How to mess up the drive and still enjoy the journey

Well, after three weeks of travelling, I finally arrived at Happy Home! It’s definitely Kenya with the training wheels off. The taxi driver met me at the airport without incidence. The two other volunteers happened to be in Nairobi for a few things, so Joseph drove me to the house they were staying at. I took advantage of the opportunity to brush up on my (extremely rusty) Kiswahili. Coming straight from the Netherlands meant that every foreign language sounded like Dutch the first couple of days. Imagine my surprise when the owners of the house turned out to be a Flemish Belgian couple! The two other volunteers are named Tabea and Anne, and they’re both nineteen year old girls from Germany. They both had a mild case of food poisoning, so we delayed our departure to Happy Home for a day to hang around the posh Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. Tabea and I went on an errand to get my cell phone up and running at the Westgate mall, which has more fancy stores than all of Moscow. Not quite the Kenya I remember with SFS.

We were finally able to get started the next morning, which involved hailing my first matatu. Matatus are how resident Kenyans move around--dilapidated, uniformly white, 14-seater vans, staffed by a driver and a guy whose job it is to exceed the seat capacity by at least five people—let's call him the stuffer. SFS took a look and do not touch approach with their students and matatus. After some minor haggling at an unofficial matatu stop, someone will direct you to a matatu that will take you virtually anywhere in Kenya for PENNIES. My first ride from the house in Westlands to the country bus station halfway across Nairobi cost thirty shillings. That’s approximately 35 cents. SOLD!

Our next transportation adventure was the country bus station. Tabea and Anne assured me that they had never travelled to Migori (near the orphanage) from Nairobi for more than five hundred shillings. Of course, Thursday had to be the exception. There was a police crackdown on public transportation (read an inspection station where bus/matatu drivers would have to bribe their way out of non-compliance with “official” standards) on the road that we needed to drive on, which meant that the number of buses traveling to Migori was severely limited and there was no room for negotiation below 1000 shillings. My still-Western pricing sensibilities were not bothered by this cost (a little under $12 for a six hour ride), but Anne and Tabea were enraged by the 200% inflation. We futilely attempted our negotiations for a half-hour or so before someone finally offered us a ride to Kisumu for 600 shilling. They told us we could get off at a junction town before we got to Kisumu and take a matatu for 300 shilling to Migori from there. Not great, but it was the best offer we had gotten, so we hopped on the bus. Unfortunately, the bus arrived in the “junction” town three hours later than they said it would, and there were no actual matatus there. It was about half an hour before sunset anyway, which would have made it unsafe to travel the rest of the way by matatu. So we stayed on the bus to Kisumu.

It’s a relatively large town on the shores of Lake Victoria that just happens to have the best mid-range hotel three wandering wazungu women could hope for. Five hundred shilling a piece got us a triple with our own bathroom, beds, mosquito nets, towels, fan, and (bad Swahili soaps) TV. The rooftop terrace with a view of Lake Victoria and the vegetarian Indian food restaurant called the Laughing Buddha around the corner were included free of charge! A cup of chai and a plate of samosas with masala fries later and I was reveling in our six-hour driving detour.

We made it to Happy Home by matatu without incidence the next morning. The crackdown made our trip particularly pleasant because the stuffer was afraid to clown car our matatu, so we remained within a person or two of capacity the entire way. The quality of the roads is also remarkably better between Nairobi and Migori than it was between Nairobi and Loitokitok. They’re actually paved. The entire way. I assume it’s because of the higher population density, which is good for the roads, but bad for the wildlife sightings. So far I’ve only seen a few Thomson’s gazelles, a warthog, and an African crowned crane. A world of difference from my wildlife-packed Maasai group ranch experience. Western Kenya is all villages and shambas (Kiswahili for farms). They have tea plantations that stretch for MILES, along with a booming sugar cane empire (Sony Sugar), and the requisite fields of maize, beans, bananas, and tobacco. As the crops indicate, it’s a much more tropical climate than the semi-arid rangelands I was on before. The temperature hovers between eighty and ninety degrees most of the day with a two-hour dip in the afternoon when it thunders and pours and all that displaced topsoil goes running down the hills in great red rivers. I found the equator!

More on actually being here later...