Travelling Hopefully

I have a floppy hat, an insect repellant shirt and dark sunglasses.  Some people look good in this sort of gear, I'm one of those who don't.  As for the insect repellent shirt it must be working because every time I put it on my eyes start watering .

Thus prepared I joined fourteen other eager people to meet our guides for a trip through the African hinterland.  Nairobi seemed quite hinter to me but apparently we would be travelling to places that would hinter the buggery out of Nairobi.

With shouts of good cheer and easy going death threats we loaded up our truck (our guide Elissa assured us it was a truck not a bus despite its definite people carrying ability) and rolled out into the streets of Nairobi.  An hour later we were still in the streets of Nairobi albeit different ones.  Eventually we left the city behind in a flurry of cement plants that served notice that if we slowed down the city might catch up with us.

The countryside bore a remarkable resemblance to outback Australia only redder and with less roadkill.  Donning our sunglasses and squealing with excitement everytime we saw a cow we thundered down the highway on the way to Tanzania.  Kenya (and as it turned out, Tanzania) very sensibly place speed humps on their highways on the approach to each village.  This forces speed crazed drivers to slow down as they reach concentrations of human beings.  This gave me the opportunity to spot a minivan full of goats, all the seats being carefully tied to the roof.  There were more goats being herded in the traditional method with prompted more excited squeals.  The reception garnered by the first donkeys we saw had to be heard to be believed.

The border crossing was the expected seething mess of vehicles, dust covered tourists and hawkers taking advantage of a captive market.  Fortunately I'm an old hand at this sort of thing and escaped with only a copper bracelet and a photo which collectively cost me a thousand shillings.  My less experienced comrades got away with nothing at all.  Finally, after finger printing and assuring the officials we didn't have yellow fever we trooped through into Tanzania and repeated the entire process twenty metres down the road.  Then at last we could reboard our truck and continue our journey.

My first impression of Tanzania was that it strongly resembled Kenya and with an air of "been there, done" that we settled back into our seats.  Then the giraffe happened.  The truck slammed to a halt which would envy a fighter on an aircraft carrier deck and our united little group turned into a snarling mob as we crawled over each other attempting to take the best photos.  Photography urge temporarily sated we continued our journey down Tanzania's highway system watching indifferently as we passed goats, cows, donkeys, zebras and more cows.  Zebras!!!  Once again we lurched to a stop and we indulged in an orgy of photography of what are, let's face it. little more than overdressed horses.  Fortunately the photogenic animals petered out or we would never have reached our destination.

We stopped in Arusha, the largest city in this part of Tanzania where I handed over a modest amount of Kenyan shillings and received a wheelbarrow load of brightly coloured, nearly worthless paper in exchange.  The wholesale changing of money probably added about a tonne of weight to the trucks burden but nevertheless we trundled into our camping site where we were shown how to set up and bring down our tents.  Let's just say that some of us were better at that than others.