with the truck traffic that rumbles along these roads it's a pretty common sight to see lengths of tyre on and next to the road. Until this morning, anything leading to such a length of tyre being left on the road had never happened to me. About an hour after leaving Mokowe (the port village opposite Lamu), though, I was gently snoozing away when I was awoken by a loud bang, a weird repetitive clicking noise and the gradual slowing of the bus. By the time I came to my senses, we had stopped. “That sounded like a tyre bursting” I said. “I'd say so too” said M. The bus emptied, and a classically African session of headscratching, discussion, observation and occasional argument ensued. For a while, it seemed that nothing much was happening. Men stood around debating various important topics, women sat in the grass by the road debating equally important topics, and the two wazungu on the bus stood around, half asleep, wondering why no-one was replacing the tyre. Eventually another bus came along, it stopped, more headscratching, discussion, observation and occasional argument took place and eventually a spare tyre was produced from the entrails of this other bus. From then on the driver and his assistant got busy with the business of removing the two tyres (for the burst one was the inside tyre at the back) replacing the burst one, and putting everything back in. It seemed that the surviving tyre of the original pair was on the point of bursting too and M predicted that we wouldn't get to Malindi (about an hour down the road) without a similar stop. I was tempted to agree with her although in Africa, not only the people but also the inanimate objects seem to show an amazing resilience. Besides, I was too sleepy to take a stand on the position. The men stopped debating, the women got up, everyone piled onto the bus, and we were off again. By the time I woke up 5 hours later, we were in the suburbs of Mombasa.

How to fix a broken tyre: Stand around looking at it

With our deadline to meet Freda in Dar Es Salaam next Sunday morning, we didn't have days to explore Mombasa, as nice as it was. Like Nairobi though, the centre was easy enough to wander around and see very well in a day. A fort, built by the Portuguese is by the coast; the old town, close to it, is a typically Arab-style old town and was nice to walk around. It was also home to a guy who seemed both happy to attach himself to us and also very irate, screaming something about the Mau Mau, the Somali war, Ethiopians, his leg (which seemed perfectly intact to us), how we should learn karate, and (repeatedly) about how we “defeated him money motherfucker” along with a generous amount of ranting in Kiswahili to passers-by. Some people laughed at his obvious insanity, others apologised to us for the inconvenience. The old town was also home to a man who added himself to the long list of people who have fixed my stuff – on this occasion it was one of the sandals that I'd picked up in Hargeisa and decided not to separate myself from until the end the trip. It had been falling apart for about a week and I decided to do something about it – within about 20 minutes (during which time the guy had not only fixed my sandal but also made friendly conversation with us and also commandeered a bench for us to sit on) it was as good as new.

T gets his stuff fixed once again

We wandered back out of the old town, towards the once again delightfully named “New Peoples' Hotel” to get our bags, and hop onto a matatu towards the Likoni ferry in the south of the city. Here, chaos reigned as we were herded into a huge holding pen inhabited by lots of people and another crazy man preaching some kind of philosophy in Kiswahili to an amused crowd of onlookers, before the gates were opened and a mad dash was made for the ferry. Despite our attempts, we couldn't find a ticket office or anywhere to pay (nor any mention of safety quotas – long live Africa!) and so there was probably no idea how many people were on the boat anyway. We got over the other side too, so who cares?

The bustle of Old Mombasa

Mombasa had a nice feeling to it – the type you get when you combine an old city with a lack of upkeep and the result is a faded, paint-stripping-from-the-walls kind of charm. Surprisingly Mombasa was also home to a much larger amount of beggars than anywhere else in Kenya and these beggars were using the ingenious line of “don't give me money!” - they would instead claim that they wanted to take us to a supermarket where we could buy them food. Probably still smarting from Ethiopia, we didn't follow any of these guys, nor did we give any time to the gang of kids who, Ethiopian-style, ordered us to “GIVE ME FIVE SHILLINGS!” and cursed us when we didn't. We've also developed a lump each on our arms which have been growing since Lamu. They are red, growing, and constantly painful, and we have no idea what they are. They didn't help us with our patience levels.

Once arrived to the other side of the Likoni ferry, we hopped onto a matatu towards Ukunda and continued our trek ever further south.

Soft Landing

11th February - 15th February 2010 – Days 135-139 – Lamu, Kenya

Call it the result of bad scheduling, weak immune systems or pure pleasure seeking behaviour, we eventually left Nairobi about half a week later than originally planned. Knowing we wouldn't have enough time to explore the whole of Kenya before we would have to be in Dar es Salaam to meet a friend, we agreed to devote our time to seeing the coastline on our way down south to Tanzania. I'd been looking at too many photos of the apparently scenic Lamu archipelago up the north coast not to miss it so we bussed it up there first, stopping in Mombasa for a mandatory night while changing buses.

To get to Lamu island or to move around in the archipelago people use dhows, either old style with the sail up or the modern motorised version. After two days on buses and about 15 minutes on a dhow, we disembarked at Lamu town and sat down for a big pint of passion fruit juice while trying to suck in the old Swahili fishing town atmosphere. Touts had found us already by now and one of them was waiting outside while we negotiated last minute tactics on how to get to our chosen accommodation, the Wildebeest guesthouse/art workshop. It turned out we were not safe from the touts inside the restaurant either as a man who introduced himself as the 'second in charge' there was also working as a commissioned salesman for the Wildebeest. We eventually let him guide us to the place and negotiated a fairly good deal with only minimal commission and were very satisfied with what we got: a small corner in a Swahili style house on two floors with a thatch roof, open from the sides with bamboo blinds covering the bigger openings on the walls. Ok, we needed a soft landing for coming back out into the real world after our stay at Tom's house in Nairobi, but we hadn't exactly envisioned a romantic hideout with a soft sea breeze blowing right in either.

For a moment, we are confused

No matter how idyllic the place was, we were quickly back out in the maze of streets that makes up the town, in search of a dinner place and to scout out our options for catching a dhow to the surrounding islands. We'd already been offered a fishing trip to the nearest island at a price that nearly exceeded our daily budget and we soon learnt that this was going to be the name of the game – despite the budget traveller friendly image of the place, you would not actually manage to make any budget deals here. Looking around at other wazungu in town confirmed our beliefs. There were both young and oldish European ladies walking around with local beach boys, middle aged couples in deck shoes zapping around on the motorised dhows and expat families on a weekend getaway from the mainland.

While I was trying to enjoy the salty air and the relaxed atmosphere all the same, T was having more difficulties adapting to the scene. Ok, so the place didn't have much going for it; it was historical in the sense that it was one of the oldest trading towns on the East African coast, but now it clearly lived off tourism. Nonetheless, the people were friendly enough and not too pushy compared to what you could expect from a place like this, and the town layout was original without modern resort architecture unlike most of the coast had been on our way up here from Mombasa. Had it been cheaper to sail around, we probably would have been more convinced about the whole archipelago. As the situation stood, however, we were effectively stuck on Lamu island with four nights paid for, and we would have to kill the time somehow.

Generic black and white Lamu picture #537349

The first full day was spent in Lamu town itself wandering around stopping for beer and coffee when appropriate and counting our pennies to see how many of such stops we could make per day without blasting our budget completely. On the second day we walked down by the beachfront to Shela, another concentration of life on the same island. Shela tends to an even more expensive lifestyle with its expat owned villas but also has a 12 km stretch of sandy beach. We had some lunch, did our casual tour, got stitched up for beer and coffee and made a mandatory visit to the sands. On the trip back along the beachfront we were caught in high tide and had to wade through waist-level waves trying to avoid stepping on crabs, which formed the most entertaining part of the day.

Beware of the tide: The road to Shela...

...and the way back.

The third full day had been reserved for a dhow trip to the more pristine Paté island further out in the archipelago, but as the price of the boat there (one-way) was our three days' budget, we ended up repeating the pattern from the first full day. I got my fix of seafood for a while and T pushed on through the days to his deserved break from coastal tourism until we reach Zanzibar at some point next month. The most beautiful glimpse (and pretty much our only one) of the archipelago was in the morning light when we glided away from Lamu jetty just after dawn.

A mosque whose name we don't remember...

The Service Sector

28^th January - 10^th February Days 121-134 Selected short stories from Nairobi, Kenya

When we were not living it up on the ex-pat scene, our time in Nairobi was mostly spent inspecting the different services the city provides.

Nairobi from on high

With us being back in civilization and surrounded by good-looking, well dressed individuals, I seriously started acknowledging the state of my overgrown roots dating from the last time I dyed my hair in August. Hence, I insisted I need a trip to the salon, and to my surprise T decided to join up with nothing more than a mere suggestion from my part. I think he was getting as scared of appearing in any more pictures that his mother would be seeing as I was of hearing about it from his mother that I had not been tending to his hair earlier. So we hunted down a suitable (read: decently priced) place and both sat down to be sliced, and in my case to be dyed too, and came out with alright results – apart from the tiny detail that the next morning I woke up with some nasty scabs all over my scalp. Talk about scratching your head while you're thinking of what to do next!

Luckily my recent efforts at playing Amy Housewine – picked up smoking again two weeks after arriving in Africa and drinking wine and beer at quite a liberal pace, especially with Tom's fridge at our disposal – had been producing their own result around the same time and also my beloved eczema flared up rather badly on the same night. I faced yet another one of those endlessly long nights when all you wanna do is kick and scream until the itching stops, and it still won't and you still won't stop scratching. I ended up doing rounds around Tom's house at 5am forced by T as an extreme measure to get my nails off my skin. The next afternoon we then headed to the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi to have me checked up to see if it really was the eczema or if I'd picked up something else, like worms, or if my doxy was giving me some rather undesirable side effects. Once in there, I was drugged up hardcore with steroids and anti-histamines through an IV. As I was slightly out of it for the rest of the evening, we had to call Tom to come and collect us back to his place. I left the hospital with a four-week dose of steroid creams and my new shampoo: some super sterile and stinky pink liquid that had to be diluted to one liter of water before each use. Just what the doctor ordered. NOT.

Aside these everyday instances we also got round to some more exotic trips around town, such as to our nearby shopping centre Village Market for multiple visits to our favourite supermarket at least if judged by name: Nakumatt. Just add an 'I' in the end and you're shopping at the Naked Matt in Finnish. We also got to check out the other side when Tom took us to Westlands where we tested out the other supermarket chain called Uchumi. No comedy with the name there though, so we decided to stick to the nude brand.

T attempts to fix sandals. They hold fast for several hours, making it the most successful thing he has ever attempted

The fact that I had to find some new trainers to replace my old ones acted as a good excuse to check out downtown Nairobi. We suspect the Merrells got snatched by an unsatisfied tout back in Moyale who put our bags up on the truck and whom we wouldn't tip according to his wishes. As the choice for this category of footwear in Nairobi is found mainly in sports brand stores (Nike, Adidas) with western prices, Bata and the freelance shoe shops found in every corner selling cheap converse-style tennis loafers, women's sandals and stilettos and ridiculous gansta ghetto basketball trainers, we were very happy to find a humanly priced sports warehouse in the centre of the city. I escaped with OK trainers and only Ksh 3000 (27€) damage, and T made a legendary purchase of a 'Long Wei' backpack (Ksh 800 or 6,5€) which he intended to use as part of his plan to lighten up the luggage burden by only taking a small bag for the next leg in Tanzania instead of his standard giant. What makes this purchase legendary is that the main zipper disintegrated within three hours from us leaving the store, rendering the whole bag rather non-usable. I didn't have the heart to advice T to go ask about the shop's return policy.

The Parliament, where dodgy deals are made (probably).

Nairobi Street scene #48473638(a)

Zipping around town for all of the above was done mostly on matatus, the local minibuses. For this part of the service sector I can report that some days are better than others in terms of the price you pay for the rides, but that the music will always be deafeningly loud and your personal space even more limited than the previous time. The latter happens to the point where you get invited for coffee by the guys who cash out the customers. We also heard a dating ad on the radio during one of the rides in which a married woman announced she's seeking a wealthy closer-to-40's man to show her a good time and pamper her. So this is a message to all you single and not so single ladies out there: Nairobi's matatus might come in useful in many ways!

M sits in a matatu and listens carefully. Who ever said some things never change??

A Day At The Races

28^th January - 10^th February Days 121-134 Selected short stories from Nairobi, Kenya

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.

"I say, Ethel, how frightfully delightful! What ho!"

Slumming It

28^th January - 10^th February Days 121-134 Selected short stories from Nairobi, Kenya

128 days after landing in Cairo, we finally visited our first project sponsored by the 1% fund. We didn't have much information about the project itself other than it was to visit a toilet block and a daycare centre built by an NGO in an “informal settlement” in Nairobi somewhere. They came to pick us up and we headed off to Mitumba, in the south of the city, where we were to be shown around by Dr. Mary, the head of the NGO looking after the project.

Dr. Mary looks on as M scares off yet another kid

It evoked mixed reactions in me – on the one hand it was a strong reminder of how badly off people can be in some places – no running water, electricity, sanitation and so on. On the other hand it wasn't quite as bad as I had expected from a Nairobi slum – there were shops and businesses, the streets weren't littered with corpses and so on. Still – the NGO was building only the second block of toilets in the whole place (in which lived between 18000 and 20000 people, depending on who you asked) of which 25% were under the age of 5. Houses were made of whatever materials people could find. You could still see that people had pride in the community though – from the immaculately turned out Mr. Nicholas, community leader, who helped to show us around and had big dreams for the future of Mitumba, or the young guys who signed up for jobs emptying septic tanks and the thankless task of picking up the trash. The unemployment and trash problems were being tackled simultaneously by training local women to make handbags out of plastic bags found on the floor, of which M bought one. Mitumba was dirt poor, but there was a feeling of hope and action in the air somehow. It wasn't what I had expected at all.

The whole thing seemed well run and had good intentions and, while it won't fix the myriad problems facing people living in Mitumba, it's a first step in the right direction.

Wanderin the streets

M and T contemplate the future

As a P.S... there are an estimated 200 slums in Nairobi. The biggest is Kibera, where 40% of Nairobi's population lives in squalor in an area 1% of Nairobi's total. All in all, nearly half of the population of the city live in slums, mostly without the most basic of services and amenities, and this demographic is probably the biggest contributor to Nairobi's crime problem. As we saw in Mitumba, these people can be proud members of their community and extremely resourceful. Helping them to help themselves is a first step, although the problem runs far deeper than that. NGOs like Dr. Mary's can alleviate the symptoms, but it is up to Kenya's government to cure the disease.

Mitumba's community football pitch sees some action. The eagle-eyed will note that this particular match-up is England v. McDonald's

Safari In The City

28^th January - 10^th February Days 121-134 Selected short stories from Nairobi, Kenya

For a couple of days Tom witnessed us getting comfortable in his house – sleeping late in the morning, reading magazines and newspapers in English while consuming his premium Kenyan coffee (for my part at least), dumping our dusty backpacks in his garden while washing every single item inside them in his washing machine and then attacking the bags themselves with his garden hose, going through pretty much his entire record collection (including the “One Hit Wonders” cds) with way too much enthusiasm and volume, surfing through the movie, news and sports channels on his wide-screen TV, sipping through a healthy five Tuskers each per day, and running to the supermarket and cooking him dinner like a pair of good house elves in return for all of the above. Then, on our fourth day in his place he took us to the Nairobi National Park to prevent us from becoming completely institutionalized.

M inspects her kingdom. And she sees...

...Stereotypical African panoramic view #8472794827

At around 6.30am on this beautifully misty Sunday morning we arrived at the park, situated right on the southern edge of the city. Tom led us through the gates like he would be taking us on a tour of his own backyard, casually checking from the gatekeeper if there were any lions out and about to dance and prance around for us. We made a mental note about those viewpoints where some had last been sighted and started making our way towards the open plains through the forest bit of the northern end of the park where the entrance is. I declared out loud that I had a good intuition about seeing leopards instead of lions and started gazing up towards the trees right from the beginning. Tom cordially noted that he'd never seen a leopard in this park, which made my intuition even stronger about catching that spotty tail somewhere in the midst of the branches.

It really is that close. Wow.

Tom took us first to the picnic site where in 1989 President Moi torched ablaze some 12 tonnes of ivory to make a point against illegal killings of elephants. This was followed by another stop at an opening with good views over the plains. Both T and Tom quickly spotted some zebras and giraffes in the distance. On the other hand, not being used to spotting any kind of life around me even if it hit me flat in the face, I had to borrow Tom's binoculars and still have the exact spots pointed out to me before actually separating the creatures from the grassy background. Back in the car and driving on, I heard mentions of at least five different birds that the frontseaters had sighted, while I was just spotting bush and more grass.

Burn! Burn!!

Once my eyes started getting hang of the process of having to look in order to see something, I started spotting things too, even if I was mostly hedging my bets between potential alive wanderers vs. lifeless lumps of land. At least I wasn't the only one playing the wild guess game as T proved while proudly announcing to have spotted something moving in the bush which was seconds later confirmed by Tom and I to be a harmless breed of pile of dirt. Cutting right across the plains towards the south end of the park we saw plenty of antelopes (mostly impalas but also Thomson's gazelles, hartebeests and a couple of elands), more giraffes and zebras, buffaloes, a lone hippo wandering out of water, waterbucks, ostriches and obviously a lot of smaller birds: secretary birds, hamerkops, bulbuls, guineafowl, kori bustard, crowned crane, hornbill (=Zazu!), marabou stark, etc. Knowing how disappointed Tom will be to hear that I had to get help from T's memory to even scrape up a list this long, I'll publicly promise to take notes next time, just like Tom suggested.

At the other end of the park there is a small river bend titled 'the hippo pool' with paths to go walk around in the surrounding forest habitat, ideal for birdwatching and for those leopard enthusiasts such as myself. We got out here to have a snack and to stretch our legs after the morning's efforts at the goggles. The park ranger approached us to say there was a buffalo somewhere around the woods so we should keep to one side of the path. Pfff. At least if it would have been a leopard, this would have been justified... never mind that the buffalo is the biggest people killer in Kenya (someone please correct these LP originated details again if holding more accurate stats yourself). Apparently there had been a leopard on one of the trees the previous night but s/he didn't show up to say hello to us. Instead we saw a (rubbery?) crocodile which was too busy sunbathing to move a muscle for more than half an hour, a couple of happy turtles and some hippo foot tracks – both my feet easily fit inside one of these hoofprints. The less blind members of the party also spotted yet more birds and instructed the more blind member to their whereabouts.

On the drive back across towards the entrance we scanned the plains again for the big cats, but nada, not a thing. Tom joined T in the hallucinating club by jamming on the brakes and grabbing his binoculars to spot a grey rock. He casually tried to drive on to save the situation but this time I was just and just accustomed enough to the spotting game to blow his cover completely and expose him to some gentle but deserved ribbing. Soon after, however, T did spot a white rhino mom and kid grazing, as well as the four other vehicles that had also spotted them and were zooming and crawling as close as possible to spy on their lunch hour. Later we spotted some six more rhinos on the other side of the plains, plus more of the staple antelopes, buffaloes, zebras and giraffes. On our way back towards the park gates I got frustrated enough with my intuition failing on the leopards to switch to trying to spot something even more difficult: “How about a snake, then! Have you ever seen any of those here?” It must get heavy for Tom at times to drive wildlife tourists around...

To finish off the nature-hugging tour we parked the car outside the gates and walked into the adjacent restaurant for a shared grill platter and some cooler than cold Tuskers. Interesting fact of the day: Tusker was named after the elephant who killed the founder of this tasty brand of lager.

Rarely have I seen a happier-looking turtle than this.

The Transformation

28th January - 10th February Days 121-134 Selected short stories from Nairobi, Kenya

Somewhat disorientated after the loss of our truck, we hopped into a taxi which Abdirazak had commandeered for us (whose driver, it turned out, had worked in the same petrol station as our esteemed driver many years ago) and we headed off towards the suburb of Gigiri, where Tom lived. Tom is a colleague of my dad who lives in Nairobi and kindly said he could put us up while we were in Nairobi. “Get yourselves to the Village Market in Gigiri” he'd texted us while we were on the truck. “It's close to where I live, and I'll come to pick you up.” We did as we were told and as we pulled into the carpark, we looked around and realised that we hadn't been this far out of place for many a month.

Our skin, hair, clothes and backpacks were coated in 3 days-worth of Northern Kenyan dust, our eyes were red from lack of sleep, our ragged clothes and flip flops compared sharply with the suits and shiny shoes of just about everyone else was wearing (aside from the kids from the German school over the road – they were discreetly decked out in designer clothes). We got looks (mainly from the Kenyans) that bordered on the incredulous – I started thinking that, given the appearance of the wazungu (for that's what we are these days, having surrendered our faranji status in Moyale) around us, they had maybe never seen (nor probably smelt) any white kids in such a state as we were. M headed straight for the bathroom to clean herself up but fortunately at least one of us had our priorities straight – I headed off to get a pizza and a beer. Meeting the inquisitive look of the girl behind the bar, I gave her a 2-sentence run down of our last 51 hours and, aside from surprise at the length of our trip, the incredulity turned to understanding. Maybe I should have made myself a sandwich board? I sat, feeling slightly conspicuous, waiting for my pizza. M came back in a clean shirt, which at least gave us a veneer of respectability. At least our filth had an advantage – while it gained us a lot of attention in the Village Market's Food Court, it also meant that Tom could just follow his nose and he found us with ease and joined us for a beer. Like any good Belgian, Tom appreciates good beer and we drank and chatted for several hours before heading back to his house for a long-awaited shower. As I waited for the water to warm, I thought back to Dongola where I had had a shower for the first time in many days. The transformation this time would be quite similar, and I spent as much time cleaning the bathtub after I was done as I did cleaning myself.

Indeed my feathered friend - even the windows are clean in this part of Nairobi

Our new surroundings were spectacular – water that became warm when you wanted it to, a TV which had many channels in languages we can understand, an oven (I was a cook in a former life but hadn't cooked anything since September), a washing machine, a garden, clean sheets. Gone were the cockroaches and in their place zipping around on the walls were the rather more charming geckos. Tom's welcome was as warm as his beers were cold, and it was hard not to feel comfortable here.

26th-28th January – Days 119-121 – Moyale to Nairobi, Kenya


Another day, another adventure. In a by now familiar action, we woke up earlier than we really would have wanted and tottered down to the large dusty area where the trucks congregate, got an appalling rate for the Ethiopian Birr that we had left, and ended up being approached by the usual bus station hangers-on. In a new country, somewhere without any buses, we felt more inclined to follow this guy and he wrote us a ticket to Nairobi in exchange for 2000 shillings. He took us to a truck and that was that. Or was it...? He came back a few minutes later. “There's a problem with this one – no more space left in the cab. You'll have to sit on the top.” Normally this would have been alright but we'd hardly slept in 4 nights and “on the top” in this case meant balancing ourselves on small metal bars, tottering above the truck's shipment of longhorn cows headed for Nairobi slaughterhouses. Images of ourselves falling asleep, falling off the bars and impaling ourselves on the horns of angry bovines led us to turn down this ride and ask if there was anything else. “There's this one” the guy said. “It goes through Wajir and Garissa though”. This large empty slab which comprised Northeastern Kenya was one we knew absolutely nothing about aside from that it was absolutely infested with bandits. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was a determination not to spend another night in Moyale or maybe it was simply the second manifestation of a magnetic attraction to Somalia, but we agreed, and hopped on.

"Meet the neighbours!"

Smooth, isn't it?

We shared the truck (taking a shipment of 200 sacks of beans) with several interesting and friendly characters – Abdirazak, who didn't speak a word of English but tried to communicate with us anyway, was the driver. He was a skinny, softly spoken guy, the complete opposite of everything you would expect of a trans-African trucker, and hopped into the cab at Moyale with an anti-breast-cancer shirt proclaiming “SUPPORT MY RACK” in bright pink lettering. A good start. In the back of the truck was a guy who always did his running around but whose identity we never managed to determine. A secondary school kid heading to Nairobi, Jabar, shared the cab with us as did another guy who claimed to be South African but also claimed to be the driver's nephew. We never found out which was more accurate or, as we realised afterwards, what his name was. In any case, he was friendly and talkative, spoke near-fluent English and was our main point of communication to translate to the others. Despite communication being slow and occasionally not very smooth it was a fun ride in a friendly atmosphere.

The termite mounds give us the finger

As we set off from Moyale though, we had no idea what was coming to us. We were told by Jabar that the bandits weren't in this area any more, but this was the first time we'd heard that. In any case, by the time we'd started really thinking about it, it was too late – we were going to enjoy this trip! The landscape was greener than I'd expected, the pace was slow but steady, the truck's radio blasted out pop songs in Borana, a Kenyan language related to Oromo in Ethiopia. The truck quickly started feeling like home and we knew we would have to make it that – no one could tell us how long the trip would be, but a quick look at the map, the rugged roads and the rickety truck made it seem obvious that we would be there for more than a few hours. Our Lonely Planet book quickly became hot property as anyone who saw it would grab it and read it – including Abdirazak, who would read it while he was driving. Jabar eventually got hold of it, saw the giraffes on the front cover and told us that we could see some around Wajir. A surprise for us, but our eyes were open for them nonetheless. As the cheery and catchy Borana pop played, the sun went down, and a couple of giraffe silhouettes appeared in the bushes by the road, the first M had seen in the wild and an exciting moment for her.

Is it a Rothschilds? Is it a Maasai? No, it's a Reticulated!

Traffic was pretty light on the road – the odd truck would come the other way at the same snail's pace as us, kicking up dust that would fly in through our windows, caking our clothes and hair with that now familiar feeling. The drivers would beep their horns excitedly, wave out the window and drive on. Around 10pm, our momentum was broken as a truck coming the other way had broken down between two trees, and our path was blocked. The driver's guy in the back hopped off and gesticulated with his torch as we reversed, and then tried to go through the sand and bushes onto an adjacent track. The first attempt led us straight towards a tree and we reversed to try again. M wasn't impressed as she looked out - “look at that sand, it's far too deep... we'll never get through!” and so it proved. The next hour and a half were spent shovelling sand out from under the tyres and ripping branches off trees to use as ladders. After countless unsuccessful efforts and with a big cheer, we finally got out, onto the other path, and continued on our way. A few more giraffes and an aardwolf crossed our path, M and I started being able to sing along to the Borana pop.

Nightlife, northeastern Kenya

Wajir, our first “major” town (meaning our first one with permanent buildings) came into view at around midnight, and we hopped out to buy some welcome cold drinks and snacks. It was a pretty unremarkable town aside from its seemingly high ratio of people who, in most other countries, would be in asylums. They walked around, proclaiming things loudly to no one in particular and muttering to themselves. In the middle of it all, the woman who ran the shop where we picked up some biscuits told us that she was active in UNIFEM and had been to New York for conferences. She wasn't exactly the kind of person I expected to find in Wajir. Having stacked up, we charged on, and sleep came over us. Abdirazak had munched miraa (the Kenyan word for qat) all day although by 3am he decided that it was enough and pulled over in a small village. I was already half asleep and spent the night curled up in the truck's passenger seat as M snoozed on the bed behind me.

Abdirazak checks up which National Park he should visit next

A few hours later we were up and off again – the sun was up but it was a typical winter desert morning, and I shivered against the cold. As the sun rose and the air warmed, I started hoping that we wouldn't arrive in Nairobi that day. Not that I wasn't excited by getting there, but the landscapes were beautiful and stimulating, the atmosphere was good, there were enough animals to keep our eyes scanning the horizon and we felt ever more comfortable on “our” truck.

Red dust!

We stopped at 7am for breakfast in Habasweyne but sleep was a more tempting option for me and I didn't get off, while M was still asleep in her bed. We trundled on again through small villages, making small talk sometimes, joking with Abdirazak about his lack of miraa and trying (and generally succeeding) to joke with the police at checkpoints at each town or village. As time went on it became obvious we would be spending another night on the truck and we settled in and made ourselves comfortable. Sometime mid-afternoon we got to an intersection – to the left was wilderness, Liboi and Mogadishu. To the right, the tarmac road to Garissa. A few jokes went up about taking us to Mogadishu and, after 30 hours rattling along corrugated roads and bouncing through dry mud potholes, the truck hauled itself onto the tarmac. The effect of the new flatness and quietness was quite strange.

From here on the trip wasn't quite as wild as it had been before we hit the tarmac but we finally saw a populated part of Kenya – Garissa was a reasonably big town and we stopped there for lunch, and such features as rivers and bridges suddenly appeared. Truck stops with other trucks in it also appeared and as darkness fell we stopped at one of those, and met some of the other truckers. One of them was spending the night there as he felt there was too much of a threat on the road ahead that his shipment of goats would get hijacked at night. We were invited for a cup of tea and as we stood up to pay, we were told that someone had already paid for us. We never found out who it was. Another 7 hours on the truck, and we pulled over at a petrol station near Thika for 3 hours of sleep. How Abdirazak managed this amazing pace with so little sleep (and miraa only on the first day!) I don't know, but he managed it without any problems. Dawn came and we pulled on into a warehouse in Thika where our shipment of beans was unloaded. After waiting for a few hours for the truck's new instructions, we pushed on to Nairobi where the guys would pick up a new shipment and leave immediately for Mombasa. Amazing...

The cargo is unloaded

After 51 hours of sitting, having a rest is a tempting option

Kenya so far seems a beautiful, dynamic country, and different in many many ways from Ethiopia. It also seems more easy going and relaxed and, despite Nairobi's terrible reputation for crime, it seems as though we're almost anonymous here in Kenya compared with the incessant attention and demands for money in Ethiopia. What is also different is the raging corruption we've seen on the way down – we didn't see anything of the sort in Ethiopia although the police checkpoints after Garissa seemed set up only to collect some cash for those manning it. Some would try to invent reasons for the fines they were dishing out but many also just opened the door and stared at Abdirazak, their demands obvious enough. I asked his nephew why he paid up so easily. “If he doesn't, they will take him to the police station, things will be more difficult and he will have to pay anyway” was the reply. They weren't happy with the situation but seems resigned to the situation and played along with it.

It was long and bumpy but it was also eye opening, beautiful and a great introduction to Kenya and I'd have loved to be back in Moyale to do it all again. There was no time to think about that though – we were now suddenly in one of Africa's big cities, one of the economic centres of the continent and suddenly somewhere very new and different.