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 made plans to evacuate 47,000 UK expatriates in the event of post-election violence.”
When I woke up this morning the KBC was giving us the results (very slowly I might add) that Moi was leading so far with some other guy not far behind him. I rang up Air India at 9:30 a.m. and got us placed on the Nairobi to Bombay flight leaving at 1:30 p.m. that afternoon. We would be in Bombay for New Year! Rich and I packed our bags and said goodbye to Jim, Tom and Mike before heading out to catch the matatu into town. I was sort of bummed we wouldn’t get to have our New Year’s party with the people form our safari truck – we had a great group, but there was no reason for us to stay in a country that was as unstable as it was, along with our own government advising us not to enter Kenya.
We said our good-byes and caught the minivan into Nairobi city center and with one swift motion we were in a cab headed to the airport no less that two minutes after getting off the matatu. We boarded our plane an hour or so later to find a total of 20 people on an aircraft that was almost as large as a 747! We flew six and a half hours and at 9:30 p.m. local time we’d landed on the next continent (or sub-continent) of our world tour. India. We’d clocked almost 7,200 kilometers on our trip with Kumuka in our big blue 1961 German M.A.N. truck named “Bush Pig”