Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

Our next stop after Ethiopia was Kenya where we spent three days wandering around Nairobi. We immediately saw a huge difference between Kenya and Ethiopia, or rather Nairobi and Addis Ababa. It was a bit of a relief really for us to be in Kenya and back to a ‘developed’ lifestyle. Before leaving Ethiopia our guesthouse didn’t have running water for about 6 days. I knew I was going to like Kenya after about 2 hours in the country and having a hot shower.

Nairobi is substantially more developed than Addis. Having running water, and hot water at that, plus electricity is always nice but it’s more than that. In Nairobi the streets are clean and have names, we were even able to get a map, in Addis we were always covered in dust and stepping over garbage or cracked sidewalks. The number of English speaking people in Nairobi far exceeds those of Addis. We never ran into a problem of not being understood or communicating.

Kenya is much more popular on the tourist track, and it shows. First of all, there are interesting things to see in and around Nairobi, and they are well advertised. We went to the National Museum just on the outskirts of the city; it was first rate. The museum was in a new and well laid out museum. The information was well presented and interesting. It was really well done and nice to see, as most of the museums we’ve seen on our travels are lacking to say the least.

Other than the museum we didn’t really accomplish much during our first few days in the city. We walked through the Maasai Mara Market that is held a few times through the week and spotted some things we will pick up when we go back through. We also spent a lot of time on a public bus traveling to Karen Blixen museum. The house would have been a lot more interesting if we had seen or read the book Out of Africa seeing as the whole house and tour focused on it and assumed you knew something about it.

Another thing that surprised us about Nairobi was that it didn’t feel nearly as dangerous as everyone made it out to be. Everything you hear about “Nairobery” makes it sound like this awful crime-filled, street-children galore city. Perhaps we just managed to avoid these areas or we are completely naive, but it didn’t feel like that to us. Actually, it felt quite safe, or at least as safe as any other big city feels.

All in all, Nairobi was quite enjoyable and a nice change. It felt good to be doing ‘touristy’ things again. The hot shower certainly didn’t hurt anything either.