With much coaxing after a dramatic push start, our bus for Nairobi puttered out of the Kampala station at 7:00 am; so I shouldn’t have been surprised when an hour into the journey noxious fumes penetrated the bus, preceding our first breakdown. We had specifically selected this time of departure so we would arrive in Nairobi, a city often referred to as “Nairobbery” due to its alarming crime rate, before dark and any delays pushed our ETA later and later. We were told to relax and have a tea on the roadside while another bus came from Kampala. As we sat on the concrete steps and waited, the four men standing idly in front of the shop didn’t change their position for the whole two hours it took to arrive – I guess the only difference was that that morning they had something to direct their attention towards. A mechanic went to work on the original bus for an hour before finally deciding that they did not have the proper tools to fix the problem and it would be best for us to take the replacement. Transferring all the cargo to the second one only delayed us a bit longer and by noon we were once again on our way.

Portrait of the Giraffe

After a lengthy border crossing, all hope of arriving before night was gone. Darkness fell as we rambled along the endless Kenyan countryside, slowly making our way to the capital. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until the driver pulled over for an emergency pee break and the bus failed to start back up. We were yet again broken down, this time on a deserted section of road with only the headlights of the occasional passing lorry providing any light. I was amused more than annoyed when all the men were pulled off the bus to push. Even when one of the passengers came back onboard and told me that we were in real danger, I still assumed he was talking about the state of the engine, but when I saw the local men starting to panic, I got nervous. The area we were stranded in was ominously referred to as the Burnt Forest and its reputation preceded it. Bandits roam these parts praying on unfortunate buses such as ours, stripping passengers of everything they own (often including underwear) and leaving them naked at the side of the road. Frantic mobile phone calls were being made by the passengers, one man calling the bus office demanding security, while another was fruitlessly trying to get the police to protect us. The girl behind me called every bus company and private hire within a 300 kilometer radius begging them to send us transportation regardless of cost. Upon hanging up the phone with the second unsuccessful attempt she said that she just wasn’t ready to die. When another lady complained that it would be worse for the women who would all be raped, my alarm escalated – especially when I took into account the AIDS statistics.

The Ugandan pastor tried to calm everyone down by telling us that we were “in God’s hands now” before informing us that both the driver and conductor had left the bus. While English was predominantly spoken, every so often a switch would be made to Lugandan (or Swahili) and mention of Mzungus would be made combined with pitying looks in our direction. One man told us that it is worse when Mzungus are on the bus as bandits assume that they have more money stashed somewhere. Another man replied that if they came near us he would just shoot them, but then lamented that he wasn’t allowed to bring steel over the border anymore. After an hour, the driver returned with a mechanic, reassuring us that “the Lord has a reason as to why the bus isn’t starting”, failing to acknowledge that it was mostly due to the company’s gross negligence in servicing the vehicle. Needing to get away from the infectious fear affecting everyone inside the bus, we risked the alternative and stood outside to calm down. The mechanic mournfully looked at the underside of the bus while a local Matatu driver that had stopped shone his lights for him. The matatu driver managed to ease our minds momentarily by explaining that we were stranded in a perfectly safe area… until he mentioned that the really bad areas were only a kilometer and a half in one direction and four kilometers in the other. Three hours later, close to midnight, the bus reluctantly sputtered to life and we rolled out of burnt forest with our lives, our bags and our underwear.

Sniffing us out

After our ordeal, arriving in Nairobi at 4:00 in the morning was rather anticlimactic. Except for the man that tried to steal our flashlight, everyone on the bus was agreeable and a few even helped us out with getting transport to our hostel. It was a refreshing change from the usual sort of potential friends that approach us looking for some way to extort money…like the fellow claiming to be from Zimbabwe that passed us by on the streets in Nairobi the next day who, coincidently, was accepted to McMaster University in Canada. Weaving through the busy side streets, we chatted with him for a while as he seemed knowledgeable about recent Canadian politics. But when he herded us towards the doorstep of a restaurant in a dubious looking area to continue our “chat,” we told him that we had just eaten and that we didn’t bring money for drinks. Once the words “we have no money” were uttered, he abruptly said goodbye and hoped that we enjoyed our holiday. At first we thought that we had offended him in some way, but later we read that this is a common scam used to get money out of trusting tourists.

Downtown Nairobi is a modern capital city, and as we wandered the streets, we were surprised to see tourists standing in the back of an open roofed safari vehicle with their cameras at the ready. This must have been the city’s safari tour…what must the locals walking on paved sidewalks think of tourists taking photos of people in the same vehicle that is used for viewing animals at a safe distance? We felt relatively unthreatened during the day despite all of the dire warnings of the city’s dangers, but sometimes we’d catch ourselves getting a little paranoid. As we queued up for the bank, we felt rather uncomfortable while the man in front of us toyed suspiciously with a flexible wire and decided to wait until he cleared out before we withdrew any cash. Although mostly safe, walking around by day was by no means pleasant. Exhaust pipes billowing black smoke and chemicals directly onto the sidewalks from the city’s millions of souped up but poorly maintained minibuses ensured that you would arrive at your destination covered in a film of black dust. These minibuses are a sight in themselves, with black light interiors, psychedelic paint jobs, and curious slogans plastered across their backs, they resemble a disco on wheels rather than a public form of transport.

We had lunch under the middle tree unaware of this guy nearby

But it wasn’t the city life we came to Kenya to experience, it was the animals. With an Italian, a couple from the Congo and a sleepy Canadian girl we set out from Nairobi for Maasai Mara (the Kenyan side of the Serengeti). Armed with binoculars and cameras, the five of us (the Canadian girl preferred to nap) stood with our heads poking out of the top of our safari van like sentinels as Gabrielle drove us over the plains. Far away we could see about thirty white specks on a hill in the distance. “Ah, that is Nairobi,” Gabrielle explained as he put his foot on the gas. Rocketing past zebras wildebeests and gazelles, we arrived to where a few dozen vans, identical to ours, were surrounding a pride of lions that had just acquired their afternoon snack. While an angry lion chased vultures away from his recent kill, the lioness and her two cubs were licking and playing with their latest conquest – the wildebeest. Everyone looked on with their massive zoom lenses and video cameras poised as the bored lions made their excited admirers wait. One by one, the vans pulled away as their inhabitants lost interest with the lack of blood and gore and moved on in search of the remaining four of the big five.

At first I was a bit jealous of the radios that seemed to be a fixture in every van except ours, but after our second Nairobi – a cheetah spotting with literally a traffic jam of vehicles in a 1700 square kilometer national park – I was happy to wander across the landscape without a parade of vehicles surrounding us. We yielded to a family of elephants plodding south towards the hills and held our breaths when a lion with a full head of hair grazed the front of our van as he strode past us (Brett chose to lean out the open window for a photograph, rather than to sensibly roll it up in a panic). We roamed through the green landscape which changed to yellow before we tucked into our lunch under the much needed shade of an acacia tree. Looking up with a half ravaged chicken leg hanging out of my mouth, I was ordered back into the van by a park ranger who stopped to tell us that there were lions in the vicinity. We finished up and drove only twenty five meters to find a couple of docile lions basking in the sun and turning back, we counted four more.

Professional animal spotters

While we managed to spot three of big five in Maasai Mara (plus many others we think should be included), we never saw the spots of the elusive leopard, only empty leopard trees. After three days, everyone was starting to get burnt out and the safari was turning into one of the dreaded Sunday drives that my dad used to take the family on after church. For hours at a time we would see no animals at all and once when I suggested we stop to look at the ten or so giraffes that had paused by the roadside, an American girl that joined our party suggested snappishly that I should go to the giraffe park in Nairobi (I guess she had seen one too many). Luckily, both Brett and I never tired of seeing the quirky zebras and, without fail, there always seemed to be at least one dominant male half hidden in the tall grass swishing his tail in our direction, just daring us to come closer or else……he’d run away.

The next day promised a new national park and we arrived at Lake Nakuru which was pink with flamingoes in the morning light. They looked like a crop of cotton candy growing in the shallow waters, and as we drew nearer we could see each puff balancing on spindly legs and either preening itself or needling through the waters for the sought after algae. They seemed unabashed by the large herds of buffalo grazing just meters away. Much to the alarm of all the surrounding animals, a mother and baby white rhino in the center of the herd suddenly got the urge to go for a jog. A stampede followed with buffalo running en masse while intermingling zebras frantically zig zagged it as fast as they could away from possible danger. Once the rhinos had shaken the crowd, we followed them on their lakeside jaunt, the pink of the flamingos glinting behind their silhouettes.

Back in Nairobi we traded our safari van for another cramped Akamba bus (the company we swore we’d never use again) and headed for the Tanzanian border looking for relaxation on the island of Zanzibar.

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