Filed under: Kenya
Days 137-139, Friday 2nd – Sunday 4th January 2009 (Cath)
We arrived at Kenyatta airport late on Friday evening, feeling bright and chirpy after enjoying bulkhead seats during the eight hour BA flight (have I mentioned before how much I love Al being tall?). I slept a bit – had to watch Thelma and Louise three times to piece the whole story together in between naps. I think we were a little bit excited about Africa, as when the cabin lights were dimmed we starting flashing our individual reading lamps off and on and quietly recreating the Bohemian Rhapsody film clip.
Immigration was a slight ordeal. We had been advised by Oasis to ask for a transit visa (cheaper than a full tourist visa), as we were leaving Kenya in less than 48 hours, so we dutifully ticked that box on the A4 immigration form we spent twenty minutes filling out with complete details of our plans. When we got to the desk, the man flung our form to one side, slapped a visa sticker in our passports while typing an SMS on his phone, and asked for $50 each for tourist visas. We said ’sorry, I think we need transit visas’, gesturing to our completed form, which he still didn’t look at. The man sighed in annoyance, put down his phone, immediately ripped out the visas he had just stuck in our passports, picked up his book of transit visa stickers, and started writing on one. ‘When are you leaving Kenya?’ he asked, as an afterthought. ‘The day after tomorrow’, we said, indicating the form on the desk next to him, which bore this very same useful snippet of information. ‘You need to leave tomorrow if you have a transit visa’, he said.
‘How long do transit visas last?’ we asked, ‘because we are on a tour and will leave Kenya to go to Tanzania on Sunday’.
‘The tour company lied to you – you can go to Tanzania tomorrow’, he said in disgust, and not answering our question.
‘No, they didn’t lie to us, the tour starts on Sunday’, we explained.
‘No, you can go to Tanzania tomorrow. There are buses all the time’, he insisted.
‘Ok, but we are not leaving until Sunday, because we are going on a truck from Nairobi with the tour company, so if we need tourist visas then we will pay for tourist visas’, we said.
‘I already took out your tourist visas – I won’t give you new ones, you have transit visas now, you must leave Kenya tomorrow’, came the emphatic reply.
‘But…’ I started, then realised we weren’t going to get anywhere (except hopefully to Tanzania on Sunday), handed over $20 each, and walked into Kenya. It seemed the answer to the question ‘how long do transit visas last?’ had some sort of complex inverse relationship to the answer to ‘how many minutes does the person at the immigration counter want to spend with you?’.
Things improved quickly outside the airport – a few minutes down the road, we saw some zebras just hanging out eating grass on the median strip! And checking in at the hotel, we met Anne (pronounced ‘Anna’) from Norway, who was going to be with us on the truck for the next two months. And the next day, we visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which runs an elephant orphanage in Nairobi National Park. It is open to the public between 11am and 12pm, when the elephants have their daily mud bath. There we heard some extremely sad stories – we knew poaching still happened, but had no idea how rampant it was – and saw some extremely cute baby elephants.
There was also a recently rescued, twelve day old white rhino. It was still quite shaky on its feet, and the keepers needed to apply mud to its skin as sunscreen whenever it left the shade.
The elephants are raised as though the keepers are their family (especially initially, for emotional support as they grieve for their mothers), but as they reach adolescence they are gradually socialised with wild elephants, and eventually weaned away from their human family so that they will be accepted by wild herds. Apparently several older elephants sometimes wander back close to the orphanage site were they used to live, just to visit.
Unfortunately (although we know that some would say fortunately), we didn’t have time to venture into and around Nairobi itself. On Sunday morning we met most (eighteen) of our group of ‘newbies’ at breakfast time, as well as our tour leader (Mel) and driver (Franco), and our big yellow truck (Babs). After a stop to stock up on snacks and real pillows, we then met the ‘oldies’, seven other passengers who had already been with Babs for three weeks through Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda to see the gorillas. Over a game of travel Scrabble on the truck, we started to get to know a few of them, and our overland journey began!
The ‘Beach’ at the front of the truck (top of the cab is visible out the window), where most of the ‘oldies’ had set themselves up for the day.
The rest of the back of the truck, mainly occupied by ‘newbies’ that day. The sides are usually open like this, but in case of rain some clear plastic covers can be rolled down and velcroed shut. Under the seats are big ‘lockers’, where we can keep our big backpacks; under the floorboards is storage space for charcoal, food, and a safe where we can lock up passports; below the top shelves is a buzzer to communicate with Mel and Franco in the cab – one buzz for a toilet stop, two buzzes to put the sides up or down, and three buzzes if we want to stop and take photos. A continuous buzz is for emergencies only – we were told if we did this and pulled over and nobody fell off the truck and immediately covered the ground in some sort of smelly bodily fluid, we’d be in trouble. We were annoyed to discover that we wouldn’t be allowed to use the electrical inverter we’d bought especially to plug into the cigarette lighter and charge our stuff – a bit more accurate information in the pre-departure dossier would have saved us a bit of money!
It was easy to forget our initial worries with a view of a landscape like this, though - especially when standing with your face in the sun, the wind in your hair and Maasai warriors riding bikes and waving to you as you pass. Aahhh.
Al!
Me!
The road ahead!
Oh, and the border authorities let us out of Kenya and into Tanzania with no hassles, and in fact with some smiles.
