When I first landed at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi I viewed grazing giraffe's out of the plane window. My first thought was, where in the world can you land at an airport and see giraffe's by the runway; my second thought was that this was a tourism ploy...I never did find out, but it was neat to see. I was not able to get a focused photo of those large animals.
From the airport I boarded a shuttle bus for the 16 km trip to the city ; many times cattle were taking up half the road, sometimes it was donkey's or goats. Once in Nairobi I made my way through the crowded streets and ended up to find a shuttle bus that would take me the 275 kms to Urusha in Tanzania. There were so many large and small buses lining the streets, many guys worked the crowds trying to get passengers for their bus.
We soon left the metropolis of Nairobi with it's run down city buildings and found mostly red mud dwellings on the outskirts of the city. It was amazing how quickly the city changed from 6-20 floor building to suburbs with tin shops.
After an amazing time in Tanzania I was back in Nairobi and making plans to get out of the city with the nickname Nairobbery as quick as possible.
I realized it was too late to go the almost 500 kms to Mombasa so I found a youth hostile in the downtown. I walked so many kms around the city so I could get familiar with it. I managed to meet so many nice people as I walked around, there was rarely a white person; I was told more than once not to go out at night. Nairobi is very dangerous, many local men do not even go out after dark; they are afraid. I had a couple of guys pull the trick of saying that they knew me, "hey man..how are you doing ?, remember I saw you on the bus" they were trying to lure me somewhere. Another common tendency in Nairobi is well dressed guys portraying themselves as cops, so they can extort money. I walked so far that I thought I should take the #46 bus back, which had passed me several times. As I waited at bus stop all the #46 buses were full, I finally asked a guy about it and he directed me to a street where people line up for this particular bus...there was a line up that was about 400 metres long. The city is very dirty; both for litter and air quality; it is also very congested.
I was able to get out of Nairobi for what I thought was going to be about 17 days; unfortunately I returned early since I had problems with my passport (story in a previous blog). While waiting around for the Canadian Embassy to let me know what they were going to do I just walked the streets feeling dejected. At the embassy there is an in-ground pool and double tennis courts for the workers, I guess there have to be some perks for employees living abroad. When I traversed on a busy street I heard what I thought was two cars colliding; the noise was actually a man getting hit by a truck; when I looked over he was about 2 metres in the air. The pick-up truck driver stopped, dragged the body to the side of the street and then drove away; life does not mean so much to some.
I managed to travel north for a few days with the lent money from the embassy, that I would repay once I got a new credit card. I boarded a bus in Nakuru to get back to Nairobi and the bus stopped in a bus station that was in a real slum area of the city; about 3 kms from the area I was familiar with.
I tried to walk as fast as I could past an abandoned building with many homeless street people; so many children are without a home. My big backpack may have looked inviting, or my shoes for that matter, since most of the kids were bare footed. I wanted to take photo's but that was both risky and in bad taste.
I got my passport and credit card which allowed me yet again to get out of Nairobi. In the morning I left the hotel to go to the familiar bus street, not really a station, and there were the usual street kids hanging around. These poor kids get beat by many adults because they are around the market area to steal food, I was shocked the first time I witnessed the abuse. What I tried to do when in this area was to make eye contact with some of them and then throw a bottle of water and a bun to them. Once the street child, for the most part boys, received the food there was a special look that we exchanged......it is hard to describe; a sort of appreciation and an understanding (empathy).
There are extreme conditions in Kenya that can be hard to accept......one can go from the slums of Nairobi to the beautiful beaches on the Indian Ocean.
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