Africa Trip part 2

Nairobi (Karen) and Malindi
3 - 7 November

In Kenya I decide to avoid the £30 visa charge and enter on my Zimbabwean passport. I am nervous about showing my Zim passport because it hasn’t got a single stamp in it yet. I soon realise that I have nothing to be afraid of and that officials in Kenya are the same as their Zimbabwean counterparts: pretty sloppy unless there’s an opportunity for a quick buck (E wasn’t offered her change until she asked a couple of times).

S, AW and J pick us up from the airport; E and I are still chilly but after being forced to talk to each other in Doha we have thawed a bit. We drive to Karen, named after the Danish coffee grower. On the way we pass the Nairobi game park where we see some giraffe. After this we pass miles of dreary light industrial type buildings and a slum. E says how it reminds her of black ghettos in America and I tilt my head back and laugh.

S’s driving is awful. She hoots at any vehicle pulling out within 20 meters of her and vents frustration at pretty much everyone on the road. This is a pointless exercise, I conclude. Nairobi traffic doesn’t follow rules as such and as soon as you come to terms with this the better.

In Karen we are staying with AL, E’s best English friend, and her cousin A. S, AW and J are on holiday there for varying lengths of time. It is a nice house with a big pretty garden – one that could be in any Zimbabwean city, same flora and fauna, same size.

AL came over to Kenya to stay with her cousin a few months ago. She intended to stay for a month or so but ended up staying indefinitely, much to the ire of her boyfriend in London. There is much moralising amongst the English girls about living in Kenya amongst such total poverty. AL justifies it in various ways but I’m pretty sure that she wouldn’t enjoy it as much if the situation was different. I’m not saying that she enjoys living in the midst of deprivation but I am suggesting that her lifestyle wouldn’t be sustainable if the situation was different. This is the case with most whites living in Africa, I think.

AL has organized a house on the beach in a place called Malindi where we will go in a couple of days. In the mean time we chill out in Karen. We go to a couple of restaurants, one expensive and mostly white, the other full of black people eating goat. Goat is unbelievably tough and not really worth the effort but I’ll probably remember it longer than the t bone I had at the posh place. We also go to an elephant orphanage, and smoke lots of bush weed.

I also meet W, A’s boyfriend, and P who is S’s. Will is from Kenya but speaks with a slight American accent which he picked up when he went to university there. E will tell me later that she thought he was “very hot” – in hindsight this is obvious, with his scruffy beard and wild afro-type hairstyle. P is a journalist who has been wondering around East Africa for the last eight months. After coming to Malindi he will head back to Chelsea and continue his relationship with S. I like P, he is laid back and funny sometimes.

What can I say about Kenya so far? It is extremely close to what I imagined it to be; in Nairobi we drive straight past high density ‘suburbs’ into areas with hedged off gardens with 4x4s driving about. Servants open gates and tend to the washing – you could interchange Karen with Borrowdale and I doubt anyone would notice. Only the roads are worse and the poverty stricken areas are less well hidden.

My first glimpse of Nairobi proper comes when we wait, huddled in a group, everyone with darting, suspicious eyes, in the terminus for the bus to Malindi. I wish we had got the train now because I believe it has not changed much, maintenance apart, from the colonial times. I like that sort of thing; an easy glimpse back into the olden days, just like the train from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls is with its RR emblazoned windows. It’s quite easy, for me at least, to think that the blacks have somehow got in the way of something quite special but after a millisecond I realise that it wasn’t very special at all and just plain arrogant and harmful. The bus is fine in the end and I sleep most of the way to Mombassa, thanks to chairs that recline almost to the horizontal (and thanks also to half a valium). From Mombassa we catch a minibus to Malindi where our lovely sea front house awaits us.

One thing that catches my attention in Kenya is the number of Muslims there. Women completely covered in black are a common sight. Not an enviable position to be in considering the heat. Mosques, buildings that take influence from Arabia but which are built in typically crumby African style, pop up all along the roadside in this coastal area. I remember that Somalia borders Kenya but still I find all these black Muslims somehow incongruous.

The beaches are similar to Mozambique’s; pretty and warm but not brimming with life like the South African ones. People want to sell you things every step you take down the beach. They are incorrigible, these East Africans. They don’t take no for an answer and soon become a complete pain in the arse. In the mornings when we woke up they were there peering over the garden wall at us just waiting to start their endless sales pitches.

View from our house in Malindi

We have a nice, standard beach holiday. We swim, and wade out at low tide looking for interesting creatures, we bury S in the sand, we get cooked some nice meals by our resident cook and we read. I start the Quiet American which I regret not stealing to finish. AL’s boyfriend T arrives. T is a professional hunter and is proficient, to say the least, in all matters concerning the bush. I quite envy him and his rugged ways. He speaks almost like an Englishman. White Kenyans, or the ones that I met at least, still seem to have direct ties back to the ‘motherland’. They have no discernible accent of their own and lots tend to go Europe or America for university. T doesn’t even have a Kenyan passport despite having lived there his entire life. In fact, when he goes hunting in Tanzania he comes back into Kenya on a tourist visa!

In Malindi T and I go to the angling club on our way back from buying some drinks. They have the head of a 7m Great White hanging on the wall – the largest shark ever caught apparently. They also have a huge Marlin with the inscription “Kenya’s first grander”. We walk down to the scales where a couple of South Africans are hanging up a sailfish they've caught. It looks like it is broken in half somehow. They begin to tell us that as they were reeling it in a marlin attacked it and punctured its gill. They believed that one was also a grander.

The 7m shark at the fishing club