Wow, a lot happens here in a few days

I probably won't be posting many pictures on this blog.  I just jumped through some major hoops in this cyber to get my pictures transfered from my camera's memory card to a thumb drive.  The cyber computers are all locked down in a major way because they're just for web browsing and opening documents, so I had to boot Linux from a CD-ROM.  I managed to run Linux for 30 minutes without alerting the staff because I am in a corner and Mollie is blocking the way.  But I got the pics transferred and rebooted back into the cyber's OS of choice -- Winutuxu, a strange beast, you can google it.  Oops, I'm talking about computers and you probably want to hear about Kenya.
We're in Nyeri now, at the Batavian Grand Hotel. A lot of businesses here are named Batavian because Mt. Kenya has three peaks and the tallest is Batavian Peak or some such, so it means the topmost. I had intended to blog from a cyber two nights ago but Nyeri is a small city, with dirt streets and not much money, and the cybers close at the end of the afternoon. Then yesterday morning the cybers were closed again for a wonderful reason. Kenya "promulgated" -- gotta love that word -- its new constitution, which means that the constitution that was voted in on Aug. 4 is the law of the land as of yesterday, with the president and others swearing in again. So it was a national holiday, and may be from now on, on 27 August.

Kenya's food is wonderful and inexpensive.  Mollie and I can well eat for about $6 for the two of us.  One of us might be chicken (organic free-range, there is no other kind here, tough but much more flavorful that USA chicken) with rice, greens (spinach/kale with garlic and onion), a tomato/cucumber salad, and maybe soup.  The other might order beans with onions and a bit of spice, irio/mukimo/kienyeji depending on which language is used (potatoes mashed with pumpkin leaves and whole corn kernels -- I really like this stuff), greens, and salad.  The price might be 220 Kenyan shillings for the chicken meal and 160 for the bean meal, so at 80 KES/$ the meal is $6 including a good tip.  Yum!  Today for breakfast I had tree tomato juice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarillo), yellow sweet potatoes, a sour-tasting porridge made of sorghum and cassava, some noodles fried with bell peppers and onions, and fried sweet triangles of dough.  Mollie had a sausage and toast and a bit of cereal.  Breakfast came with the room, which was $34.  The night before the room was only $12 but it was a dodgier place.  So you see the sacrifice I'm making as I sit here and blog for you well past lunchtime, me hungry again and good restaurants up and down the street.  :)
 
When we were in Nairobi we visited Mollie's sister Linda.  Linda works in a town a few miles north of Nairobi so we took a matatu to see her.  Linda is wonderful and I greatly enjoyed our visit, and regret not thinking to bring my camera to take her picture, although I have a few pics of her that Mollie emailed a few weeks ago.

Besides walking, the matatu is the workhorse of Kenyan transportation.  It is a Nissan or Toyota van, diesel, slightly longer than a minvan and configured to seat 14, although there were 17 in ours on the way to see Linda.  Our 8 maybe? mile trip cost $0.36 each.  There's the driver -- they drive on the right here, and I'm do ok as a pedistrian by just looking both ways, although I'm learning to look to the right first before crossing -- and a guy that's like a conductor who hangs out the open sliding door and hawks rides and collects the fare.  He seems to be quite a character in his own right, but the driver is, by Kenyan law apparently, required to be a suicidal maniac.  He'll drive through gas stations, bump along the shoulder, pass (forcing motorcycles coming our way to squeeze over), slam on the brakes or not use them at all, and narrowly miss scores of pedestrians, all to arrive at the destination a few places ahead of the other drivers.  All of the matatu drivers are in a mad race with each other.  It's rather like Times Square without the natural grace and courtesy of New York cabbies.  The matatu drivers are so out of control that a normal straight road on the outskirst of Nairobi will have a speed bump every half mile or so, up to which the matatu races apparently straight at a pedestrian, maybe a woman with a big load or a baby on her back, only to slam on the brakes for the speed bump, which the woman knew it would, giving her the foot of clearance that passes for normal.  Then the matatu races on, leaving yet another cloud of diesel smoke to dissipate into Nairobi's awful air.  There are steel posts between the streets and the sidewalks to keep the matatus from mowing down pedestrians en masse.

Between cities you take a shuttle, which is a matatu driven by a reasonably sane person.  Our 100(?) mile trip from Nairobi to Nyeri cost KES 300 -- $3.60.  The fuel costs about the same as in the USA, and the matatu and tires etc cost about the same, so the low cost is from low driver wages and packing in the passengers.  Few of the roads are well maintained -- some stretches are so potholed that a dirt road has formed alongside, with all of the traffic using it instead.  On the way to Nyeri we saw a big construction project, the Chinese building a highway to supplement the regular road.  A lot of Kenyans were working on the project, operating the heavy equipment and doing shovel work, while the Chinese worked in blue jumpsuits and were more management/engineering types, I gather.  All of the equipment was Chinese, with brands like Sinotruck.

We also visited Mollie's aunt Nancy, where Mollie has lived in recent years.  Mollie asked what I wanted for lunch and I said goat -- Mbuzi? I think it is -- so Nancy cooked a great goat stew and served it with greens, tomato/cucumber/onion salad, and ugali, which is like whole-corn grits but drier.  My baggage was way too heavy and I had brought things like books for Mollie, so we left some things at Nancy's, including my old laptop.  Nancy's 13-year-old son, William, hasn't had his nose out of the thing for 4 days now, I hear, although I wish there was a way to get him an internet connection.  If it was a Windows box instead of Linux, the Safaricom cellular modem would work, but I assume that there are no drivers for Linux.  Well, never say never, just looking with google I see that there's some hope of getting it working. Mollie's brother Churchi (short for Churchill, his middle name, his first name's Winston) is coming to Nyeri tomorrow to resume school, and he can bring the laptop for me to experiment with.  Thank goodness for the Linux ethic of posting solutions to the net!

One last thing before lunch.  Yesterday Mollie and I did the regular tourist thing for the first time.  Mollie had never ridden a horse so we went to Sangare Tented Camp (http://www.sangaretentedcamp.com/).  A fellow named Moses picked us up in Nyeri in one of the Land Cruisers that they use for hauling tourists through the bush.  He's worked for Sangare Tented Camp for some years and knows a lot about African animals and plants, as well as being a very good driver.  We drove 20-30 miles on paved roads and then another 3-4 on dirt roads to get to the place (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=kenya&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Kenya&ll=-0.302466,36.966505&spn=0.04137,0.084801&t=h&z=14).  An old man who spoke Kikuyu (Mollie only speaks Kiswahili, Luo, and English) rounded up three of the camp's 6 horses and we set off.  The rest of the horses -- well, one was a zebroid, the sterile offspring of a horse and a zebra, and like our mules used mainly as pack animals -- followed along.  After a while two horses went back but an old sway-backed white one stuck with us.  We came across the the owner of the place, whose grandfather immigrated to Kenya in 1918, and found out that the ranch was 4500 acres and used to be loaded with rhinos, but when the poachers started thinning them down the remainder were darted by conservationists and moved to a safer place.

At the restaurant and tent area, next to a lake, we saw white pelicans, Egyptian geese, and a Maribou stork or two.  On the horse ride we saw zebra, gazelle, and waterbucks.  We ate a huge and wonderful buffet lunch back at the camp, and then on the Land Cruiser ride back to Nyeri, Moses took us a diffent way and found us a herd of 7 giraffe and some baboons.  It was a great trip and I would have some good pics if I hadn't been bouncing on either a horse or a jeep most of the time.  The rhino are gone and we didn't see any leopards, but there are plenty of them there.  There are no lions, cheetahs, wildebeest, or hyenas on the ranch, and the elephants stay up on Mount Kenya until the dry season, at which point they migrate down to the ranch because it always has water.

Well that's about it.  Please sell the movie rights and send me a check. :)  And Happy Birthday, Andrew and Mom!

Made it to Nairobi

Met Mollie at the airport, have had a good sleep -- what year is it anyway? -- a meal and some good Kenyan coffee. Ah, settling in. I'm typing on Mollie's little smart phone keyboard so this is as tedious for me as it is for you, so that's it for now. :)

Hi, Bye

Hello all and welcome to my blog about my trip to Kenya.  Tomorrow Tom Franklin will pick me up at my house (bye, cat!) and take me to the airport.  I fly to Newark and then to London and on to Nairobi.  The entire trip is 23 hours including layovers, and I also lose 7 hours because of the time difference.  I'm looking forward to being in the London Airport and I brought good reading for the trip:  William Powers' Twelve by Twelve, A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream (2010).  I'm a fan of William Powers as a writer and a man after reading his Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge (2006), describing his work for Catholic Relief Services in Liberia.  Yes, I'm spelling this out as a recommendation.  :)

Gotta go repack.  Both of my bags are about 49.5 pounds, according to my not-too-accurate scale.  If I could slim each down by a couple of more pounds, then I won't have to worry about discarding something at the airport as other passengers impatiently wait to check their bags.