My Travel Adventures

Today was one of our more leisurely days: I spent only about four hours driving, which is less than half the time I spent behind the wheel yesterday. Taking full advantage of the day’s undemanding itinerary, we woke up at seven o’clock and were in no rush to eat breakfast, check the pressure in our car’s tyres (we had to refill two), and refuel at the only gas station within one hour of our hotel. We left Solitaire a little after eight.

When we arrived at our car rental at eight in the morning, I did not expect to leave a full hour later, but there were a lot of things I had to learn before I could be unleashed onto the roads of Namibia. Very patiently, the rental owner showed me how to change a tyre, how to deflate and inflate a tyre, how to unfasten the second spare tyre from the bottom of the car, and how to put together all the implements necessary for these operations. During the process, we found that the nuts on the wheels were tightened so fast that I could not budge them at all, so our first point of call was a service centre where we had an employee slightly loosen them. This way, if we needed to change a tyre, we would be able to do so.

After a few minutes’ worth of calculations, we managed to spend all our remaining Pula buying snacks at the airport in Maun. Hoping to see a bit of the Okavango Delta from above during our flight, we asked to be seated on the right side of the plane, but instead of lush green forests parcelled out by dark blue waterways, all we saw were dry riverbeds in a sea of greyish brown.

We were picked up for our trip to the Okavango Delta at half past seven in the morning and arrived at our destination – one of the mokoro stations at the NG32 Concession – some two hours later. The journey was not particularly pleasant. Our car was one of those large vehicles with open sides, and the wind chilled us down to our bones despite the blankets out driver gave us. Once we had left Maun, there were a few occasions that filled me with anxiety, like when our driver had to shift gears to pull through a particularly sandy part of the road, or when we slowed down to cross a narrow wooden bridge.

While Air Botswana offers a direct connection between Kasane and Maun (pronounced, as I found out at the Kazungula border crossing, “Maoon”), this flight is not operated every day. With my packed itinerary, I decided I could not wait for the following day to fly, so I opted for a flight from Kasane to Maun with a layover in Gaborone. In the few days leading up to this journey, Air Botswana bombarded me incessantly with announcements of scheduling changes, but the layover time remained more than sufficient at almost five hours instead of the original seven or eight.

On Saturday morning, we crossed the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Our hotel was only about half an hour from the crossing, so we decided to walk, which was not too difficult with my light luggage thanks to the decent road. Baboons welcomed visitors to the Zimbabwean customs office – the first wildlife encounter of many that day. They used the electricity pole to descend from the roof of the building to the ground, where they would strut and insouciantly collect trash like partly eaten corn cobs from passersby.

My flight from Nairobi to Victoria Falls was a bit chaotic. Since transiting in Addis Ababa was twice as cheap as flying directly, I decided to take up Ethiopian Airlines on its offer of a free room in an airport hotel and continue to Victoria Falls the following morning. Unhelpfully, the Ethiopian Airlines website does not have a proper explanation of how this arrangement works, so I started getting a little nervous when I got to my gate at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport without receiving any information on how to get my hotel voucher. I was doubly perplexed when I found out that my friend Wei, with whom I was travelling, had already received her voucher by email.  

I woke up at around six and one of my friends did as well. We decided that instead of waiting for the rest of the group to wake up and slowly make its way to breakfast, we would catch a boda to the beach and join them later. Catching a boda in Kilifi is no great challenge. Walking along the street, a tourist is bound to attract the attention of a passing motorcyclist within a few minutes, and if that does not work, one can always find drivers hanging around the major junctions, larger roads, and tourist joints.

 Since I only work for half a day on Friday, I left my hotel-cum-office in Malindi not long after noon. I arranged with the hotel to find me a tuktuk driver who would take me to the town’s matatu stop, but once I climbed into the rickety three-wheeler and we started talking, he easily convinced me that it would be much faster to travel all the way to Gedi with him. His price was not exorbitant, and he very reasonably pointed out that if I took the matatu to Gedi, I would still have to either walk or take a tuktuk from the matatu stop to the site itself.

Being one of the few people to show my face at the office during the summer, I decided to take advantage of our home office policy and left cold Nairobi for the coastal city of Malindi. I left on Thursday morning: the plan was to spend a day and a half teleworking in Malindi, visit the ruins of Gedi on Friday afternoon, and then join some of my colleagues for a weekend in Kilifi. After my unpleasantly warm experience in Mombasa, I expected to be greeted by cloudless skies and a wall of hot, humid air, so I was surprised by the strong winds that accompanied our descent and the drizzle whose end we caught while alighting.

While trying to check-in online for my flight on Jambojet (an endeavour in which I believe no one has ever succeeded), I found out that my seven o’clock evening flight to Nairobi had been pushed back to half past eleven. I was quite put out by this, but it did allow us to spend the day in a much more leisurely way. We left the apartment at around ten, taking a tuktuk to the city centre only to learn that most of its establishments were closed as it was a Sunday. Still, we found one café that was open and sat down for some drinks before continuing to Fort Jesus.

I made my day trip to Tsavo East during a weekend visit to Mombasa. I went together with my friend Bonnie who, after visiting me in Nairobi, spent a few days in Zanzibar and flew into Mombasa just a few hours before I made it into the city on the SGR train. The ride was a long one: Usually it takes about five and a half hours to get from Nairobi to Mombasa, but due to an unexplained delay in Voi, my ride took closer to six. My journey was also lengthened on both ends by various unconnected events. Firstly, it takes some forty or fifty minutes to get from northern Nairobi to the SGR terminus, which is jut beside the airport. Secondly, travellers are asked to arrive one hour early because they need to walk through several security scans and have their luggage inspected by sniffer dogs, after which they must either have their tickets printed at one of the staffed counters or by a machine.

Living in Nairobi, I never really thought about how to spend a fulfilling, action-packed weekend in the city, since it always felt as though there was an ocean of time to do everything I wanted to do. However, a quick visit from my friend Bonnie compelled me to come up with a tight weekend itinerary, as well as giving me the necessary shove to enact my plans.