Kenya - 21 January, 2001

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Travel Distance

Total:

21,221 km

301 km

We finally landed in Nairobi in the early hours of the day after a very eventful flight from Douala, Cameroon.  We get off the flight and quite quickly pass through immigration.  The bags are coming out on the conveyer belt as we get to the luggage collection area and we collect our bags.  We then load them onto a trolley and head through customs, where we are met by Gilly, our Dragoman driver for the rest of the trip.  He takes us to the truck, where we load up our stuff.  We go and change some money while Jon sorts out some problems that he had with his bag.

We finally get all loaded on the truck and head off around 2:30 AM to a campsite near the airport, arriving about 30 minutes later.  We get our stuff off the truck and quickly sort out our sleeping gear and head off to bed as soon as we can.

We are awake by 7:30 AM, being woken up by the bright sun shining into the tent.  We get up and look around the campsite in the day light.  It turns out to be a place where many of the overland companies bring their trucks to store and work on in between trips.  We have breakfast prepared for us and we go and enjoy a filling plate of eggs, sausages and toast.  We then take a quick shower, after which we pack up our stuff and load it into the truck.  We will be heading to Lake Baringo, but first we drive into Nairobi to do some shopping for food.

The good news is that on all the trips in eastern and southern Africa there is a cook on board.  While we still need to help out with shopping, chopping and cleaning, it will be much easier.  We are looking forward to this.  We walk around while the cook does his shopping, but we do not have much time, so we cannot go far.  By 11:30 AM we are on our way.

Along the way we stop for lunch on the road side - we now discover how different it will be to travel in East Africa as opposed to West Africa.  The lunch is amazing - we have cold cuts, real cheese, lettuce, vegetables, fruit and good bread.  We are stuffed.  We then head on, arriving at Lake Baringo at the Robert's campsite at 5 PM.  We set up camp near the edge of the lake.  The cook then prepares a fantastic dinner of steaks, rice and vegetables with fruit salad for dessert.  And this time we do not need to floss after eating the meat (as we always did in West Africa) - that is how good it is.  During dinner, we are informed by Gilly that one of the brakes on the truck has broken and that he wants to drive back to Nairobi tomorrow.  As this brake accounts for only 15% of the braking power, it should not be a problem, but they want to fix it before the rest of the East Africa trip starts.

Shortly after dinner is finished, it starts to rain.  This is the first real rain that we have had in four months - it is a bit strange.  After putting the rain fly on the tent (we have not had much use for it in West Africa), we head over to the bar for a drink, but the place is a bit full due to the rain so we go over to the bar at the hotel next door where we can play some pool.  After a couple games of pool, we head back to the campsite to go to bed by midnight.