In the beginning

I nearly didn't make it to Kenya at all, if the British media were to be believed. I'd booked for November 30th, when the public sector workers were involved in a once-in-a-generation strike to try and block detrimental changes to their pensions. The press were spinning tales of queues so massive at Heathrow's immigration halls that passengers would be stranded on planes, unable to leave for fear of overloading the arrivals hall, and therefore spreading the pain to those leaving as well as their planes were further and further delayed.

As it was, I was delayed by an hour, due to a power cut in the air traffic control tower. This was an interesting foretaste of my holiday.

I arrived in Nairobi without further incident. When I arrived, the special time stream known as Kenyan Time kicked in, and from thereon in, every action had an equal and opposite amount of faffing attached to it. Indeed it was possible that Einstein's theory of relatively explained the whole thing, with the extra mass of all those elephants slowing time down to a crawl, with only visitors   even aware that it is happening.

My bag took an hour to arrive. Nairobi airport is the Penn & Teller of the airport world, with all its tricks and secrets on full display. Rather than hide the magic source of the baggage, we could see them very slowly depositing them on the carousel, whilst a portly golden retriever ran up and down on top of the bags sniffing for Andrex toilet paper. Watching the slow going was oddly comforting - after 45 mins the bag was still absent, but it was obvious that this was more likely to be a by-product of the graceful slow motion unloading than it was of a missing backpack. It turned up, and I stepped out into Trafficworld.

The odd thing about Nairobi traffic jams is the waiting. You are frequently stuck for up to 15 minutes, with almost no movement whatsoever. Nothing stirs. Then, without any warning, you are off! Off! Off! Someone turns a key in the gridlock and opens it, and for a few minutes you flow like quicksilver, before suddenly you congeal again and are forced to sit patiently under the watchful gaze of giant storks the size of 11 year olds as they sit atop street lights and huddle under their ragged cloaks.  

There's not much more to say of Day One. I scuttled nervously into the Kenya Comfort Hotel - approximately 36 square feet of cupboard plus a water closet for $60. Eventually Nickson from Adventure Panorama Safaris turned up as promised, collected his money and outlined what would be happening the next day. Or what should have been happening the next day. I ate at the hotel, sitting drinking Tusker as the "short rains" lengthened outside the window, before their Nairobi beat battered away at the rooftop all night. But still, jet-lagged and exhausted, I slept.