Travelling Hopefully

After nearly thirty hours of alternative between tedious air travel and tedious wandering around airports a Kenya Airways dreamliner deposited me at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in (or at least near) Nairobi.  By this time I was semi delirious and my answers to the friendly questions from the passport officer about the reason for my visit to Kenya were so disjointed and incoherent that I'm amazed I wasn't arrested on the spot.  Once through customs I stepped out into the surprisingly cool morning air and looked around for the car that the hotel had helpfully failed to send.

While I gazed at the absence of signs with my name on it with growing dismay the Kenyan army stepped in to help.  A soldier approached me and asked what the problem was.  At first I suspected that the passport officer had had second thoughts after all.  However once I got over being disturbingly close to an AK-47 (or whatever it was) he was a tower of helpfulness.  I sobbed out my story and, once it had been proved that my phone wasn't going to be helpful, he called the hotel on his phone.  After an awkward conversation in which I'm pretty sure that neither of us understood the other completely vague promises of a car were made.  I sat around and waited for a bit and then the soldier found me again to tell me that the hotel had called him to let me know that the car was on its way.  I don't know about their usual reputation but the Kenyan army gets a big thumbs up from me.

I rolled slowly into Nairobi and I do mean slowly.  It would not be unfair to say that Nairobi has a traffic problem and the various messing about at the airport meant that I was now struggling through peak hour traffic. Eventually by taking some back roads we arrived at the grounds of my hotel.

My hotel has grounds!  I don't think I've ever been in a hotel with grounds before.  They're small grounds but they are definitely grounds with nicely disciplined plants and a swimming pool.  The hotel itself hovers somewhere between charmingly dilapidated and just plain dilapidated.  The grounds however are lovely, the rooms are large and the staff friendly if not terribly knowledgeable.  In a desperate attempt to stave off sleep until nighttime I decided to deal with my postcard shopping needs and asked the lady at the reception desk if there was a small shop nearby where I could buy some.  She obviously didn't know what a postcard was and for small shop the best she could come up with was to point out that if I went out the gate and turned left then Nairobi was only a kilometre away.  So I walked into Nairobi.  I couldn't find any postcards there either although by this stage I was far from my best (which isn't all that great anyway) and it was probably my fault.  Tomorrow I'll hit a tourist site or two and hopefully they will be only to eager to trade coloured pieces of laminated cardboard for cash.

First impressions of Nairobi?  It definitely has its problems; every major building (including my hotel) is gated and has its own security force.  I have never before been scanned by a metal detector before being allowed to enter a supermarket.  On the other hand I wandered in my usual semi comatose way through the streets (admittedly the major ones) without attracting the attention of anything more dangerous than a couple of safari touts.  I did however make sure I was back at the hotel well before sundown.

Tomorrow, hopefully somewhat more alert, I am going to visit the National Museum and a snake park.  Surely there should be postcard opportunities in one of those places.