SAS Travelogue-Kenya

SAS Travelogue-Kenya

by Rebecca Smith

Jambo!! OK, so in Kenya, day numero uno….I didn’t do anything. I had 6 hrs of dock time. How cool is that?!?!? Anywho, that night I went out with Shawn and about 18 other people. We took a matatu (a 16 seater van like vehicle) and had to pile in like a clown car. We drove all over the well maintained roads (yeah freakin’ right) of Mombasa looking for a Swahili restaurant. Our driver took us to a pizza place. OK, time to explain to the driver the difference between pizza and Swahili food. Aha, eureka, and the like, the man discovers we don’t want food we can get at home and proceeds to drive us to the edge of town to this restaurant slash nightclub. Fabulous. We ate then went dancing. It was fun, they played a lot of American hip hop and then some Kenyan variations of hip hop or dance music. It was so much fun. Until the scary Maasai man started following me around. They have an affinity for pale skinned wives. I’ve been offered a dowry of 40 goats and two cows in exchange for my hand in marriage. Sadly, I had to decline, but boy I could have used those goats. Then some German guy tried to purchase Shawn for the evening by way of the waiter. We realized earlier on in the evening that a large number of the women patronizing the club were, shall we say “working girls.” Most of the other patrons were scheevy old foreign men. Thus, we were rather insulted by the insinuation of this German man’s invitation, but then when he came to our table himself we just kind of told him off, and he didn’t get it. So when we ran away practically screaming and he followed us, we were at a loss for plans to lose our scheezy German tail. After that, we stuck to the group until we went home. The next day I left for my safari in Tsavo. The vans seat seven and have a roof that lifts up so we can stand for maximum photo ops. It was like a two hour ride to the gate to Tsavo East. On the way to the lodge, we did a game drive through the park. We saw lots of elephants, who in Tsavo are red because the soil there is a red clay. That is also the reason that every time I got out of the van I had to wash my face because it had turned clay red. We saw zebras, a lot of guinea fowl, a lot of antelope, and these tiny little mini deer called dik dik. Then we went to the lodge to eat and check in. Then we did another game drive. Then we ate. Then the safari leader gave a lecture. Then we slept. This is what a safari is like: eat, sleep, game drive, repeat. On our afternoon game drive we saw a den of lionesses and their cubs noshing on a zebra carcass. That was pleasant. It was really cool, but we are a bloodthirsty gang and wanted to see the hunt in action, no such luck. The next day we game drove our way through to Tsavo West. We saw hippos!!!! YAY!!!! This whole safari thing almost didn’t seem real. It felt like we were in a zoo staring at the animals and taking pictures. But I learned that the animals often migrate and leave the park by way of something called a corridor. Most of the park is cordoned off wherever it touches a township for several reasons. They want to limit the amount of damage done to property by the animals who get out of the park and they want to cut down on poaching. In Kenya, if you are caught poaching you can be shot on sight. But there are two types of poaching, there is the traditional poaching for commercial reasons with selling done on the black market and there is subsistence poaching where the hunting is of small game that will be used for food by the poorer townspeople. Subsistence poaching is still poaching, but not really, and is allowed in Kenya. It is the commercial poachers with their AK-47’s that are to be shot on sight. I think that is a very effective law, when poachers are caught, but the reserve is so large, it is impossible to police the entirety of it, so a lot of poaching still occurs. Thankfully Kenya has banned the sale of ivory and other by products of poaching so that it makes the market much easier to control. Not much else to say about my safari; it was fun and really cool, but nothing very exciting to tell about. Its something you have to experience. Whenever we saw a warthog we sang “When I was a young warthog…” from “Lion King.” Also, we saw a cheetah, but it was like a mile away, so it looked like a spot in the savanna grasses. We did go to a Rhino Sanctuary, and saw no rhinos, but that’s because there are only 50 in there and they had to be imported because poaching made rhinos extinct in Kenya. And we did stay at a lodge where they put out leopard bait, but we saw no leopards. By the end of the safari, we told our driver, George, that if it was elephants he could keep driving. We came up with a mantra: “Unless it’s killing it, eating it, or doing it, don’t wake us up.” I thought that was very effective. So after our 5 hr long drive home over the well paved (HA HA HA) roads of Kenya, I was excessively tired and opted for a night in. The next day, our last day in Kenya, proved to be quite interesting. I went shopping outside the ship. In each port, the people of the city, especially the taxi drivers and shopowners, know we are coming. I don’t know how, but they all know when we are coming and how long we will be there and that we are stupid Americans with money to burn. Anyways, this information leads to much hustle and bustle outside the dock where our ship is located in every port, usually a lot of hustling and a bit of bustling. Anywho, in Mombasa, a mini open air market sprang up and the “shopowners” (I call them this because as you walk past they invite you to visit their shop, however, the definition of a shop must be different in Kenya, as what was actually there was a sheet on the ground littered with carvings, batiks, or jewelry, no actual structure of any sort to denote shop, just a sheet…on the ground. I took a bag full of stuff like t-shirts, soap, lotion, perfume samples, shampoo/conditioner samples, fun size cereal boxes, an old not very good cd player, a calculator, and other stuff, and NO CASH!!!! I traded my little heart out and got a bunch of stuff that when I got back to the ship, all I could say was “Why did I buy this?!?!” So now I have a bunch of junk from Africa instead of a bunch of junk from the States. Woo hoo. Did you know people really use the phrase “hakuna matata?” I mean I know it was an actual phrase (some girl asked a Kenyan guy if they got that phrase from our movie “The Lion King” …now that’s dumb), but I thought it was like Jambo and they only use it with tourists, but no, they use it all the time!!! So everyone, Hakuna Matata!!! Waheri from Kenya!!! Write again in South Africa. PS—sorry this was sooo late, but the internet in Kenya does NOT work, at all. So oh well, and I spent like $20 on the internet on the ship so I could register, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I didn’t spend an extra fortune writing a journal entry for Kenya. Thanks love ya, buh bye!!!!!