Wednesday
The normal program would have us leaving Tuesday evening,
but we’ve decided to stick around in Nairobi for a day.
After a leisurely breakfast – the first time we got to
sleep late on this vacation! – we head to the Kenyan
National Museum. The permanent exhibit has the required
African artifacts and stuffed animals. More interesting is
the exhibit of humanoid fossils that have been found in
Kenya. Turkana boy and others. There is also a case with
the Lucy skeleton, which I’m pretty sure is kept in
Ethiopia. The exhibit does not make clear which fossils are
genuine, and which are copies. There is some contemporary
art, as well as a very interesting exhibit about rock art
in Africa.
We continue on our walk into the downtown area. Nairobi is
a merry mess: there are lots of people on the street, the
vehicle traffic is monstrous, it’s crowded, and generally
very noisy. But it’s good to see so much life happening,
compared to antiseptic American cities. We have a cup of
tea in a tiny Indian restaurant, and from our table we
watch life happening in front of us. The taxi drivers
parked there have no customers, but no lack of topics for
conversation with each other. For lunch we go into a
restaurant that advertises its genuine African cuisine.
It’s upstairs, tiny and as you enter, you see a guy sitting
on the roof terrace frying the meat that’s on the menu. We
both order goat, which is delicious, and costs less than
two dollars apiece. We keep our fingers crossed: so far we
haven't had any stomach trouble or scary diseases.
At the end of the day we walk back to our hotel. Maybe we
should have taken a taxi, because the weather is cool but
humid, and it’s a somewhat long walk, and the diesel and
exhaust fumes are overpowering. We are back at the hotel
well before dark, because Nairobi downtown may be an
interesting experience by daylight, by night it’s reputed
to be much too interesting.
Dinner, Somak takes us to the airport, and then 8 hours to
Zurich, 3 hours layover, 8 hours to New York, 3 hours
layover, 2 hours to Memphis, 4 hours layover, and home by
about midnight, more than 30 hours after getting to the
Nairobi airport.
