Nairobi

It took all of a week for us to finally make it into Nairobi. In the meantime, Ed has been looking at the accounts, and Jo has been counting books. Last Sunday we went to an Ethiopian restaurant with Anssi and his wife, which was excellent. They served strong black coffee with burning incense, which was a little unexpected.

Then we went to where the rift valley has its largest drop over land, at around 1000m. The view was beautiful, if a little hazy and it felt a lot like being in Europe (fir trees and cold). I guess it was not surprising as we were now at over 3000m. The African way of dealing with beauty spots is to build shops all along them, and then hassle the tourists. There was a boy selling rabbits. He told me that if he didn’t sell a rabbit he wouldn’t have any food to eat. In the name of charity (one can’t have a child go hungry) I told him to eat the rabbit.

It is noticeably hotter in Nairobi than Karen. First we went to the Masai market, a colourful assortment of tourist trash (otherwise known as traditional artisan products) where every trader seems to believe that if he nags for long enough we will buy all his merchandise at vastly inflated prices. It works, we somehow came away with a souvenir.


Leaving the Masai market, it is only a short walk to the parliament buildings, which seem not to have been built by the most gifted architect. Here we saw our first parking wardens (they had ‘Corruption is evil, parking attendant’ written on the back of yellow lab coats). We passed more government buildings on our way to the National Museum, all of which had signs announcing that they were ‘Corruption Free Zones’. Many of these, for example the ‘Water and Sanitation Ministry’, had hand painted signs which could have been done better by my old cub pack. Corruption free zones, my a@*!.

The National Museum was an interesting overview of Kenya and its tribes. Pride of place was given to an elephant’s skeleton along with assorted fibreglass models of said elephant. Apparently Kenyatta liked it. They also had an anthropological section. I had no idea that so many early hominids had been discovered. For those of you who are familiar with Lucy, as far as I could tell, her skeleton has been super glued to a piece of Perspex! It is also the only building I have ever been in where they hose down the floors to clean them.

Then it was back to base in time for an e-mail bonding session with some Tanzanians who are staying on the compound. They are all on Facebook, but no internet connections.

So far we haven’t been robbed. We also learnt that real men drive through red lights.