Finally Kenya

I rode into Dar a week ago Saturday with Josh’s dad who had to get into the city to deal with some paperwork. When I found out I had the potential to avoid a bus ride, I very quickly scheduled my life around Jon’s offer to bring me into town. When he dropped me off back at the home of my Dar es Salaam hosts, I had to say a quick good-bye to avoid crying like a blubbering idiot because it was my last parting with the people I had been with all this time in Morogoro who had been so incredibly kind to me throughout.

I spent a few frustrating days in Dar with no electricity for much of the time (and there hadn’t been any in Morogoro when I’d left) and the internet not functioning in my neighborhood. Trying to coordinate travel plans in this part of the world on your own is difficult at best. Trying to do anything without a cell phone is virtually impossible. Trying to track down people in another country to confirm when you are coming so that you can buy your bus ticket and get on the road when you have no phone, no internet, and when you do borrow a phone the calls won’t go through – well I won’t even begin to describe the level of frustration I experienced. Perhaps I have been spoiled be the ease of communication at home, but it certainly is a better way to go if you ever want to get anything accomplished. And we wonder why the majority of the rest of the world just can’t seem to catch up. It took me two weeks just to figure out what day to buy a bus ticket.

I was up at 4:30 in the morning to get my 6am bus to Nairobi. I was on that bus for 14 hours. Surprisingly, it was the fastest day I have had in Africa. It was two in the afternoon before I ever even looked at my watch I was so busy looking out the window. There aren’t actually too many exciting things to report on that front, but the border crossing will be a post onto itself.