Nairobi, Kenya

Thursday, May 22, 2008

So, we arrived here in Nairobi (Kenya) at 6:00 am yesterday via London, just in time for morning rush hour. Fascinating place. Lots of traffic, most vehicles with absolutely no emission control at all. Horrible air pollution. We are just south of the equator.

We’re a couple of hours east of the Rift Valley, the origin of human kind, and fours north of Mount Kilimanjaro. Nairobi was originally a rail stop over point between Kampala in Uganda, and Mombassa on the Indian Ocean. Lots of Brits still, and English is the common language, with Swahili being the back-up. This is home to the Masai people, and if you ever saw Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in “Out of Africa”, well, this is the place. The movie was based on Karen Blixen’s autobiography, and her home http://www.museums.or.ke/karen is now a museum on the outskirts of town (the neighbourhood is officially known as “Karen” now). The Ngong Hills are in the distance.

The pictures are of downtown Nairobi, but does not show Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa (Soweto is the largest, outside Johannesburg). Another is of traffic gridlock downtown. I lifted the Kibera picture from the Web, and the scenic shot is from the elephant sanctuary showing the distant savannah.

The scenic shot of the plains is taken from the elephant sanctuary (see next posting) on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Yesterday was mostly taken up with running around trying to arrange visas for our entry into Sudan tomorrow. It was mostly an exercise in patience, filling out forms, and waiting for clerks to appear an hour after the appointed time. We did manage to fit in a quick taxi tour of downtown, then crashed. We’d been up by this point around 50 hours, with maybe four hours of naps on the flights. Slept through dinner and most of the night.