AlexPGP's Corner

   The Kahama Hotel had seen better days. In fact it had once been the Kenya International Hotel, overlooking the Nairobi River. Its grand exterior now fronts on a narrow perpetually congested highway (even in the dead of night, as I arrive) and the concrete wall of an overpass. A sidewalk does not even grace its shuttered front door. The Nairobi River is still near at hand, smelly and filled with trash, but arriving at night as I did one at least can’t see that.
   From a small carpark in the back, inviting light does emanate from what appears not unlike a service entrance actually leads to a surprisingly modern and comfortable lobby. I give my name to the cheerful clerks behind the front desk, and thanks to the miracles of modern technology here I am in their computer.
   “Your colleague is already here” they inform me.
   “What?”
   “Your colleague. He arrived already”
   I’m not expecting my colleague for another day though.
   I proceed up three flights of stairs to the room, and cautiously push the door open. With the blackout curtains closed it’s as dark as a crypt in there. This is my first time in Nairobi, is some villain waiting in there to cosh me with a metal pipe? (you experienced Nairobi hands will be shaking your heads at my naivety here, of course it wouldn’t be a metal pipe, it would be a rungu)


This picture doesn't quite do it justice, behind that grate is a grand looking permanently-shut door

   It had been a pleasant and balmy night when I’d arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport an hour earlier. I was a bit nervous as this was the first time I’d travelled to Africa entirely on my own, no larger organization making all the arrangements for me, no local staff dedicated to my safety. I had booked the hotel on the way to LAX, and like magic these haphazard arrangements made on my phone resulted at the other end 36 hours later in arriving to find the hotel driver, polite, dignified, waiting for me smooth as anything. As we drove out the airport gates a broad highway stretched before us, street lamps illuminating the fog in a sepia glow … and zebras grazing in the median??

   My first arrival in Africa two years earlier had been similarly at night, in Nigeria, and I’d felt naïve for expecting to see zebras, all I’d seen on the harrowing drive from the airport were wrecked cars in the unilluminated dark. But no, it was just the wrong country for zebras!

   I enter the darkened room without light – I figure if there’s a criminal they won’t see me either, and if Doug is sleeping, well, he’s sleeping. But I hear his sleepy voice moments later,
   “Oh hey Kris”
   “I wasn't expecting you till tomorrow” I remark.
   “Oh I got the dates wrong apparently” he explains.

   The previous August, I was standing in a Californian orange grove, an open beehive in front of me, when my phone rang, I saw it was Doug, the American beekeeper I had met in Nigeria, so I answered.
   “Hey what's happening??” he asked, “any travel plans coming up??”
   Pressing the phone against my beekeeping veil, I answered, “well, I'm going to a beekeeping conference in Tanzania in November”
   “Oh sounds fun, mind if I come along?”
   “Okay, yeah let's go!” I responded. And that was that, here we are. But I haven’t traveled with friends since an ill-fated 2008 Middle East trip which all friendships involved are still recovering from. I barely know this Doug guy, will we be able to stand each other for 40 days of seat-of-the-pants planning across the third world? We’d find out!

   The time difference between Nairobi and California is 11 hours, almost the maximum possible, which is pretty jarring, and I’d only gotten in at around 3:30am, but still, I’m not one to miss breakfast, so I crawled out of bed and hurried down to the breakfast buffet 20 minutes before it ended. Doug had preceded me and had already discovered a tour company representative in the lobby.
   “Look, we can offer you some great rates on practically anything right now, everyone's desperate for bookings because the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is scaring everyone away!” the fattish man wearing a blazer over a black shirt explained.
   “Really? That's a thousand miles away!” I exclaim.
   “Yeah, more like five thousand, but most Americans and Europeans don't seem to realize that. They're not coming. So what do you want to do?”
   “Well, we'd like to go on a safari, and Zanzibar, and then we need to get to Arusha by November 11th…” He smiles broadly, he has safaris, he has hotel deals in Zanzibar, he has flight deals. I am cynical and suspicious and know what these things should cost and … am pleasantly surprised to find these are actually good deals. We are lucky that people are dumb.

   Later that day we walk across the river (on one of the numerous concrete overpasses) into downtown Nairobi. It’s a fairly modern city of (smallish) skyscrapers and people going about their business in suits.


View of Nairobi from one of the taller buildings

November 5th, Day 2 – Doug and I find ourselves in a bizarre surreal abandoned amusement park looking place. Monkeys scamper across the roofs of locked up kiosks. A guard relaxes on a vacant porch with his rifle across his knees. Prisoners in black and white striped coveralls move in a line across a lot of tall grass cutting it with machetes, watched by another armed guard.
   Many of the buildings belong to agricultural enterprises – some appear to only be used once a year, some appear to be in current use. This is the showground of the Agricultural Society of Kenya, and indeed one week every year it hosts the Nairobi International Trade Fair.
   Our destination is a small two story building owned by Honey Care Africa. While the rest of the fairgrounds have been very tranquil, their building is a hive of activity. They employ about 45 people. Honey extracting machinery is running on the bottom floor, and hives are being made in an adjoining building. We’re led up to the second floor, which is administration, by a young Canadian fellow who is their head of field operations. We learn they run thousands of hives throughout Kenya, with their professional beekeepers constantly traveling around visiting the various farms on which they are located. They’ll have all their beekeepers back here at headquarters on the 19th, and we discuss being there for that, though as it happens the 19th would find us halfway up Kilimanjaro.

   The Nairobi National Museum is nice and modern, having been rebuilt only a few years prior. It was founded in 1910, but its collections go back a bit further – it contains for example a 20 million year old hominid skull found by a previous curator’s wife. I learn Nairobi was founded as a way station along the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria in 1899. It takes its name from the Nairobi River, which means “cool water” in Maasai. The likeness of a famous elephant, Ahmed, stands in front of the museum. During his lifetime he was declared a “living national monument,” and guarded 24/7 by rangers. He died of natural causes in 1974, aged around 55, found leaning against a tree. The famous “Tsavo man-eater” lions are not, they have been in Chicago for over a century now (though Kenya has repeatedly asked for them back).
   “Hey man, want to hear a song? Here I’ll play you a song!” a local Rastafarian with dreadlocks and a traditional stringed instrument calls out to us outside the museum as we exit. The instrument, a Nyatiti, consists of a hide-covered wooden bowl with two arms holding a crossbar to which 8 strings are attached that stretch from there across the bow. I would have continued walking, cynically seeing this as a probable attempt to extract far more than it was worth from us. But Doug is interested in hearing it. The music is forgettable, which is better than memorably bad, and afterwards of course he wanted a payment.
   “I don’t have any money, but I have some herbs I can give you” Doug informs him earnestly. The Rastafarian’s eyes light up and he nods that that would be very acceptable. Doug removes from the backpack he always wears some small baggies of herbs and gives him some. They are, of course, various botanical herbs the medicinal value of which Doug is a big believer in, they are not the specific THC-containing herbs the Rastafarian was hoping for. Doug is oblivious to his disappointment and the obvious misunderstanding, I am trying not to laugh out loud.

   That evening I continued reading "The Forever War,” in which time dilation causes the protagonist to be gone from Earth for hundreds years, and it makes me feel lonely and far from home.

November 6th - Day 3 - We head out at 9am on safari! Safari safari! The minivan-sized 4x4 could probably fit at least a dozen people, but because of the Ebola scare, it’s just Doug and I and the driver. A canopy opens up out of the roof so you can stand at the middle seats and be head and shoulders above the vehicle.
   I had expected that maybe we'd drive around for an hour and see a giraffe, drive around for another few hours and see an antelope, something like that. There are exotic animals around just about every corner. Clusters of giraffes nibble acacia canopies, herds of zebras graze the grasses, various kinds of antelope wander about, there are ostriches, warthogs, even three rhinoceroses, one baboon, and I scarcely dared hope for it, but we see a lion! Just lounging there, we drive right up to where she lounges by a waterhole, and she takes no notice of us. Behind her, in the immediate surroundings are the classic bushes and acacias of the savanna, but behind them the city skyline looms prominently. Nairobi National Park is literally just off the edge of town. This is certainly convenient, though being within sight of skyscrapers does kind of dampen the ambience. But then again there’s plenty of safaris further afield. And speaking of convenience, we are able to go straight from the national park to the airport, which fortunately is on the same side of the city, bordering right on the park, because it’s time to go to Zanzibar.