I’m back from Nairobi after the longest bus ride of my life. I left from Dar Es Salaam at 6:45AM and arrived in Nairobi around 8:30PM. Almost 14 hours without no stop but a quick 15 minutes pause for lunch. Needless to say I was happy to remove my butt from the seat, I really started to feel pain. The transport was quite nice though, I took Scandinavian Express buses (35000TSh – $35) which are probably the most luxury buses in East Africa. There is air conditioning, clean seats, superbe organization, top notch staff. I had 3.5 movies during the journey to help waste some time: Signs (starring Mel Gibson), a-movie-I-cannot-remember (was not good anyway), The Master of Disguise (Disney Movie and nothing special about it) and one-movie-I-do-not-know-the-title.
The difference between Kenya and the Tanzanian coast was striking. Starting from Moshi (Tanzania) I could see that obviouslly the rainy season was present inland and Nairobi is wet, wet, wet…so wet that the main water pipe in Nairobi exploded and the whole city does not have any water. So forget about the shower ! Too bad that was the firs thing I wanted to do yesterday when getting of the bus ! The shortage of water is kind of a contrast when the whole country is suffering from severe flooding since a couple of weeks.
Today I spent the whole day straightening out things. I booked my flight for tomorrow at 9:15AM to Lusaka, Zambia. I went back to the Masaai market to buy some more woodcarving and went to the post office to send everything to my dear friend Fabrice in Paris. The parcel is about 12.5kg of different things from Kenya, Seychelles and Tanzania and it was time for me to send all this. I payed quite some money for the shipping (surface mail of course) and more exactly 3255KSh which is about $50. It should arrive in about 3 months and I just hope that it will. I would be quite sad if it does not.
Now I’m writing all the reports and uploading old pictures at the same time. There is no guarantee that you will have something as this looks quite slow right now, but at least it’s better than what it was in Tanzania. I have had so many people complaining that I do not upload pictures that I’m doing the best I can to catch up but really this is no piece of cake to find a place where you can bring your laptop and then it can take ages to upload data. In Zanzibar I had about 0.1KB/s for upload so you can imagine the time it will take if you want to upload 7 to 10MB of pictures…