Vacation report

I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. As mentioned in my previous post, my wife and I spent the last two weeks of 2008 on vacation in Kenya and Tanzania. What follows are collected thoughts and highlights from our trip:

Nairobi, Kenya
Our first stop was Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Though a few people we met referred to it as “Nairobbery,” I thought it was great. Perhaps I’m biased since I'm coming from Kinshasa. The food was excellent – I enjoyed sushi, Thai (with deep-fried spinach as an appetizer), and some of the best fish and chips I’ve had since visiting Ireland five years ago. The city had the hustle-and-bustle feel you’d expect from any major international city. The downtown streets were crowded during the day with pedestrians, and at night cabs were shuttling people to various nightspots and restaurants in the area. I was jazzed to see a movie in a movie theater (“Eagle Eye” – a very silly film), browse a bookstore, and go to a supermarket with a good selection of food and reasonable prices.

And everyone was so nice! That really caught me off guard. Sure, there were people asking for change on the street, or salesmen trying to get you to sign up for their safari or visit their shop. But if you politely said, “No, but thanks anyway” they smiled, said “Have a nice day,” and left you alone. It was a shock. I’m used to having people relentlessly badger me as I walk down the street in Kinshasa. Or, when we were looking for a restaurant or shop, total strangers would point us in the right direction or lead us to where we wanted to go. Insanity! And they didn’t want money in return! The first day or two I was there, I was suspicious that everyone had an ulterior motive for helping me when in fact, they were just being nice. Has living in Kinshasa these past five months really made me this edgy?

We visited a giraffe sanctuary outside Nairobi, where you could get up to eye level with a giraffe and feed them. They have extremely long tongues. Some people were putting food pellets in their mouths and having the giraffe eat the pellet out of their own mouth. No, I did not do such a thing.

I should also mention that no matter what your political leanings, Obama’s victory in the presidential election made socializing very easy in Kenya. When Kenyans found out I was an American and especially that I was from Chicago, they were pretty stoked. Kenyans were bursting with pride, knowing that Obama has Kenyan roots.

Arusha, Tanzania, and safari
After a few days, we left Nairobi for Arusha, Tanzania via a six hour bus ride. We embarked on a four day safari the morning after we arrived in Arusha. Going on safari was pretty cool. My wife and I were in a Toyota Land Cruiser with a driver and another couple. The roof of the Land Cruiser popped up so we could stand up and take pictures and get a better view of the wildlife.

We took about 500 pictures while we were on safari. It’s funny, because the first day we were on safari we’d all tell the driver to stop so we could take twenty photographs of a lone gazelle's hindquarters from 300 yards away. Four days later, I think everyone was thinking, “What, another herd of zebra in the road? From now on, let’s stop only if it’s a unicorn or a dinosaur. Otherwise, let’s get back to camp. I’m hungry.”

We went to three different parks over the course of four days – Lake Manyara, the Serengeti plains, and the Ngorongoro crater. Each park was different. Lake Manyara had a large forest, plains, and Lake Manyara (duh). We saw a herd of elephants in the forest as we were leaving the park at the end of our drive.

The Serengeti was vast and dry with very little shade. Most of the animals we saw were taking it easy during the day.

The Ngorongoro crater was probably my favorite part of the safari. It’s an enormous crater formed from a collapsed volcano. There’s a tremendous concentration of wildlife in the crater and the scenery is beautiful. It’s one of the most scenic places I’ve ever visited.

Here's a shot of the crater from the rim at dusk:

We camped each night on safari which was fun. There was a cook and a porter that came with us so we didn’t have to worry about setting up camp or cooking. The stars each night were mind-blowing. It’s hard to find many places on earth where the night sky isn’t polluted by light or smog or whatever. I’ve never been into astronomy, yet I spent at least twenty minutes each night taking it all in.

Stone Town, Zanzibar
On Christmas, we flew from Arusha to Stone Town, the biggest city on the island of Zanzibar. Stone town had a completely different feel than anywhere else I’ve been in my limited travels around Africa. The Arabic influence is very strong, with lots of Muslims and non-Western architecture. The seafood in Stone Town was out of this world, and there are endless narrow winding streets that lead all over the city.

While in Stone Town, we had our only real excitement on our vacation. My wife and I rented motorscooters so we could see some of Zanzibar beyond Stone Town and she had a minor wipeout while starting the motorscooter at one point. No major injuries besides a skinned knee, elbow, and palm, but it did keep her out of the ocean while we were in Zanzibar. While saltwater is a good cleansing agent, it also hurts a lot on open wounds.

Nungwi, Zanzibar
The last leg of our trip was spent at a nice hotel in Nungwi, a small village on the northernmost tip of the island. It was hot. Very hot. And humid. We did our best to stay out of any direct sunlight between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Despite liberal coatings of sunscreen and a lot of time in the shade, I still got burned a bit. That said, the ocean was beautiful and life was very, very laid back for a few days. I wore swim trunks for five days straight, just like when I was a kid.

I went snorkeling for the first time (my wife missed out due to her injuries from two days before), and we went on a sunset cruise with a few other people on a small dhow. The cruise was memorable if only because the captain of our small sailing vessel was three sheets to the wind himself and actually fell off the boat halfway through the trip. His loyal crew of two pulled him back on board and delivered us home safely. It was a little nerve-wracking at the time but now I can look back on it and laugh.

On New Year’s Eve, the hotel brought in a dance and acrobat troupe. They weren’t bad. I liked the acrobat troupe more, if only because they failed to successfully execute around 10% of their routines. This added a delightful element of unpredictability to the show, especially when they were spinning flaming bicycle wheels on their fingertips or holding each other up in human pyramids that there three people high. The arms on some guy on the bottom of the pyramid would start to shake a little and the audience would all lean forward, expecting to see some excitement. In the end, though, there were no mishaps.

The most surreal moment of my vacation
By far, the strangest part of the entire trip was the ferry ride we took from Zanzibar back to the mainland of Africa. There are daily ferries that run between Zanzibar and Dar Es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. The ride takes a couple hours and it’s way cheaper than flying. We’d heard from a few people we met on our trip that seas can be pretty choppy so we took some Sea Legs pills before we got on the boat. We settled into our seats in the cabin along with another 180 or so passengers, many of them Muslim. Almost immediately, the cabin started getting really hot. There's no windows to open or worthwhile AC to speak of in the cabin and it felt very stuffy. Not a good recipe for sea travel.

Eventually, the boat got going and to help pass the time a DVD was put on for the passengers. No joke, the movie is Rambo 4, the most recent one. Anyone see this? The movie is chock full of violence (236 kills, per Wikipedia), most of it graphic. Of all the movies in the world to show to a boatload full of Africans and tourists, they choose this one. Even better, it’s a bootleg version with bad English subtitles so I’m not able to follow the intricacies of the plot. Picture this: I'm watching a bootlegged version of Rambo 4 in the hot, stuffy cabin of a huge boat with all these Muslims, and we start to hit the high seas and the boat is getting thrown around.

I tried to keep on one eye on the movie and the other on my fellow passengers to see if anyone was getting sick. Onscreen, Rambo is literally ripping people's throats out, decapitating them, and massacring the evil Burmese soldiers. Most of the people with me on the boat were watching the movie in silence, or going "Unnnnnnnhhhhhh" when something especially gory happens. And yet, nobody threw up, at least as far as I could tell. You'd think that being in a stuffy, smelly cabin on a boat getting tossed around on the open sea while watching an incredibly violent movie would cause some people to lose their lunch. No dice.

At any rate, it's good to be back home in Kinshasa. We've caught up with a few of our friends who were on vacation and now that the holidays are over, it's back to the old routine.