Arriving in Kenya was almost an anticlimax after the chaos of Kinshasa. I was granted a visa at the airport with no bribes or strange questions. There was even an official taxi rank to get a lift to the hostel. Before I had one foot outside the terminal building I had my first ‘would you like a safari?’. Give me a minute I just stepped off the plane!.
The taxi drove me into the city, which although congested was clean, with big wide streets and fancy skyscrapers. To start with it felt like i’d left Africa and flown into Europe already. We arrived at the Youth Hostel on the outskirts of the centre, and sure enough there was a man in a cheap suit waiting for me ‘would you like a safari?’ he asked, breathing chewing gum flavoured breath in my face, he had to be the most annoying man ever and followed me around for the first day, kept coming up with lines like ‘have you seen the Lion King? Hakuna Matata, we say that, it means no problem’.
Eventually I managed to loose the guy and wandered the streets of Nairobi for a while, it doesn’t have the honesty and innocence that most of West Africa had. People still talk to you in the street but mainly because they want to rob you or sell you something. It does however have all the modern trappings of europe at an OK price, I sat down to my first bacon, sausage and eggs for nearly seven months. I was like a kid in a candy store when I visted the supermarket, wow, milk, cheese, cereal. I nearly ate a whole bowl of coco pops for breakfast the next morning.
Similar to Ghana it is a politically stable, english speaking and despite a theft problem its quite safe, because of that its a good place to send the public school girls off for a couple of months working in orphanages, schools, digging wells etc. Which for me is pretty awesome, I spent a few days in Nairobi mainly chatting to girls as I havent seen any in a while (except for those searching for visas). Night-time is definitely a different story, in all of the previous countries the streets were just as lively at night as they were at day time, if not more so. All you had to do is walk out alone find a friendly looking place, then sit down and chat away. In Nairobi the only bars are in the city centre or the fancy suburbs which are all a taxi ride away, outside of these areas the streets are very quiet and walking a no no apparently.
