Traveller's Tales - The Journal

Quote from today’s The Nation “Nairobi – UK awaits election monitors’ reports The Foreign Office said yesterday that it would not make a statement on the outcome of the General Election until it had reports from the British High Commissioner in Nairobi and the Commonwealth observer team. The British High Commission is said to have [...]

Moi declared today a public holiday so there aren’t any Air India flights leaving today, let alone the fact that no one at the airport was answering the phone anyway. We ended up just hanging around the Kumuka compound watching the only Kenyan television station for any election information. We knew we weren’t going to [...]

Kisumu, Kenya – One day to go until the election and we were headed to Nairobi to try to get out of a country which no longer the stablest in East Africa. We packed up our stuff and jumped in the truck with Mike, Tom and Jim who were also going to Nairobi to help [...]

Today was the day. Today, against my better judgment, the truck left Jinja and headed for the Kenyan border. The Kenya/Uganda border is technically closed for security reasons, but we’d heard that they were letting tourists through. Upon our arrival at the border we could look over the customs gates into Kenya to see a [...]

We drove all day long. I resorted to drinking beer all day to keep myself entertained (which created a few more piss stops than needed) but we finally pulled into this Zambian village right off the main road to camp for the night. We played a few camp fire (Camp Noel Porter-type) games after dinner [...]

This next section is my travel companion, Richard Morris’ account of code breaking our Lonely Planet guide book. Wednesday 4th November 1992, Sable Lodge, Harare Oh yeah – perhaps the funniest thing yet. I think I have discovered something of utmost importance: top secret code written in the Africa guide book we have. It came [...]

It is absolutely pissing down with rain this morning; if these are the short rains I wouldn’t like to see the long heavy ones. After talking to these other travelers, we decided it wasn’t worth it to travel around Kenya on our own right now; if everything gets stolen, then we’re going to have some [...]

We decided to venture out of the compound today to have a look at Nairobi some more, but not without a larger group this time. The first time Rich and I went walking we were on our own, and when we began to wander into an area where we the people didn’t seem as tolerant [...]

I’m sitting here on the porch of our lodge we’ve moved into for the next couple of days. It’s sunny and I’m surrounded by loads of travelers. Our lodge has a huge open yard, and if you go looking for them you’ll find chameleons on the branches of the bushes. Rich is doing his laundry [...]

The plane landed five hours later – hard. It jolted me out of my sleep, making me instantly nauseous, forcing me to run to the back to boot in the plane’s loo. The stewardesses kept telling me to get back in my seat as I was running past them to be sick. I voted to [...]