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Published: July 13th 2014
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Total distance travelled today: 19.1 km (by car)
Elapsed time of travel: 2 hours, 16 minutes
Lodging for the Night: Hotel Boulevard
After a sleepless first overnight flight to Amsterdam (6 hours 15 min), 6 hours out in Amsterdam with our Dutch friends, Annelie and Sander, and another relatively sleepless overnight flight (8 hours...and 2 days later), we arrived exhausted in Nairobi at 6am. The lineup for the visas seemed to take forever, but there were no hassles and soon we were off to the hotel (we managed to pay less for a transit visa because we were going to be in Kenya for less than 24 hours). We were very happy that we had gotten a transfer to the hotel from gadventures, because we were just so tired and it was just so easy. The drive to the hotel took 2 hours, even though it's not that far (19.1 kilometres via our GPS to be exact). The traffic here is the worst we've ever seen. Although we were on a pretty big highway, we spent quite a bit of time sitting perfectly still in the traffic. We had noticed that people were selling newspapers through the traffic. With the
Amsterdam Central Station
We made it to Amsterdam... now time to find Annelie and Sander. amount of time that we sat idling on the highway, it makes sense why the papers were being sold to drivers!!
When we finally arrived at the hotel, we went immediately back to bed and didn't wake up for 5 hours. Since it was late afternoon, that left us with only time to shower (much needed), wash our clothes (much needed) and organize ourselves before we met our tour group at 6. We spent every moment appreciating the warmth of the hot water, because this was our last night of civilization before the camping begins.
Our "welcome meeting" for the tour took a long time, because many people were given the wrong time by their airport pickups and our guides, Masivu and Antony had to say the information again. We arrived at 6, and we met Brandon (from USA), Sarah (from New Zealand) and Holland (from USA). At 6:30, Markus (from Germany) arrived, and then at 7 Saori and Mayumi (from Japan) showed up. We were excited to get to know these people over the next 40 days (except Brandon and Markus were going to leave us half way in Livingstone).
Unfortunately this was our only night
we were spending in Kenya before we head south to Tanzania tomorrow. Nairobi isn't the safest of cities and lately there has been a string of terrorist attacks (the US And Australian governments have upped their travel warnings, but Canada hasn't yet), so we weren't terribly motivated to get out and look around. In the end we were too exhausted to go out anyways.
One thing that we were very surprised at since our arrival is that it's much colder here than we expected. Nairobi is not too far south of the equator, so we had expected a lot of heat, like in Singapore. In fact, we had thought that maybe we would spend the afternoon by the hotel's pool. But the first day was only 18 degrees and very cold feeling overnight. Looks like we may have opted out of a hot summer at home for another (but less cooler) winter!
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