Our first time to Nairobi I don’t have very fond memories of because I spent most of it sick. But of all places to recover, we certainly had some nice digs in this part of our trip. Rockr and Junkii’s friend booked the hotel for us – she is from Nairobi and chose a place near to where she was staying. We were in our own little apartment, surrounded by lush plants and walkways. I was thankful for the clean and fully-functional bathroom, and the humongous bed. I got a kick out of the leopard print sitting room.
Rockr too was suffering from TD, the fruit shake’s effects hitting him a little later, but no less vehemently.
Despite the two sickies, we did have two excursions during our time in Nairobi. If you’ve heard about Nairobi, then no doubt you’ve heard about its questionable safety. The hotel provided us with a driver for everywhere we needed to go, so we felt safe enough to go out in the evening with, as it turns out, one of the managers who needed to go to the supermarket as well. The local supermarket chain is called Nakumart, and that is where we sped and careened toward with our driver, Omar. He was as carefree with his driving as with life in general. He was full of energy (or stimulant) and talked a mile-a-minute about his life in Nairobi. He must have been fairly young (19 or 20) because we took a slight detour to his parent’s house, where he lived, to grab his laptop. It was an entertaining experience and gave us a sense of a young local Nairobian’s life – at least an affluent one. I kind of hope he wasn’t representative of his generation because he was a little classist, not to mention racist! Rockr missed out on this outing because he was still feeling awful 😦
The second outing was the next day and even Rockr managed to make it out. Again we had a driver, and again he was a pretty aggressive driver. Driving in Nairobi is nuts. Nobody obeys the rules, so it’s complete chaos everywhere you go. It takes several hours to get anywhere in rush hour. So we pretty much spent the whole afternoon arranging our safari, most of it just driving. But again, it gave us a glimpse into Nairobian life, and we got to see a bit of the downtown.
The next post will be about the safari! But it might take awhile. Junkii wrote a post explaining his process and why the photos take so long. My process is similar, so check it out if you are curious about the hold-up.
Ugh. Seeing myself flopped on the bed like that brings back bad memories.
R, your feet were dirty!
hehe, that’s probably why he had them at the end of the bed.
There are not too many regrets from the trip, but I did regret not taking any photos of this place. It was a nice cozy dig, felt homey 🙂
Thanks for taking the photos. We might ask to have copies of it for our book printing later on.
Of course! There are some things that I didn’t get pictures of too, so I may ask you to return the favour for the same reason 🙂