My Travel Adventures

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.