Arrived in Nairobi on the eve of 3 January with some anxiety. Being fed the Nairobbery appellation ad nauseam and then turfed out into a dark street with a ton of year long baggage is not calculated to instil calmness. A lovely young Kenyan woman helped out the fogies with a SIM card purchase and money transfer before we were whisked (if you can be whisked in a beat up taxi along pot-holed roads) to the posh side of town where all the embassy staff, UN employees and rich businessmen live behind barbed wire compounds with 24 hour security guard.
We were going to be staying with Ravi (who works on the UN carbon credit REDD project) and his wife Sabina in their large, well-protected house - a barrier into the estate where they live, into their property with guard, two barking dogs and a locked gate separating downstairs from the upstairs bedrooms just to be on the safe side. There is a huge division between the haves and the have nots in this sprawling city of 3 million with a ghetto (Kibera) of nearly half a million people and a population projected to grow to 4 million in less than 10 years such is the birth rate of the country (3.4% p.a.). Lots of African cities are in the same boat (Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg etc) as the rural poor come to try their luck, fed on the self made myth perpetuated by an urban cousin or that rich man down the road who drives a Mercedes and lived for a time in the capital city.
The cliché about fear feeding fear must be true because the big mansions seem to be out competing each other in security protection and there is even talk of carjackings between embassy land and the airport so the rule is never to slow down below 100 km/hr if unfortunate to be travelling in the dark. It's difficult to know the truth of this in five minutes' experience but I can tell you that on the way from the airport there were moments in the pitch darkness of suburban Nairobi when I looked sideways at driver John and wondered when the gun or machete (I had been reading about the Rwandan genocide after all!) was going to come out and be pointed at my throat most probably after he had led us on a merry circuit to the back of beyond and not in fact to the plush residences of post-colonial Africa. Oh the shame, John was a lovely honest bloke who went out of his way to take us to the right place after a false turn into a barricaded back alley was quickly rectified. So I have now decided that Nairobi is a totally safe city with lovely reliable people and an unfortunate, ill-deserved reputation based on a few bad eggs. Same all over eh - always the few that spoil it for the rest?
This was reinforced the next day when we went to visit Kez, a white rhino specialist, who lives on the other side of the city near the famous centre for the threatened Rothschild's giraffe. After the compulsory slobbery kiss and cuddle with a pair of delightful, long-necked ungulates whom we shall call Martha and Arthur, it was off to the totally open and unprotected property Kez owns and which backs on to a few acres of bushland. Here warthogs roam by day - one big uggie has even learned to beg on hind legs like a dog for a treat - and bushbuck and bushbabies appear by night. We got to climb a ladder to a little tree platform and feed the latter - world's cutest creatures - some very over ripe bananas. Guests for dinner say that southsiders take a sanguine approach to security and it seems to work for them, as they had no horror stories to report. Strange to experience Nairobi from two such varying perspectives in less than 24 hours.
I won't tell you about the many wonderful wildlife adventures we had up the Rift Valley bar one. (I will just include a few pics of critters including my award winning African Sea Eagle catching a fish - don't nick it, it's copyrighted!) Anyway, I buggered my back getting in and out of a jeep in Lake Nakuru National Park, took the anti-inflammatories when I got to Lake Baringo which upset the tum tum etc. You know the sequence I'm sure. Anyway, it was the middle of the night and I was groaning in the lavvie when I heard, I swear to god, a whinnying noise on the other side of the flimsy wooden frame. I knew there were hippos about and had seen and heard them wheezing and farting on other occasions but never sounding like a horse. They're dangerous big bastards so I was looking out for the hippo guard in the pitch dark to come and escort me back to our native hut or Banda. No joy, why is there never a hippo guard when you need one? Gee, you should have seen me fly, bad guts or not, across that compound imagining the lumbering beast behind travelling at the 45 km per hour they are reputedly capable of. Don't get between a grazing hippopotamus and water! Now all you classical scholars will know that hippo comes from the Greek word for horse which made me question the naming intelligence of these ancients. Until now!
We took a matatu back to Nairobi. These are public transport vans used by most people to get around and famously have two speeds - stationary and flat out. Conversation between two of the passengers in Keswahili was animated and I thought I overheard the words Mandela and British. Enquiring about the nature of the dialogue we were told that they were just talking about usual stuff like roads. So in fact what I thought might be a heated political exchange was maybe more of a 'best to take the A42 out of Lake Baringo, then turn right at Marigat on to the B312 to make sure of avoiding the road works at Naivasha' kind of a chat.
On the open road, oncoming vehicles flash their lights at you in much the same way that cars in the west advise of speed traps ahead. The Kenyan version seems to be more of a warning that policemen are about to flag you down, probably to extort cash, on the pretext of some minor vehicle or traffic infraction. Except in big towns like Nakuru where they are more likely to lock you up, as baksheesh taking could be spotted. Consequently, our driver had to make a convoluted detour for some carburettor adjustments in a dingy yard and sent us walking through the back streets to make our connection back to Nairobi and the flight to Rwanda.
We were going to be staying with Ravi (who works on the UN carbon credit REDD project) and his wife Sabina in their large, well-protected house - a barrier into the estate where they live, into their property with guard, two barking dogs and a locked gate separating downstairs from the upstairs bedrooms just to be on the safe side. There is a huge division between the haves and the have nots in this sprawling city of 3 million with a ghetto (Kibera) of nearly half a million people and a population projected to grow to 4 million in less than 10 years such is the birth rate of the country (3.4% p.a.). Lots of African cities are in the same boat (Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg etc) as the rural poor come to try their luck, fed on the self made myth perpetuated by an urban cousin or that rich man down the road who drives a Mercedes and lived for a time in the capital city.
The cliché about fear feeding fear must be true because the big mansions seem to be out competing each other in security protection and there is even talk of carjackings between embassy land and the airport so the rule is never to slow down below 100 km/hr if unfortunate to be travelling in the dark. It's difficult to know the truth of this in five minutes' experience but I can tell you that on the way from the airport there were moments in the pitch darkness of suburban Nairobi when I looked sideways at driver John and wondered when the gun or machete (I had been reading about the Rwandan genocide after all!) was going to come out and be pointed at my throat most probably after he had led us on a merry circuit to the back of beyond and not in fact to the plush residences of post-colonial Africa. Oh the shame, John was a lovely honest bloke who went out of his way to take us to the right place after a false turn into a barricaded back alley was quickly rectified. So I have now decided that Nairobi is a totally safe city with lovely reliable people and an unfortunate, ill-deserved reputation based on a few bad eggs. Same all over eh - always the few that spoil it for the rest?
This was reinforced the next day when we went to visit Kez, a white rhino specialist, who lives on the other side of the city near the famous centre for the threatened Rothschild's giraffe. After the compulsory slobbery kiss and cuddle with a pair of delightful, long-necked ungulates whom we shall call Martha and Arthur, it was off to the totally open and unprotected property Kez owns and which backs on to a few acres of bushland. Here warthogs roam by day - one big uggie has even learned to beg on hind legs like a dog for a treat - and bushbuck and bushbabies appear by night. We got to climb a ladder to a little tree platform and feed the latter - world's cutest creatures - some very over ripe bananas. Guests for dinner say that southsiders take a sanguine approach to security and it seems to work for them, as they had no horror stories to report. Strange to experience Nairobi from two such varying perspectives in less than 24 hours. |
| African Paradise Flycatcher (white morph) |
I won't tell you about the many wonderful wildlife adventures we had up the Rift Valley bar one. (I will just include a few pics of critters including my award winning African Sea Eagle catching a fish - don't nick it, it's copyrighted!) Anyway, I buggered my back getting in and out of a jeep in Lake Nakuru National Park, took the anti-inflammatories when I got to Lake Baringo which upset the tum tum etc. You know the sequence I'm sure. Anyway, it was the middle of the night and I was groaning in the lavvie when I heard, I swear to god, a whinnying noise on the other side of the flimsy wooden frame. I knew there were hippos about and had seen and heard them wheezing and farting on other occasions but never sounding like a horse. They're dangerous big bastards so I was looking out for the hippo guard in the pitch dark to come and escort me back to our native hut or Banda. No joy, why is there never a hippo guard when you need one? Gee, you should have seen me fly, bad guts or not, across that compound imagining the lumbering beast behind travelling at the 45 km per hour they are reputedly capable of. Don't get between a grazing hippopotamus and water! Now all you classical scholars will know that hippo comes from the Greek word for horse which made me question the naming intelligence of these ancients. Until now!
 |
| Pearl-spotted Owlet |
We took a matatu back to Nairobi. These are public transport vans used by most people to get around and famously have two speeds - stationary and flat out. Conversation between two of the passengers in Keswahili was animated and I thought I overheard the words Mandela and British. Enquiring about the nature of the dialogue we were told that they were just talking about usual stuff like roads. So in fact what I thought might be a heated political exchange was maybe more of a 'best to take the A42 out of Lake Baringo, then turn right at Marigat on to the B312 to make sure of avoiding the road works at Naivasha' kind of a chat.
 |
| African Fish Eagle |
On the open road, oncoming vehicles flash their lights at you in much the same way that cars in the west advise of speed traps ahead. The Kenyan version seems to be more of a warning that policemen are about to flag you down, probably to extort cash, on the pretext of some minor vehicle or traffic infraction. Except in big towns like Nakuru where they are more likely to lock you up, as baksheesh taking could be spotted. Consequently, our driver had to make a convoluted detour for some carburettor adjustments in a dingy yard and sent us walking through the back streets to make our connection back to Nairobi and the flight to Rwanda.
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