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  • Journey to Nairobi

    November 23, 2019 in England ⋅ 🌧 8 °C

    The long awaited day had arrived for my journey to the legendary continent of Africa where my ancient hominid ancestors had lived, loved and died for generation after generation over millions of years to bring me the chance to come into being. And now I was returning to their hallowed ground shared with a myriad of creatures and large mammals that I would hopefully witness for the first time in my life.
    I had gone to sleep very early in the evening at around 8pm so that I could get up at 2.45am, get a shower, light breakfast and dive into the booked taxi with my small and large rucksacks at around 3.45am. The taxi driver was friendly as I told him of my planned journey across East and South Africa. We drove down through the dark, wet, and largely deserted streets of Bristol, with a few waifs and strays staggering drunkenly back from their Friday night out. We arrived at the coach station where I waited for my National Express coach to arrive. A drunk man staggered around the waiting area asking me and others for a light for his cigarette and making the atmosphere tense in the way that someone disinhibited by alcohol can do. The National Express coach eventually arrived at 4.25am. I stowed my large rucksack in the hold beneath the coach and boarded to take my pre-booked seat by the window. The coach was surprisingly busy at this time of the morning filling with fellow travellers heading for Heathrow airport and their flights to various parts of the world. We set off up the M32 out of Bristol, with rain drops blowing across the window, I looked out into the darkness at the familiar terrain by the motorway and felt that strange melancholic nostalgia of leaving a city in which I'd lived for over 25 years and wouldn't be seeing again for several months. I travelled with a mixture of tiredness, nervousness and excitement at the long journey ahead of me.
    I tried to get some sleep on the coach journey, but to no avail. as I always find it difficult to sleep on any transport no matter how tired I am. This would prove to be a challenge in my long journey across Africa. The air conditioning/heating was also set too high on the coach and the heat was unbearable. I ruminated that this would be good training for the heat of Africa to come. A passenger asked the driver to turn the heating down, which he did, but it made little difference.
    We arrived at Heathrow airport terminal surprisingly quickly and I disembarked, reclaimed my large rucksack and entered the terminal. I hadn't flown for several years and it took me a while to get my bearings in the busy terminal. I asked a helpful member of staff where to check my rucksack in and she pointed me in the right direction. I had a wait for the check in desk to open, and used the time to put my rucksack in a protective cover and to eat my pre-prepared brunch. I then checked my bags in without difficulty and walked up the escalator to pass through the security and into the departures area. I messaged my family to let them know that I'd successfully passed through security and would soon be on the long flight to Nairobi. My sister passed on a request from my young nephew, Luke, for a photograph of the airplane that I would be flying on. After a wait, I took the long walk to the departure lounge in terminal 5, took a photo of the plane for my nephew, and waited to board the plane. I was feeling excited as I enjoy flying and looking down at the wide expanses of Earth below from such a great height. Even though I have flown many times, it still seems like a miracle to me that I can be so high up and looking down over the Earth like the gods of Olympus in Greek mythology.
    I boarded the plane and was pleased to find that I had nobody sat immediately next to my window seat so that I had more leg room and also had room for my ruck sack which I had taken on board as hand luggage. There was an attractive, well dressed, black woman sat across from me on the aisle seat who was quite taciturn but not impolite during the flight. I listened to the various announcements on the intercom and watched the stewardesses go through the emergency procedures before preparing myself for the take off. The plane taxied out onto the runway, opened the engines into a powerful roar, we thundered down the tarmac, angled upwards and rose peacefully and gracefully into the morning air. I was surprised at my lack of anxiety on take off which I had experienced more on previous flights. I think I had reached the age where I could say 'Que sera sera' in such situations. The flight was roughly on time at around 10.10am. There were some nice views of London's dense urban landscape as we rose up through white clouds and slowly banked towards continental Europe. There were some breaks in the cloud cover over the English channel and I could see the long thin white beaches of the northern French coast before the clouds closed in again and covered the view in an undulating white duvet of air moisture for a few hours. We were served breakfast and later a lovely hot lunch of vegan thai curry which I had pre-ordered. I was still unable to sleep, so I watched some wildlife documentaries on the video screen in front of me. I avoided films of Africa as I didn't want to colour my own visions of the African wildlife that I would hopefully see during my own journey. The clouds parted again over, what looked like, the coastline of Croatia with dramatic mountains and steep river valleys flowing down to the sea. We then reached the far side of the Mediterranean sea and the first sight of the continent of North Africa and what I assumed to be Egypt where I had spent an epic week visiting ancient temples and the great pyramids of Cairo over twenty years before. Long wide beaches stretched down to the sea. As we flew inland I could see across immense deserts with endless rock formations casting long shadows in the hazy yellow late afternoon sunshine. We continued on across the desolate expanses of North Africa's deserts. We passed over an enormous inland river delta over what may have been the Sudan, its waters gleaming, as a golden sun descended over the curved rim of the Earth. The clear sky turned deep red up to turquoise blue, to deep blue, and then to velvet black. Venus and Jupiter were sparkling brightly in the evening sky. As the darkness descended, I could see glittering towns with bridges lit up like bejeweled bracelets by their street lamps over black ribbons of water passing slowly underneath us. There were so many lives below, and so many stars above, all uncountable but equally precious.
    After around 10 hours of flying we had reached the great rift valley of East Africa and began to descend towards Nairobi airport. The lights of the airport and the surrounding city only appeared relatively close to landing as we descended through rain clouds to land with a thud on the wet tarmac and taxi in towards the terminal. We arrived earlier than the scheduled 21.50 local time and we all left the plane to get a packed airport bus to the one remaining terminal following an airport fire several years earlier. I then had to wait in a queue to pass through security, but my queue was happily shorter due to the fact that I had already secured an East Africa visa from the Kenyan High Commission while at home. As I offered my passport for inspection I was confronted with the finger print scanner favoured for security in East African countries and it took me a while to figure our how to present my fingers and thumb to the green lighted scanner and in which order. The surly female immigration officer was not amused by my confusion. I eventually got through the immigration booth and made my way to claim my baggage from the carousel. It was a relief to find that it had accompanied me in the hold of my flight and had not been left at Heathrow or flown somewhere else. I made my way out of the terminal and walked down a long series of stone steps to a waiting area for taxis. It was here that I began to experience that apprehension and disorientation of being in a foreign culture with people speaking in a language (Swahili) that i didn't understand. I looked for the Oasis sign that should have been there with a man called, Smiley, who was due to pick me up from the airport and drive me to my accommodation at Karen Camp on the outskirts of central Naorobi. However, there was no Oasis sign to be seen and various taxi drivers picked up on my lack of available transport and kept asking me to take their taxi which I had to politely but firmly decline. I called Smiley and managed to speak to someone, who I initially thought was Smiley, but later realised was his brother, Peter. It was a slightly confused conversation where Peter asked me where I was waiting and I explained where I was. He told me to wait there which I did for a slightly anxious ten minutes or so when he eventually arrived on foot and we were able to introduce ourselves. However, Peter didn't initially tell me that he wasn't Smiley so I called him that until he put me right when we walked back to a multi-storey car park where he paid for his parking ticket and we found his car. We then drove through the night out towards Karen Camp. We talked about the rainy weather in Nairobi and Peter said that there had been far more rain than is usual in the short rainy season which had caused a lot of flooding across Kenya. The heavy rains, caused by climate change, the El Ninho effect, and moisture laden weather heading across the Indian ocean to East Africa instead of India, would become a significant feature of the first half of my trip in Africa. We also talked about Premier League football, which I found to be a very handy topic of conversation with virtually all the taxi drivers I encountered during my trip. Peter supported Leicester City and I told him that I supported Liverpool. We discussed how well Liverpool had started that particular season as they were now sitting pretty at top of the Premier League. The easy and friendly conversation was welcome as the drive out to Karen Camp took nearly an hour on the clear night time roads. I noticed that as we drove down a long highway, we passed a huge shanty town with rough single storied houses made with corrugated iron bulged out onto the edge of the highway for over a mile. This brought home the grinding poverty that I was going witness in many parts of East Africa. We then passed an open fenced area which Peter informed me was a large national wildlife park that bordered the road. It is apparently the only wildlife park in Africa that sits right next to a major city. Peter said that he would often see elephants, giraffe and antelope by the roadside as he drove by. The reality that I was now in a continent where such large and exotic wildlife could be seen from the rush hour traffic excited me. We eventually turned off the main highway and down some residential streets until at last we arrived at Karen Camp and the first leg of my journey had been completed safely - I was in Africa! Peter showed me into the entrance to the hostel. The hostel was fairly tatty and underwhelming and I was met by an older woman who seemed to be the hostel manager but her clearly inebriated state made me wonder about this as she clasped my hand for an uncomfortably long time. There was also a barman there behind the bar called Michael who met me with a friendly handshake and smile. I said goodbye to my driver, Peter, and thanked him. I decided to stick with the dorm room accommodation which had been booked for me by the travel company that I was doing my overlanding tour with, Oasis Overland. This proved to be a mistake as when I was shown to the room, I realised that it was more of a shed with a clean but musty smelling bed and a big gap under the rickety old door. I would definitely be needing the old grey mosquito net to keep out the mosquitoes. I didn't relish the prospect of spending two nights here and began to wonder what kind of trip I had embarked upon. However, I was exhausted after my long journey, so I unpacked my sleeping bag, silk liner, a few of my things, let down the mosquito net, put my ear plugs in, and eventually crawled off to sleep in the hot night air.
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