| A road trip through Kenya is full of adventures, some planned, some not | ||||
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The trip should have taken six to seven hours. And our reward for that journey: seeing the beautiful Indian Ocean at sunset. But, oh, how that did not happen. That Tuesday was quite a safari, which means "journey" in Swahili. Within 12 hours, we had big-city rush hour, a flat tire, a troubled transmission, zebras grazing on the side of the road, the savannah and mountains and, finally, a night swim. The safari started at about 10 a.m. when we left Nairobi, the country's capital and its biggest city. There are plenty of movie theaters, shopping centers, Internet cafés and gated communities mixed with rundown roadside shops, slums and wild animals. They remind you that, while Nairobi's development is ahead of other capitals in Africa, it is still an African city. There are quite a few surprises in Nairobi. On our first night of the two-week trip, we drove away from the airport, playing a game of Spot the Zebra, the streetlights gleaming off their white stripes as they grazed by the side of the road. Another gem in the middle of the city is the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.The elephant orphanage lures school groups and visitors from throughout the world with a chance to see and pet the young elephants, playing, rolling around in the mud and bottle-feeding before they are sent back to the wild. Not far from the elephant orphanage is the Giraffe Center in the middle of a ritzy, residential neighborhood named after author Karen Blixen. Petting and "kissing" the giraffes (gross!) is the norm. They are drawn by the smell of peanut pellets in visitors' hands or lips. Their long, wet tongues slobber all over you as they eat their snacks. Wild animals are a major tourist attraction for Kenya, but in recent years, Nairobi's Kibera slum has become a competitive attraction, famous since its major role in the movie "The Constant Gardener." Tourists stand out to the more than 1 million people who live in the shacks that appear to be piled on top of each other in the maze that makes up the slum. The kids run after tourists, yelling "Hi! How are you? Hi! How are you?" It is here that remnants remain from the riots that took place a little more than a year before: burned-down churches and a vacant, vandalized gas station. Residents of the Kibera slum were involved heavily in the protests after the December 2007 general election escalated into unprecedented violence in a country that had been known as the pillar of stability in an unstable continent. More than 1,000 people in Kenya were killed. The country lost significant tourism dollars and vacationers stayed away. In recent months, tourists have been making their way back to Kenya. Maneaters We left the tall buildings and traffic in Nairobi on the Tuesday morning and continued the long drive to Diani Beach. For hours, we drove along paved and unpaved highway, waving to more zebras grazing on the side of the road, hoping for other beautiful creatures. Just the day before, we'd driven north to the Rift Valley, the vast area known for its flower farms — many of the flowers you see in shops across the U.S. come from Kenya — lakes and inactive volcanoes. That day, our destination was Crater Lake, a lake formed in an old volcano crater. On our way, we passed many zebras and giraffes grazing and playing on the sides of the bumpy, dusty road. The only thing more beautiful was the golden hue cast by the sunset on the green bark of the flat-topped acacia trees. February is summertime in Kenya and it rarely rains. But the smell of moisture was in the air and the clouds were rolling in on our way to Diani Beach when we discovered we had a flat tire. That was the first sign our safari was not going to go as planned. While the bride and groom — Marie, who'd been living in Nairobi for several years, and Andrew, a native Kenyan — attended to the flat tire, the three of us looked around. Here we were, in the middle of the Savannah, on the highway, with big trucks zooming past us, and just about anything watching us. What could be lurking in the grass? We weren't too far from the entrance to Tsavo National Park East, one of the largest parks in the country and where a group of us were to go the next morning for a three-day stay. During that stay, I learned what could have been lurking in the grass. We saw lionesses napping in the shade while their cubs stood at attention under the cover of a small shrub; too many elephants and zebras to count, their skin and fur red from the dirt; a cheetah feasting on a recent kill; plenty of birds and monkeys and impala and gazelles and all kinds of animals I'd never heard of before; and two very large male lions. As our safari driver repeated, they probably were the descendants of notorious lions who killed and ate construction workers building a railway in the 1800s. While the lions seemed almost docile napping during the day, their roars kept me up at night, reminding me that I was in their territory. But we saw none of those as we waited on the side of the highway (phew!) that Tuesday. Fixing a flat tire is a skill every driver in Kenya has because of the poor roads. We started back on our journey in about an hour, just as the raindrops started to fall. The hours began ticking by and we were nowhere near Mombasa, the major port city where we were to take the ferry that would bring us closer to Diani Beach. If we could make it to Mombasa by 4 or 5 p.m., then we'd know we would make it to our hotel by dinner. Sometime between the flat tire and Mombasa, Andrew realized he couldn't get the stick shift to change out of third gear. I had one thought on loop in my mind: the scenes from "Little Miss Sunshine" when the family van's first gear stopped working and they had to push the van, then run to jump in it. Not my idea of a fun time in Kenya. The sun went down, it was pitch black and we still weren't in Mombasa. But the truck wasn't working properly and we had to stop at a mechanic in Mariakani, which means "American" in Swahili. Several men used flashlights to take out the gearbox and assess the damage. The diagnosis: the car needed a major operation and we needed to call for a taxi. After more than an hour, we were back on the road, this time in a van that would take us the rest of the way. Room With A View We were tired and aggravated by the time we reached Mombasa, a city that became familiar to Americans earlier this year after crew members of the U.S. cargo ship Maersk Alabama freed themselves from Somali pirates and docked their cargo ship there. Minutes passed too slowly as we waited for the ferry in Kenya's second-largest city. After what felt like a long time but had been only about a half hour, we made it to the other side. Even though the ocean was blocked from our view by countless resorts, I could smell it. And then, 12 hours after we'd left Nairobi, there it was. Our resort was a series of cottages and at the end of the sandy path was a beautiful pool with the scenic background of the warm Indian Ocean. A reward hard-earned.
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A common Swahili saying is "pole pole," or "slowly slowly," and Kenyans frequently use it for a reason.
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