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April 27th I woke up in the early morning, about 6am and looked outside to attempt to comprehend that I was in Africa. We had to get up early to beat the traffic, and we had planned to get on the bus by about 8am. Well plans changed and Victor and I didn’t end up getting out of the house until about 9:30am. Since the traffic would be in full flow by then we decided to take the next
rational step, to get on the dirtbike/motorcycle taxis and weave through traffic to get to Nairobi city central. It was a crazy experience, and I was very apprehensive at first, especially when I had to have my full pack on behind the driver. Probably not the safest ideas, but it really had to be done. You can see the video
here. Shame my finger didn’t want to operate correctly and it stopped the recording prematurely. You get the gist of the ride though..
After arriving in Nairobi downtown I was able to get to an ATM and get sorted for the Kenya part of the trip, no sweat. We planned on getting a bus not far from the bank, and
expected to leave at 11am. The bus departure kept getting delayed because the quota wasn’t filled, i.e. they hadn’t sold out the bus. So basically we waited until about 1:30pm before we left, after the whole rig-a-marole of getting through the slender city streets and filling the bus up with gas, (they didn’t think of doing this while selling tickets for the trip to Mombasa). To say that downtown Nairobi is chaos is an understatement, but really no different than any Latin American city.
So after waiting what seemed like eternity we finally started making our way to Mombasa. It was quite the ride, especially on about 5 hours of sleep and 20 hours of jet lag. We even had a very good salesman on board to make sure I couldn’t get to sleep (sorry to be so bitter but I would have enjoyed it more if I spoke Swahili fluently). Anyways it was actually cool to see him do his whole spiel to the whole bus filled audience. He even had a great intro as to why to buy his herbal remedies, it went on for about an hour before he introduced his first product. Basically the equivalent
of an herbal detoxifier, colon cleanser and all. Then he sold some aloe vera cream and gave away some free samples. I think he made a get profit for the day, he was quite experienced by the looks of it.
The journey was rough on me, I’m not gonna sugar coat it, I really didn’t like it, but if you never go, you never know. On the way we had a stopover and had some food, a rice dish with beef and more
sukumawiki. Afterwards we got back en route to Mombasa, still another 4 hours away, (we had already gone about half way). The landscape was pretty phenomenal especially for someone still in the daze of realizing they are in frickin Africa! I took a nap after we ate and dreamt of white sand beaches and snorkeling in Lamu. Victor and I watched a movie on the laptop (Inglorious Basterds, he really enjoyed it) and before we knew it we were in Mombasa.
Victor had planned for his cousin to pick us up at the bus station and take us to his mother’s home, but that plan fell through unfortunately. We ended up getting a guest house
room for about $13, it had two beds, a decent bathroom and a cool view of down town Mombasa. I introduced hacky sack to Victor and we played that until the humidity got unbareable that we went to sleep. We did after all have another 5 hours by bus to get to Lamu island, on north eastern coast of Kenya…
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Eric
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I enjoyed your Africa post. It looks like you are having a good time there. What's with the Michigan stickers there? My blog is looking for travel photos. If you have time, email us some at dirtyhippiesblog@gmail.com and check us out at dirty-hippies.blogspot.com Continued fun on your travels, Eric