We are in Nairobi, Kenya staying at the Meridian Court Hotel, our first hotel stay so far this trip. After our serengeti adventure we figured we deserved a place to relax, regroup, and most importantly, shower! Being dirty is just a fact of life here and any local or experienced African traveler will happily remind you of this. So, we bit the bullet, cancelled our hostel reservation, and stayed in a hotel where we were able to each take two hot showers in the period of about 20 hours. We also managed to get a good 10 hours of uninterrupted (almost - see #2 below) sleep in proper beds. Laundry remains a bit of a challenge; we are all running quite low on clean clothes so we each did some sink laundry to tie is over for a few days. It was most difficult to completely remove the enormous amount of sand and dust from my clothes, and since dirty is just a way of life here, I gave up trying after rewashing my shorts 6 times.
Up until now, we've been sleeping in tents, showering in cold water, using mere holes with no TP for #1 and #2, and reusing clothes that would be deemed a biohazzard at home.
Oh, and, #2 has started to play into things. Allison has been to the toilet more times than we can count. We're hoping that last night's dinner has taken care of that.
Since our Victoria Falls to Nairobi tour officially ended yesterday, the entire group went out for dinner at one of the world's top voted restaurants, Carnivore. As you may be able to deduce from the name, this place is all about meat. We each received a hot wash cloth and some snacks to begin. Small portions of soup and salad followed. Then suddenly huge amounts of rotisserie meat started arriving at our table. Each server carried a different sword or spit, and would happily plunk the tip of it right on your hotplate and carve off a big chunk of meat. We ate: roast beef, pork loin, beef ham, spare ribs, sausages, turkey, chicken, ostrich meatballs, leg of lamb, lamb sausage, ox heart, chicken liver, and camel. Besides the surprise 85 percent tax on our bill at the end of the meal, we all ate way too much and enjoyed the experience.
We have now been in Africa for over a month and have just completed our 21 day overland safari. We totally broke our rule and made some fantastic friends. Team Australia, team Switzerland, and team Holland aka little spoon (a nickname from day one that just stuck) will all be missed. We even made friends with a Canadian from Toronto, and totally hit it off with Paul our bus driver.
Our entire Africa trip was pretty much planned out except the following week. We ended our overland tour having no clue how we were going to spend the week between our tour and our mission trip, or how we were going to get ourselves from Nairobi, Kenya to Kampala, Uganda. In fact, we were mentally preparing to take the chicken bus, get charged too much at the border, and totally wing it. But, it just so happens that our tour company is running another tour from Nairobi to Kampala and since we made such good friends with the driver from our tour, he offered us a free lift! The drive could be done in one day, but it will take us about four days with the tour. Right now we are camping at Lake Navasha for two nights and since we are technically not part of this tour, we aren't involved in any of the activities. This has allowed us to have a relaxing couple days along side the hippos, cranes, and baboons in our campsite.
The wildlife here continues to amaze us. As we were enjoying some beers on the patio beside the pool, an employee came and told us that we left a window open on our bus. I didn't think this was a big deal until I went to close it and found 7 baboons inside the bus helping themselves to our avocados! It is also amazing to see the maribu cranes fly overhead with their 3 meter wingspan. And as soon as I'm finished this sentence, I'm going to go watch the hungry hungry hippos in the lake!
Brad
1 comment:
Thats some travelogue, you koops. I hope you finally made it to Kampala.
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