On the road again...

Walking down the streets of Zanzibar again is so amazing. Most of our interactions with people go like this:

1. Make eye contact- we recognize a person.
2. Smile, give them the typical greetings.
3. They recognize us, their eyes get really wide.
4. They start shouting words of welcome and greetings into our faces at incredibly high volumes.

I’m actually really surprised at how many people recognize us. I know we were here for a long time, but we can hardly go anywhere without someone squaling with joy at the sight of us. It is overwhelmingly welcoming. 

Our trip to Kenya was incredible. The drive there took two days, after the bus stopped an hour preemptively in a different city than was the original destination. It was about 13 hours in a bus the first day and about 5 or 6 hours the next day. Nairobi is absolutely crazy--- it didn’t feel dangerous at all like the news makes it sound. People were reall friendly and left us alone more than any other place that we have been. Since the violence there calmed down about 6 months ago, it has been peaceful. I definitely had the wrong impression of the city when we arrived. The largest slum in Africa is just outside of the city, so I thought that there would be a lot of poverty and we would want to be really careful about walking around downtown, but it wasn’t like that at all. Some of the neighborhoods have a really Western feel and we did things like go to the mall to eat greasy pizza, perused the largest supermarket I have ever seen, and we even went to our first polo match with about 200 British people in one of the suburban areas (what a ridiculous, ridiculous sport).

After spending a day in Nairobi, we left to go on a 3-day safari in Masai Mara, the park that is the Kenyan side of the Serengeti plains. It was really amazing. We shared a safari VAN with a young French guy and a Japanese guy (who said, “oooooh greeeeaaat!” whenever we saw wildlife). Our driver was a maniac- cruising the Serengeti plains after ostriches and lions and cheetahs. It was really fun- and fun to meet all the other people (they were all really young) who had made it out to the bush for budget safaris.

The highlights of the trip to Kenya for me, though, were our trips to the elephant orphanage and giraffe sanctuary just outside of Nairobi. At the elephant orphanage, there were at least a dozen very young, very uncoordinated orphan elephants rolling around playing that you could watch and touch, and two rhinos hanging out that you could touch. Warthogs just wandered around everywhere and young schoolchildren came to see the animals. It was really cool. And on our walk out the founder of the orphanage picked us up and gave us a ride.

The elephant orphanage was cool, but the giraffe sanctuary was a transformational moment for me. I finally discovered my favorite animal. Giraffes. I think it might have to do with the fact that my long neck and legs make me feel a deep connection with them, but I definitely think that giraffes are the coolest animal I have ever seen. At the sanctuary, they gave you food pellets of grass and you could feed the giraffes. Their long, slimy, spotted, gray tongues would smother your face if you held the food in your mouth, and they would just eat right from your hands or wherever. So cool.

The trip back was terrifying. I have traveled the same route on another occasion- and on that occasion it took us 10 hours to go from Dar to Arusha, and it takes about 5 hours to go from Arusha to Nairobi. So when they told us it was only 12 hours on the bus from Nairobi to Dar VIA Arusha, I was skeptical and thought that that was just their way of trying to sell us tickets. Wow, was I wrong. After sitting on the bus, listening to Tracy Chapman’s song “Revolution” as the bus left at 6 in the morning, we arrived in Dar Es Salaam 12 hours later. The driver was a complete maniac. He had anywhere from 0-1 hands on the streering wheel at any time, and the other hand was gesticulating wildly to his frien in the front seat. Rather than waiting in line at the weigh stations, he would zoom past the line, throw the bus in reverse and reverse backwards to the front of the line. If traffic stopped, he would get out of the bus to give the other drivers a piece of his mind. I covered my face for at least the last 2 hours of the drive, when we were averaging at least 130 km/h and never hesitated to pass cars despite oncoming traffic. When the driver left about half the bus along the Tanzania-Kenya border, he slammed the bus into reverse and at full speed, backwards, we recrossed the border to retrieve the passengers. The choices of entertainment were interesting as well- at 6 in the morning, we were listening to the all 80s all-the-time station, by the afternoon we watched two movies called Sweet Love I and Sweet Love II. And at the scariest part of the trip, when the driver really went crazy, we watched one of the most violent movies I have ever seen called “Blood Diamond”, about the diamond trade in Sierra Leone (Good movie, bad time for it). We made it safely to Dar Es Salaam, though, and the next morning took the ferry to Zanzibar and feel like we’re back at home again.

Chris leaves tomorrow and I leave 3 days later. I can’t believe we’re almost on our way home! I can’t wait to see you all.