Archive for the ‘Kenya’ Category
December 4th, 2005 | 
Author: In reality we never got to experience Kenya properly. The main draw towards Kenya is obviously the wildlife and you cannot experience the country’s culture just by doing a game drive. However, we did experience enough of Nairobi to be able to comment on the capital city. Nairobi grew out of the construction industry based around the railway lines. Today, Nairobi is just like any big city- large buildings, good roads, traffic lights, shopping centres, plenty of traffic. The divide between rich and poor is much greater here than in Uganda. I could be wrong but this is what probably lies behind the crime and robbery which is prevalent here. You don’t feel this unease or tension in Uganda where the people seem to be more at one with each other. On a personal level, this spoilt my/our experience in Nairobi as it prevents you from exploring. The feeling of being in Nairobi at night was not a pleasant one for either of us. It is such a shame that you are made to feel this way. They are not all bad apples and it would be unfair to categorise everyone in this way but the few do spoil it for the rest. We are both grateful to the two kind people who assisted us on that first night. However, I can’t help thinking that they knew what might have happened to us if we had not received their help. I got the impression that they are only too well aware of their city’s bad side.
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Alison and I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand you’re interested in a people’s culture and way of life but at the same time you don’t want to be voyeuristic. How would you feel if you had a procession of visitors/tourists streaming through your property and community? The sad truth is that the Maasai have been displaced from their land through the borders imposed to create the national reserve. As a result they have been forced to accept this tourism to enable themselves to sustain their traditional way of life. However, the impact on these communities is very apparent eventhough they exist as traditionally as possible. Having said this, although it has been forced before its time, we could’ve ended up here at this juncture at some time in future years anyhow.
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As mentioned previously, it took about six hours to get to the Maasai so we arrived at about 16.00 hours. Despite the long, bumpy, dusty ride our driver/guide took us straight into the reserve. We drove around until the sun started to go down – it was fantastic! We saw most of the big five – lions, elephants, zebras, buffalo, giraffe, impala, springbok, stellenbok, black wildebeest, baboon etc, etc. All of these animals you could get really close to. The area where the lions were spotted was nearby a recent buffalo kill and they were having a nap after a good feed. Around the carcass of the buffalo were vultures which were dining on the remains. By the next day when we revisited the site the buffalo had been reduced to pure bones, amazing just like you see on the TV documentaries back home.
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You’ll see the spelling of Maasai has been spelt with double “a” at the begining, this is despite the fact that it’s referred to in a lot of books as Masai. I checked this with our Maasai Mara tour guide and the double “a” spelling is apparently correct. For some reason our guide book shows both spellings in different sections, not sure why this is.
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Before arriving in Nai-robbery, we took sensible precautions and worried ourselves senseless with horror stories of how you can get conned and mugged, well you might as well know what’s coming.
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As mentioned in an earlier posting our travels overland from Uganda to Kenya took us through the less popular border town of Busia located just a little further south of Malaba the usual crossing point.
Our route from Busia took us through Kericho the tea capital of Western Kenya. So that’s where it comes from !!! Not sure about the latest stats but Kenya was and probably still is by the looks of it the world’s third largest exporter of tea. The name Kericho comes from a Maasai chief called Ole Kericho. Read the rest of this entry »
Having sorted out our trips to the Maasai and the Crater this left us with the rest of the day to sort out our flight from Dar es Saalam to Cape town. This one was not covered for in our around the world ticket and we knew we would have to book it once out here.
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Alison has in the past visited both the Maasai Mara and the Ngorongoro Crater, but it was difficult to decide wether you needed to see both or not. The trouble was that both would have the classic African savanna wildlife but the crater has a different geology.
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As we did with the Red Chilli ( Alison used to tents by now ), we booked some tented accomodation.
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We arrived in Nairobi at about 20:30hrs at the sort of time we’d wanted to avoid. It was madness!!!! I’ve never seen so many people hanging around a bus terminal as I did here.
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