My Travel Adventures

Roughly a four-hour drive from Nairobi, spreading out at the foot of Mount Kenya, Ol Pejeta is a conservancy that specializes in taking care of rhinos and chimpanzees. The site is home to over 165 black rhinoceroses, and its major attraction are its two northern white rhinos, the last exemplars of their entire species. The two females were brought over as part of a four-member family unit, but the males died a few years ago without helping them produce any progeny. Attempts have been made to crossbreed the northern white rhinos with their southern counterparts, but these have failed, so it appears that surrogacy – using frozen sperm from the males and eggs from the living but aging females – is the only remaining option to keep the species alive.

I have just about reached that age when some of my friends are getting married, and when the fingers on one hand no longer suffice to count the years many others have spent in committed relationships. Unfortunately for me, two among my closest friends decided to have their weddings during my year in Kenya, which spelled two long journeys across the Atlantic: first to Toronto, then to Philadelphia (with a quick personal detour to Washington DC), both within the space of a month. At the time I booked my tickets, I did not know I could ask for flexible working arrangements (one of the many secrets at my workplace), so I ended up making four journeys that each took almost twenty-four hours.

On the eve of my return from Kilwa, the manager at my hotel asked whether I had booked a bus ticket. I said I had not, as the website I had been recommended refused to accept my European debit cards and my Kenyan MPesa account. The manager made a consternated face. “I am not sure there will be space,” he said. As I waited at the reception with a sudden knot in my stomach, the manager started making phone calls. Buti La Zungu – the company with which I had come to Kilwa the previous day – confirmed that there were no seats on their bus. The manager gave me two options: I could either take another bus at the same time, with the caveat that it is “a worse bus,” or I could take a cab to one of the bigger towns in the neighbourhood to take a “better bus.”

Dating to the 9 th century CE, Kilwa Kisiwani is one of the most historically significant settlements in East Africa. It flourished between the 13 th and 15 th centuries as the seat of the Kilwa Sultanate, a political entity that controlled much of the Swahili Coast and with it, much of the trade that went on between Africa and other civilisations across the Indian Ocean: The Arabian Peninsula, India, and even China. Ibn Battuta, who visited the island city in 1331, described it as one of the most beautiful in the world. It was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1505, who built a fort and stayed until they, in turn, were forced out by the Omanis. 

The journey to Kilwa is arduous. In fact, it takes so long that I had to wait until a three-day weekend to undertake it. While Kilwa Masoko has a small airport, it only receives charter flights, which means that any visitor to Kilwa Masoko must either hire a car or catch the bus from Dar Es Salaam. As far as I know, this bus only leaves at noon and the bus back leaves at six in the morning, which effectively means there is no way to make this trip in less than three days – unless, I suppose, one were to put inordinate trust in the notoriously dangerous and irregular daladalas.

On my last day in Rwanda, I woke up at a more sensible time: half past five. Despite getting over seven hours of sleep, I could not convince my body that it was not tired from yesterday’s gorilla trek, nor could I persuade my legs to stop hurting every time I went up or down an incline. At half past six, the driver picked me up and drove me once again to the Volcanoes National Park visitor centre. The sky was much clearer that morning. Only a few clouds hung above the five volcanoes, which I now saw stretching from my left hand to my right and towering above the fields hoed by colourfully clad women.

I woke up a little before four o’clock in the morning to the sound of male voices outside the hotel. I thought it might be the driver who was supposed to pick me up at 4:30 and even though it wasn’t, it still felt better than waking up to an alarm clock. We left Kigali as grey streaks began to cross the dark sky, but the uniformly white streetlights still shone on all the surrounding hills. These hills soon became obstacles to us as we began to drive up and down them, cleaving closely to each well-paved bend above precipitous slopes.

I arrived in Kigali on the evening of May 29 th . It was a Thursday and very clearly not a holiday: I did not have to queue outside of the airport in Nairobi, and all the occupied counters were engaged in processing one flight at a time. It seemed our small two-by-two plane was the only flight due in Kigali between nine and ten o’clock; at any rate, its passengers were the only people in the arrivals hall, which made the process of obtaining an on-arrival visa go by very quickly. There was also no need to queue to exchange my one-hundred-dollar US bank note for Rwandan Francs.

I had arranged to leave for the airport at ten o’clock in the morning, which I figured would get me there with time to spare. The road was bumpier than I remembered it being on the way to Cape Maclear, possibly because on the way back we took a different route, but probably because this time I was trying to read a book. We made four stops altogether: two for the driver to pee behind the car, one for us to buy lunch, and one for the driver to buy two giant sacks of rice. He explained that since it was a Sunday, most stores were closed, and the price he had seen from the road was a real bargain.

I arranged for a boat ride yesterday, and the boat was ready at nine o’clock as we had agreed. The guide, John, quickly introduced the crew with whom I would spend the morning: besides himself, there was the captain (John had to repeat the captain’s name twice before I accepted that the man was named “Comment”) and Moses, a tourism student from another town. John did most of the talking, making many oblique references to his appreciation of a potential tip. The profits of his tours, he said, do not go directly to him but are divided among several dozen official tour guides in the area. Furthermore, the people who own hotels in the area are foreigners and keep their earnings to themselves; John complained that the Afrikaners were especially tough.

Today was a workday, so I very dutifully checked my emails and wrote up my research findings from the hotel bar overlooking Lake Malawi. The sky and the water were both perfectly blue. My lunch break took longer than I expected, as the restaurant I visited across the road made all my food entirely from scratch. Still, it was interesting to taste some of the local vegetables whose names I no longer recall. I also had some time to chat with a boatman repairing a catamaran on the beach by my lodge. He offered me one of his tour packages for an acceptable price.

Direct flights from Nairobi to Lilongwe are not scheduled for every day, so I was lucky that Ethiopian (which owns a large stake in Malawi’s national carrier) just so happened to have an itinerary perfectly suited to my needs. My plan for Malawi was the following: On the first day, I would see the Chongoni Rock-Art Area en route to Lake Malawi; on the second day, I would telework from the shores of Lake Malawi; on the third day, I would explore Lake Malawi; and on the fourth day, I would return to Lilongwe and then Nairobi. I would need to take no time off for this, as I had planned my itinerary to begin with the Labour Day holiday, which falls on a Thursday this year.   

One of my friends is leaving Kenya for the foreseeable future, and since we have been talking about going on a safari together for the last two months, we decided to make it happen this weekend. I did most of the planning for the journey, beginning with the all-important decision of where to go. Although the rainy season, which lasts from March to May, is generally considered to be Kenya’s low season, there are several reasons why to go on a safari during that time. First and foremost, hotel prices tend to be lower during the low season and accommodation is easier to find on short notice. Second, there are fewer tourists (though the weeks around labour day see a large influx of Chinese visitors). Third, some parks are genuinely worth the visit during these months. It is said that the view of Kilimanjaro from Amboseli, which is the park I ended up choosing precisely for this reason, is clearer during the rainy season because there is less dust in the air.

With my flight back to Dar Es Salaam scheduled for 13:45, my options for how to spend the morning were limited. However, having found the national museum closed yesterday, I did not have to rack my brains to figure out a programme. The visit took less than half an hour, but I spent another fifteen minutes waiting for the building to open, for although the museum’s official visiting hours begin at eight o’clock in the morning, only the most assiduous employees arrive at that time. I came at around 8:20 myself, when only one of the three ladies who served the ticket booth was present, and she asked me to wait while she turned on some of the electronic information panels.

Having toured Moroni and a few of the villages north of it, I turned my attention to the southern town of Iconi. This sleepy town was once the seat of the Sultanate of Bambao, which also encompassed the country’s present capital. Until the arrival of the French in the late nineteenth century, the island of Ngazidja (or Grande Comore) was divided into ten sultanates, with the sultanate of Bambao and the sultanate of Itsandra occupying a preeminent position among them. Rulers from these two lineages selected the Sultan Ntibe, who crowned the other rulers and theoretically held authority over all but one of the other sultanates.     

The pick-up time we were given for our six o’clock flight from Dar Es Salaam was three o’clock in the morning. I thought I was cutting it close by setting my alarm to 2:50 and turning up on the dot, but it took over half an hour for the entire group – which was just over a dozen people – to assemble in the hotel’s reception hall. Still, we made it to the airport with plenty time to spare. The only person missing from yesterday was the French military attaché, who I imagine might have gotten on a government special when our flight was postponed.

My trip to the Comoros began in Nairobi at 3:43 in the morning. Instead of waking up to my alarm, which was set to four o’clock, I woke up to the sound of a mosquito buzzing its disharmonious song right by my ear. Appropriately enough, I have been reading Anguille sous Roche by Comorian author Ali Zamir, who relates the story of three sisters: Ear, Hand, and Mosquito. If my shaky French serves me correctly, the story revolves around the three sisters buying a goat for a joint meal. Hand eats the goat by herself and frames Mosquito, and until the end of time she will not let Mosquito reveal the truth to Ear.  

Having pushed ourselves to the limit over the past three days, we made a late and leisurely start on the day of my departure. Our initial arrangement was that I would meet Victoria and Steve at nine o’clock, but this eventually changed to nine thirty, and we did not leave until after ten. The night before, Steve had driven his sister home and stepped in dog poo on the way to his hotel room, so he and Victoria did not fall asleep until after two: they were busy cleaning up the messy floor.

In an unforeseen turn of events, it was our group and not the hotel that ended up running on “African time” in the morning. I woke up at half past six to eat our seven o’clock breakfast and embark on our seven-thirty tour of the three Sipi Waterfalls. However, a combination of missed alarms and uncompromising attitudes towards eating leisurely breakfasts resulted in a delay of over half an hour.

We woke up at a leisurely half past seven, as we were told that the Nyero Rock Paintings would not be accessible until after eight o’clock. This may well have been true, but from what I gathered, the staff at our guesthouse simply did not want to wake up early to cook food, as more guests had arrived at midnight. We ate our breakfast in a small room within the main building of the guesthouse, which was still being constructed. It had no windows and consisted of a tightly packed dining table with four chairs and a side table with all the food laid out. The whole concept struck me as the way I would build a hotel if I had never visited a hotel in my life.  

For the long weekend of Eid, I decided to visit my friend Victoria in Uganda. I arrived from Nairobi on Thursday evening: Victoria and her partner Steve insisted they pick me up at the airport and drive me to their compound in Entebbe. I did not think this necessary, but by being with me, they were able to let the guard know when to chase the dogs back into their kennel. Victoria and Steve had been surprised multiple times by the unexpected appearance of this ferocious pair of German shepherds, who are probably quite good at scaring away robbers but cannot tell robbers apart from visitors.

I had been talking to a few colleagues about potential day trips from Nairobi and I learned that several companies organise bus trips to the Aberdare Mountain Range. Initially, there was talk of joining one of these groups, but so many colleagues wanted to go that we figured it would make more sense to organise our own tour. In the end, our group ballooned to sixteen people, and instead of a single van we had to hire two.

My friend Victoria came to visit Nairobi this weekend, which we spent together with the rest of our group of Nairobi-based Oxford friends. As Victoria works in Kampala, we made sure to do things that are harder to achieve in Kampala, like eating at an authentic Italian restaurant, going to a bougie café, browsing through an expat-centric bookstore, and eating Vietnamese food. We also spent a few hours lazing about Karura Forest. The highlight of the weekend, however, was our game drive in Nairobi National Park. This was the closest I have ever gotten to rhinoceroses in the wild: we saw two pairs, one of them accompanied by a calf that was prancing around and eying us curiously. We also came across some lions, buffalos, a serval cat, a hyena, and a crocodile. The number of giraffes was astounding, and we managed to snap a few pictures of the classical giraffe-in-front-of-the-big-city scene that people associate with the park.

As the rainy season is just around the corner, I decided to make the most of the ephemeral sunny skies by travelling. Mount Kenya seemed like an ideal place to go on a day trip, because I did not intend to spend five days climbing to its summit but was happy to simply see the majestic peak. My driver picked me up at my house at five o’clock in the morning. We proceeded – with one break for breakfast – all the way to Nanyuki, a town at the foot of Mount Kenya, where we were joined by the guide who would lead me on a little walking trip.   

My day trip to Lake Nakuru began inauspiciously. Right after we left Runda, we drove past a police car whose occupants had apparently detained the passengers of a smaller passenger vehicle. My driver slowed down with undisguised interest and rolled down his window to ask one of the detainees what was going on. In the darkness of the night – it was only half past five when we drove out – they had hit and killed two people crossing the road.

I wondered, as I snickered in my aeroplane seat, whether I was the only person listening to the pilot’s announcements during our take-off from Paris. “Remember, when you are visiting friends in Africa,” went his routine, “that if you show up empty-handed, you will be compelled to offer up your personal belongings. Save yourself the embarrassment and select some presents from our in-flight magazine.” He followed with another bon mot a few moments later: “We would like to remind you that this is a non-smoking flight. If you smoke in the lavatory, the government will have you arrested for the rest of the weekend, which will ruin your trip.”

Narmer: Early Dynastic Period, First Dynasty, Reign: circa 3150 BCE. Commonly credited with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, Narmer is considered the founder of the First Dynasty. Narmer is also identified with a ruler named “Menes” who founded Memphis, but archaeological evidence suggests the city already existed in pre-dynastic times. Narmer ruled from Thinis, a city in Upper Egypt, downstream from Thebes.  

On my last full day in Egypt, I went on a guided tour of Giza, Saqqara, Dahshur, and Memphis. Despite booking my tour with the same tour company that took me to Alexandria, we had a repeat of our morning mishap: the driver arrived at the wrong hotel. It occurred to me that something like this may happen, but I decided against being a patronising know-it-all and giving the tour company the same directions a second time.

I began the day with an Uber ride to the Coptic part of Cairo. As much of this area is pedestrianised, my driver could not take me all the way to the Hanging Church, but he explained that all I needed to do was to walk straight once I had made it past the entrance to the quarter. He seemed quite bemused when I gave him a fifty-pound note for his helpfulness and almost looked as though he hesitated to take the money.

Today I went on a day trip to Alexandria, which I reserved online a few days ago. I was picked up at seven in the morning at my hotel in Cairo and returned almost exactly twelve hours later at the same. Despite sending a message to the tour agency to alert them that there were several hotels with the same name and despite showing them my hotel on a map, the driver still arrived at the wrong one. He was a competent man, so I assume my message was simply never passed on to him. He also had a quite eclectic taste in music: we started the day with some instrumental Egyptian pieces and then transitioned to Armenian pop.

Today was the day I feared on my big trip to Egypt: the journey to Cairo. I had arranged everything beforehand but still worried something might go wrong, as I never got around to purchasing a SIM card and would be without any internet for much of the day. In the morning, I took a cab from the ship to Aswan Airport. The rest of the group had left by van to Hurghada, and my guide offered to book the car for me before he journeyed with them. I found the car and driver exactly where the guide said I would. Without communicating very much, he dutifully deposited me at the entrance to the airport within half an hour.

We started our last full day on the Nile with a three o’clock departure for Abu Simbel. After the quick transfer from ship to bus, I nodded off and awoke again as day began to break over the desert. The ride took three and a half hours, towards the tail end of which we were properly in the desert; even the hardy round clumps of grey grass gave way to a uniform barrenness overseen by the occasional stern cliff. On the way back, we saw these cliffs more clearly. The shorter ones were beige with splashes of black, while the taller ones had warmer colours, and a few were shaped like pyramids.

We left our ship at half past seven to board the tour bus to the nearby temple of Edfu. While the site’s history dates to the third millennium BCE, the famous ruins visited today were built under the Ptolemies: The work began in 237 BCE and was only completed one hundred and eighty years later. As pointed out by the introduction of Cavafy’s Collected Poems, the Ptolemies were in fact the longest-reigning dynasty of Egypt, which I find quite remarkable. This dating makes the temple comparatively young but in no way detracts from its splendour. Buried in the sand for centuries, Edfu retains its hieroglyphs, Horus statues, and some of its colour as well as the ceiling atop its massive pillars.

We began our itinerary at a leisurely eight o’clock in the morning. While the ship remained moored by the pier under Luxor Temple, a small boat took our group to the opposite bank. Imbued with symbolic importance, the western bank of the Nile is home to the Theban Necropolis, a vast collection of royal mortuary temples and necropoleis. This is where, especially during the New Kingdom, pharaohs were laid to rest in ornate tombs covered in carvings and paintings of scenes from sacred funerary texts. Many of the tombs were looted, some of them by subsequent pharaohs looking for extra funds to line their coffers, and their long exposure to the outside atmosphere is why most paintings appear heavily bleached.

I have always wanted to go to Egypt. Cairo, Alexandria, Giza, the Nile – I’ve known these names for as long as I can remember. In fourth or fifth grade, our history curriculum focussed on Ancient Egypt: one day we dressed up as Ancient Egyptians and baked what the teachers believed to be the closest approximation of Ancient Egyptian bread. I do not remember what I wore, but I distinctly remember some children arriving wrapped in toilet paper and claiming they were mummies. In the years when we studied Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, my bedsheets made for a splendid toga.

My breakfast, just like the breakfast yesterday, was a hearty one, and I spent almost an hour cramming one item after another in my mouth: an omelette, a vegetable platter, slices of local anise-flavoured bread, yoghurt, dates, and a toast with cheese, figs, and honey. I told myself I would not have time to eat lunch, so I need not worry about having too much. The prolonged breakfast threatened to put me behind schedule, but I was forced to change this schedule anyway as soon as I walked outside: it was cold, windy, and cloudy – a disinviting combination for a stroll around the city.

Since breakfast at my hotel began at eight o’clock, I started the day later than I usually do. The day before, I asked the receptionist whether there was a bus to Kairouan, but she recommended I take the louage instead. “Louage” (which simply means “rent” in French) is the most popular form of intercity public transport in Tunisia and functions a bit like a shared taxi. The system works like this: A person buys the ticket to their destination at the corresponding counter at the louage station – usually a separate station from the bus station and the train station. Then, they go outside to find their van, where the driver usually stands ready to begin ushering them in. The van departs when it is fully occupied, which means there are no fixed schedules for louages, but the vehicles take little time to fill up on high-demand routes.

I woke up at five o’clock in the morning as I bought a 6:05 train ticket yesterday to El Jem. Since I packed up faster than I expected and checked out quickly as well, I arrived at the Tunis train station at half past five. The train did not, in fact, leave at 6:05 but instead arrived at 6:05, at which point the amassed crowd thronged the doors and rushed into the two wagons, paying no heed to the seats written on their tickets. I managed to board quite early and participated in the general chaos by sitting down one row behind my original seat to get a better view from the window. The train did not leave for another fifteen minutes, during which time several people passed in and out of the cab for a friendly chat with the conductor. At one point, the cab held at least four people, two of whom left the train before it even departed.

When I arrived in Tunis two nights ago, I greeted the receptionist at my hotel in French. She was a young lady with dark hair and bright green eyes, a striking feature that was tempered with the shyness of someone who does not like to call more attention to herself than she already receives. She responded to my greeting with embarrassment, saying – in English – that while she understood French, she would only be able to respond in English. She explained that unlike the older Francophone generations, most people in their twenties and thirties speak English better than French, which was a lesson that have carried with me throughout my travels.

On my first day in Tunisia, I visited Carthage. The highlight of my preparation for this trip was the night before when – at my hotel in Tunis – I revisited the Aeneid with its description of the city and Dido’s famous suicide scene. On a practical level, however, I had already done my logistical research several days earlier. The train to Carthage was supposed to run from the eastern end of central Tunis every half an hour, but recent reviews of the station said the train was out of order. Since I did not want to walk all the way to the station only to find out for myself, I decided to call a Bolt cab from my hotel and rode to Carthage directly.