Kenya

We drove south from the Uganda border without a lot of chatter. We pulled off the road to look at all the flamingos at Lake Nakuro a large flat soda lake in the Rift Valley of Kenya. We sat and watched the birds for about an hour and then got back on the road to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. It was late in the afternoon when we pulled into a hotel in Nairobi. We each checked into a room and got cleaned up. My friend was pretty upset still. He acted very depressed. I offered to go out for dinner with him but he wanted to be alone. I left him at the hotel and headed out to look around in Nairobi. I ran into two of the Danish girls almost right away.

We went and sat in a cafe and talked about Uganda and how they had to rush out of the country when all the violence started. They still had a week to go before their flight home so they were just hanging out sightseeing in Kenya. I asked about my friend that wanted to travel with me and they told me where she was staying. After we talked some more to catch up on all of our news for the last month I left them there and went to look up my other friend at her hotel.

I found her hotel and asked for her room number and went and knocked on her door. She answered the door a bit slowly. When she saw me she did not act excited or happy to see me. I guess she was still mad at me for taking off to go mountain climbing without her. She also had another visitor in her room. Guess who it was! My old traveling buddy from Central African Republic to Zaire was standing in her room half naked. I clearly interrupted them. She was surprised that I already knew her friend. Him and I rehashed all that had happened to each of us for the next couple of hours until she got kind of pissed off at both of us. Then we all went out to find some food.

After we ate and talked some more I left them alone and went back to my hotel to rest up. I was pretty tired from all the stress of getting out of Uganda alive. I was pretty tired of all the violence I had encountered so far. Africa impressed me more for its brutality than anything else. I tried to watch some tv in the hotel but I didn't like the small screen so I just took another shower and went to bed.

The next day I went to the post office and picked up a load of mail for me from the general delivery bag. There were letters from friends and family talking about their lives and all their problems. I had to laugh at the overblown problems they were encountering and telling me about. They were no where near the big problems I had been encountering like getting arrested convicted and sentenced to death for spying or the violence against the prisoners in Bangui, getting caught up in the Rwanda/Burundi massacre or escaping from the Idi Amin deadly fiasco in Uganda. I learned that we each have our own little worlds going on in our private little lives and whatever difficulties you experience at any given time are big to you so therefore no matter how small they are in the big picture they grab the attention and focus at that time in that persons life. Life is crazy is all I could think.

Nairobi was a big town. There was the usual problems found in any big city with petty crime and things so I had to be safe and not stupid in what I did and where I went. I had no problems though. My Danish girlfriends had had a few problems with theft and men giving them problems but nothing big or important just annoying things. I loved the cheap food all over town. The market was huge and they sold lots of things that I love like mangos, papaya, melons, oranges, dozens of kinds of bananas and roasted nuts. I pigged out. My weight was getting dangerously low. I needed to put some pounds back on. All my daily walking was great exercise and kept me really fit and thin but I wanted more meat on my bones so I ate all day long. I drank lots of beer too. Here in Nairobi I could find nice cold beer not the lukewarm or barely chilled beer that I had been drinking for months but nice icy ones. Considering how much beer I drank I am surprised that I was never drunk but the heat just burned off the alcohol as fast as you could drink the beer. It was still fun to drink though.

I hung out in some bars. The bars that were mostly locals were full of men mixed in with a few hookers and they all wanted to get my attention. I was not interested in the hookers but they were fun to talk to. I liked the attention sometimes but a lot of the time it was just the same old thing over and over again and it got tiresome. They all wanted to know if I knew their cousin or uncle or whatever who lived in Cleveland or Boston or whatever. We talked about boxing a lot because the Rumble in the Jungle was still in the news all over Africa. The Africans loved hearing about black men that were a success in America. They frequently complained about the American Blacks as being lazy and not taking advantage of the opportunity they had living in America. I got tired of the same old banter over and over about these topics and did not encourage the discussions on racial topics.

In the Hotel bars and tourist bars I met up with other tourists and travelers. Most of the tourists were just here on safari and rode around in buses at Nairobi City Park which is a big game reserve with lots of lions and giraffes and antelope and things just outside the city of Nairobi. They all had their telephoto lenses and everything and their safari clothes on. I got a chuckle out of their opinions about Africa because they were such narrow looks at a vast continent. That is how people are. The travelers that traveled like me or were just long term travelers had more interesting things for me to listen to. I learned all the cool good spots to go to and the things to do and how to do them. I made some plans there to visit a lot of the places I heard about from other travelers.

I was getting pretty well rested hanging out in Nairobi. I did all the local tourist things like the game park and the rivers and things. I wasn't very impressed. After being in the real Africa for so long and seeing so few living creatures to see a bunch of animals in a fenced off park was no different to to me than just going to an African Safari park in the United States. It was good that at least some animals were surviving in these parks but it just didn't seem natural to me. Better would be to instill some conservation into the local people so that they didn't kill and eat everything that moved. I know there were a lot of poor people that supplemented their diet with game to stay alive and that is ok to me but the animals will not survive this type of constant killing or they will all be extinct soon. Who was I to lecture the locals on how to save their wildlife. It wasn't me going hungry. I understand the dilemma I just don't like it. It is like the spelling of the word dilemma or dilemna which one is correct? Some dictionaries spell it one way others the other way. Who cares?

I ran into my Danish friend again. Her and my other friend got into a dispute and she was alone again and wanted to travel with me. We hooked up and started sharing a hotel room together. She decided to not fly back with her school friends. It was a big decision for her and it took nerve to do it but she went ahead and skipped her flight. I kind of felt responsible for her now.

We hitch hiked down to the coast together for our first real traveling experience together. I found that having her with me made it easier to get a ride. Every time we hitch hiked in Kenya we got a ride with rich people in fancy cars. I liked that. We went to a place called Dick's Cove and hung out with a bunch of travelers that were mostly long haired hippy types. There was a lot of naked swimming and sun bathing and we had a lot of fun. We stayed in my tent right on the beach. Every night the moon would rise up over the ocean and we would watch the waves breaking on the reef then the same waves gently lapping on the white sand beaches. We made friends with a guy that operated a bar on the beach. He was a retired Englishman and we enjoyed each others company. We had out tent up right near his beach bar and swam or sun bathed near it all day for quite a few days.

I needed to find a way to make some money because my funds were getting low. I met a guy that told me he would pay me $400 a day to ride a motorcycle from Tanzania to Kenya. He bought them cheap in Tanzania and then drove them across the border without paying the import taxes on them and sold them in Kenya for a big profit. As a tourist riding across the border I could just say that I was lost if I got caught he told me so I did that a few times and made some quick cash. It was kind of exciting for me and easy money too.

Then my girlfriend, Kirsten, and I decided to start traveling up to Ethiopia. I was enjoying having a girlfriend with me already. The lack of sex in my travels across Africa so far was a bit tough to take for a young virile man like myself so I appreciated my newly found girlfriend. We decided to hitch hike up to the far north of Kenya where the road ends and the desert starts and try to find a ride across the desert up into Ethiopia. So we hit the road for Marsabit, the end of the road in Kenya.