Mon 06/07/09 05:59

We arrived in Nairobi about 7 in the morning and although we’d just been deported we were in good spirits. While in the airport we were kind of held, I say kind of because our passports weren’t given back to us and we were told to wait, but we were in the middle of the airport so we could wander around. I guess we were under something like house arrest.

We finally got our passports back about 2 hours later and then we started to try to figure out what we were going to do. We had a few options available to us, the first was to just go back to Dubai, the second was we could wait for the group in Cameroon to do something there, and the last option, which we chose, was to do a little bit of all. Nothing really was working out though, we called the US Embassy but they didn’t call us back, we got a hold of Sareh and Jim, but there wasn’t much they could do, so we finally decided to get a hotel. Even though our bags weren’t expected to be back in Nairobi until the next day, I wanted to find some place just to relax, eat, and gather myself.

The hotel was in the center of Nairobi, and it was kind of a nice hotel, but the location was, for lack of a better word, dangerous. When I think about it, it was the major problem that I had with Nairobi, it seemed dangerous, and the key word is “seemed” because I’m not really sure if it was or wasn’t, but you just get the feeling that you are prey when you’re walking along the street. The huge walls, double-locked doors, and the warnings to not go out at night all reinforce the feeling. So after getting snacks and some toiletries we went back to play some backgammon and to watch a movie.

We headed back to the airport to pick up our bags in the morning after breakfast and after talking to the guys in Cameroon, we knew that we were going to have to just hang out another day at least before we found out if our visas would come through. So we got a room at a hostel called Karen Camp. Neither of the girls had ever stayed at a hostel, but they trusted me. I liked the place it had a “western” feeling to it, and more importantly, it felt safe. It turns out that this hostel is a stopping point for the overland tours through Kenya… which means that I may have stayed here if I hadn’t gone to Cameroon and did the Africa trip that I had originally planned.

We went to a croc farm on our way to the hostel. It was fun. It also turns out that Mona, a girl in the group still in Cameroon got robbed, and both her and Peter had to scare off pickpockets.

The next morning we had decided that we were going to do something instead of just waiting for visas that were probably were never going to arrive, so we booked a safari through the game preserve, Masai Mara.

I really can’t explain how cool Masai Mara is. The best explanation is it’s the Discovery Channel in real life… except everything is smaller. I think watching all the shows on migrating wildebeests and zebras had convinced me that they were large animals, but in reality they’re fairly small. I digress though, the mere fact that we were there and could see them migrating was so cool.