Travelling Hopefully - A Conclusion of Sorts

So I went to Africa, I saw a little of Kenya and Tanzania and a (very) little of how people in those countries live.  So what do I think of it generally?  I loved the trip, the place is beautiful and I can understand how people can fall in love with it and stay forever like my host in Mombasa.  I couldn't I'm afraid, I'm too soft and too pampered and too addicted to petty little luxuries like being able to drink from the tap when I'm thirsty.  Although if I could arrange the necessary comforts I might make an exception for Stone Town.

Impressions; Kenya is poor.  Tanzania is very poor.  Things don't work as well as they could or should.  Many of the things which in our western self indulgence we would call essentials are simply unavailable to the local population and they just have to do without.  The newspapers are full of corruption stories (although I personally only saw one instance when one of our drivers had to discreetly hand some cash to a traffic policeman) and on top of that Kenya has an ongoing security problem due to its involvement in the struggle against Al Shabaab up in Somalia and Tanzania has an education problem due to some idiot policy decisions made decades ago.

Still things are not all bad.  Technology and equipment might be shaky but if sheer muscle power and unremitting effort can make something work then it will work.  And if it doesn't work then something will be done.  I intended to travel by train from Mombasa to Nairobi.  That didn't work, the train broke down and couldn't be repaired within the timeframe I required.  Instead the train manager detailed one of the policemen I had noticed in the dining car the previous night to take me into Voi which is a bus terminal.  There he ensured that I got on the right bus to Nairobi and wasn't cheated on price.  I had called the guy who took me out to the National Museum when I stayed in Nairobi asking him to pick me up from the train station.  I called him back and asked him to pick me up from the bus station instead.  No problem.  A couple of hours later he called me back and suggested I ask the bus driver to drop me at one of Nairobi's outer suburbs where he would be waiting.  This would save two journeys through Nairobi traffic.  I spoke to the bus driver, no problem.  I got off the bus where my driver had been waiting for an hour to pick me up and made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare.  The train might not work but Kenya does.

I find it a little irritating when people expound on the mess that is Africa.  We have had thousands of years to get our own countries to their current standard of semi acceptability.  Africa decolonised about sixty years ago leaving behind a legacy of borders in the wrong place, tribal hostilities accentuated (and sometimes deliberately stoked) by this or that colonial power and also a glimpse of a new possible world without any very clear signpost as to how to get there.  Check back with me in three of four centuries and we'll see how Africa is doing then.  What I do know is that the human material it has to work with is as impressive as any on the planet.