Answer: Fastest Nairobi Tour EVER!!!

Question:

What happens when you add:

+ Two Mazungu talk/scam their way into getting the ride to the guest house they were promised

+ Shuttle driver is told the wrong place to go from supervisor

+ Rush hour traffic

+ Nairobi driving

+ Gas tank on empty

+ End of a long, long day

We left Arusha on Thursday morning on a bus that was much more like the traditional DallaDalla’s that you see traveling around the country. I don’t think either of us really knew what to expect on the ride and at the start it wasn’t very promising. We were sitting in the back row with no windows of our own to open and traveling on a very bumpy and slow road. With 32 people crammed in to a small space it soon started to heat up. Needless to say by the time we reached the outskirts of Arusha I was ready to pull a Paul!! (For anyone not on the Kenya team who doesn’t know what this means please talk to them.) Thankfully the man in front of me had moved over a seat and now only had his briefcase sitting in the window seat and I was able to trade with the briefcase. I spent much of the next hour praying and breathing in as much fresh air as I could.

The rest of the ride really wasn’t bad at all and we met some nice people and had great chats. I had to explain to the man who’s briefcase I’d traded with about ice fishing in t-shirts in the spring and I think he basically got the impression that Canada is a bunch of freaks who wear no clothes in the cold and sit on ice to fish, not my best work. Eric was sitting beside another Eric and a lady from Oregon and talked to both of them about their travels and the UN Visa Eric was in the process of getting so he could attend school in the UK.

The roads in Tanzania were a delight as they were basically all paved outside Arusha with very few holes but two goats who nearly made the ultimate sacrifice. The roads in Kenya were an entirely different case, dusty, full of holes and almost non-existent are the nice things we could say about them. This was expected by Eric and I given our previous experience here and there was some progress seen in the amount of new tarmac that’s being laid in several places, unfortunately none of it is ready.

We arrived in Nairobi just in time for the start of rush hour and true to form the last hour of our bus ride was spent in screech and floor-it traffic, that’s Kenyan for stop and go. When we did finally get to the stop we told the manager that we had been promised a shuttle to our guest house and he got frustrated because Mayfield is not in the City Center and their shuttle is for the City Center only. Now in truth they did tell us all this in Arusha but we assumed that Mayfield was City Center and the guy in Arusha (who didn’t have a clue) agreed with us. We eventually did get a shuttle that we didn’t have to pay for but the manager told him to take us to the Mennonite House and when we finally got there we had to tell the driver it was wrong and he begrudgingly started towards Mayfield. He was more than a little grumpy at this point and traffic was pretty snarly and this made for some of the most ‘interesting’ driving we’ve seen to date. We did make it through unscathed and the van even had working seatbelts so we were never in any real danger. I was more worried about the people on the sides of the roads.

Mayfield was a very welcome site when we finally arrived and we had no hassles getting our room and all the rest sorted. By this point it was about 1630 and Eric hadn’t eaten a meal since 0730. As you can imagine this meant he was more than a little peckish. We both collapsed on the bed and reminisced about our day while chowing-down on the snack food we had. While eating we began to notice the different shades of dirt that our skin, hair and clothing had taken on and decided it was time for a long, hot shower with a great deal of soap. Clean and relaxed it was a waiting game until dinner and we spent the time checking emails and chatting with my daddy.

On Friday we’ll head out to the Java House, bank, grocery and a couple other shops to stock up before heading to Acacia camp on Saturday morning.