Getting into Kenya was surprisingly easy. Once across the border, we wanted a quick, short ride to a stop like Archers Post or Isiolo, but it wasn’t to be. All the buses from the border left together at 1500 and it seemed like a waste of a travel day not to go as far as we could. “Fuck it”, I imagine one of us said, “let’s take the overnight bus straight to Nairobi.”
Sure, it gets in at maybe 0300, and sure, we had been told in no uncertain terms not to walk around Nairobi in the middle of the night. But what if we took a cab straight to the train station for the 0800 to Mombasa? Then we’re not doing anything too dangerous!
If this worked, we’d save a night or even maybe 2 and at least 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($10).
Our bus left as expected around 1530. We weren’t in a convoy of buses, but we did have an armed guard cuddling his assault rifle next to the only door.
This was supposed to be a 9- to 14-hour ride, so we settled in. At least we had real seats.
Unfortunately, our “real” seats were right next to a really defective window. The temperature dropped precipitously sometime overnight. A freezing breeze blew across Dave (and me, to a lesser extent). We put on every stitch we had handy, but that wasn’t much.
At 0300 we crossed the equator. This was very neat and also a bit of an afterthought.
Of course, there were frequent police/military stops for document checks. Every hour or two, they would have all of us disembark so they could search the bus.
Adding all of this up, proper sleep was impossible. We rolled into our Nairobi stop around 0600. It was still dark out. Not wanting to wander the dark streets and remembering that Uber works in Nairobi, I called a car to take us to the train station.
To our relief, tickets were still available.
We made it to Mombasa! Our real goal was Watamu up the coast a bit, but we weren’t up to a bus after the night’s ordeal. We stayed in Mombasa to recover.
Our travel push from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Mombasa, Kenya, by the numbers:
80 hours
1625 mi (2600 km) distance covered
20 mph (32 kph) average speed
I bought us a metric shitload of fried chicken, and we ate it all.
The next morning we resumed our travel to Watamu in a VERY stripped-down minibus.
We’d booked a modest resort near the beach and some ruins that looked interesting. The street into town was lined with shops pushing artwork and curios of various kinds and quality. One carved bit of ebony caught my eye: ebony carvings are expensive because it’s generally not allowed to cut down more trees and the existing stock of legal ebony is dwindling. I resisted the urge to drop some cash in part because my bag was too full as it is.
But the next morning I awoke with a nasty hangover and some sad news from home: my grandfather, the patriarch of the globe-trotting side of my family, had passed away. His stories of living and working in Libya and other countries formed the nucleus of my lifelong dream to travel the world, and to visit Africa in particular. To make a long story short, I went back and bought the carving without any plan to get it back to the US. In the end, I wrapped it up in gobs of cardboard and tape and put it on a plane to my folks’ place. The thing about not having a home is you rely even more on your family, so it’s not exactly true that you don’t have a home after all.
There was nothing for it: travel goes on. The mundane necessities of life were calling: our clothes, for example, were filthy.
We really needed to get out of the hotel. There were some ruins nearby at Gede, so we caught a tuk-tuk headed that way.
The one sentence about the day in my journal is this: “We took a tuk-tuk to Gede ruins, seeing many horrifying spiders.”
“That’s his new home, Timmy.”
We explored the ruins so thoroughly that we accidentally stumbled into the turtle preserve for which we hadn’t purchased entrance.
Making our escape at a brisk waddle, we found there weren’t any tuk-tuks around. Ah well, we started walking back. Nah, screw that: after a mile or two we hopped onto a motorbike taxi.
Next time: walking on water!
P.S. Dave says: “”