THE TRAVEL BUG IS BACK ON THE ROAD – KENYAN SAFARI TIME

The travel bug gets a small boost today with my Intrepid Kenya Wildlife Safari starting today.  I’ve been looking forward to this trip for quite a while.  The main draw card was the annual Great Migration of millions of animals from the Masai Mara to the Serengeti, but I also see this week away back on an overland truck as a pre-warm up/test run for my 10 week West Africa trip next month.  I also am looking forward to making some new friends and generally seeing more of my adoptive country and what it has to offer.  I am lucky that I know about Intrepid from my travel agent days and also having travelled with them on several previous tours all over the world.  It was this company I used for my 8 week African overland trip back in 2011 and they were amazing, so I have good faith I will have a great guide, driver, cook and amazing group for this trip (touchwood).

So with me travelling again it was time to dust off the monster, and for those of you who haven’t read previous travel blogs, the monster is my backpack.  It is truly remarkable just how much ‘stuff’ can fit into a 60L backpack and when I have it full, to the extent that I can’t possibly fit another thing in there, it looks like, well a monster of a backpack.  It doesn’t help that it is one of the wider packs, rather than the proper trekking packs that are longer and I think that is also what makes it look bigger.  I have had so many comments from strangers in my travels when I have the ‘monster’ on my back that I think it does look a lot bigger than what it actually is.  Either way, it was time to pack and since I was living here and not travelling it took the pressure off the weight of the back as I didn’t have to worry about checking it in as such, but I felt a little bit of pressure that I am from Nairobi and only doing the weeks trip, that I shouldn’t have as much stuff as everyone else.  It is crazy though, generally whether you go for a week or 10 weeks you have the same stuff and what I was carrying for this week, I would be taking exactly the same bags to West Africa for the 2 months-which is my case in point.  The last time I travelled with a sleeping bag, I had bought one of the micro sleeping bags when I was in London and at the time I was going for size, as I was space poor at the time, and the size of the bag was as big as a small football.  It was left in South America after doing me proud for around 8 months of camping and felt it was a little preloved and I could buy a new one if I needed.  Well I do need one for this trip and also the next one, so while I was in London I visited Argos, which is like a wholesale shop of goods that you buy from a catalogue.  I paid 10 quid for an ‘oversized’ sleeping bag thinking that it would be more comfy, I would fit into it and it could also work as a big fluffy blanket.  The downside was it is of the big variety, so a little cumbersome, but I figured it was not an issue for this trip and I am on direct flights into Ghana and out of Senegal and figured if I don’t check it with my bag I would be happy to carry it as hand luggage.  It will be a good test run to see if it will keep me warm, after all I only paid 10 quid!!

Today is day one of the tour aka an arrival day, so for me this just entails a 30 minute drive into town for my ‘arrival’.  I thought about asking for a discount and taking off the first night’s accommodation, but I didn’t want to miss the pre departure meeting they have on the arrival day, and what I would save on the night’s accommodation it would cost me that same amount to travel in and back home again just for the meeting by taxi.  So it was best I took the night’s accommodation at the hotel in the city to which I live.  Taking into account that check-in wouldn’t be until the afternoon, I got Steve to pick me up at 3pm and then I could just have some down time at the hotel.  They were using exactly the same hotel that I stayed in 2 years ago and knew they had a pool and restaurant and I had a plan of reading a book by the pool, a little luxury I can’t do at home but unfortunately the weather was crap, actually it was really cold when I woke up and would have to think of something else to do when I got to the hotel-you always seem to have to have a plan B in Kenya.  I arrived just after 3.30pm and headed straight to reception to check-in.  The receptionist at first couldn’t find my name but it was a little re-assuring that she said she had seen it somewhere….after waiting 10 minutes I was ‘found’, passport copied and key given to me.  I asked if my roomie was here yet, the answer was no, and I also asked how many people were on my trip and I was told 12.  That is a PERFECT group size and with a bounce in my step I headed to the room to offload my gear.  I had bought my travel laptop with me and I had run out of time to really before-hand to go through what I had on there and to make sure it was working properly, so I used this time to realise that I had no disc space left and tried to tidy up my desktop and make some room.  I also tried to remove my iTunes library but for some reason there was an issue doing this, so I will have to make sure I look into this before my big trip and hope that it won’t cause too many problems for me to upload photos and with some luck write some blogs. 

My roomie, Anne, arrived about 40 minutes after me and straight up I just knew that we were going to get along just fine.  It is a funny thing, first impressions, and the conversations you have with people that you just meet and I think 90% of the time, my first impression generally turns out to be right and I was glad that I had at least one good person on the trip if the other 10 people were to turn out to be duds.  One thing I have learnt after all the group travelling I have done is that 90% of the group are good people with a common interest and travel philosophy and then with the other 10% you wonder why these people even bother to leave home or part of the 10% there is always a quirky person or someone who is a little strange.  Either way, if I was unlucky enough to get a whole group of quirky people, at least I still had Anne.  Yes things were coming along just fine and we just chatted and watched Kenyan local TV until 6pm when it was time to go downstairs for the pre departure meeting.

I knew where the information board was to direct us to the right meeting and when we got there, there were also 5 other trips also having meetings.  3 of them were Intrepid tours, a Dragoman tour and a company I hadn’t heard of before.  It was a little confusing as we were asked to meet at the green chairs, to which nobody could find where the green chairs were.  There were a lot of ‘Intrepid’ people walking around trying to find the right meeting and everyone was asking everyone what tours they were doing.  Anne and I went to the biggest room and figured we would just wait until an Intrepid person would show up and then if we were at the wrong meeting we would be sent in the right direction.  We waited for around 10 minutes when some other people came in and told us that the Kenyan Wildlife was meeting in the annex off the bar, so we collected out stuff and made our way there to find all but 2 of our group already sitting there waiting and we weren’t the last to arrive, which is always a good thing and then the meeting started.  Dan was out guide for the week and there was a little confusion still on what the name of the tour was as it happens that my tour is a split tour that does my week in Kenya and then it heads into the Serengeti to complete another week in Tanzania.  It seemed that the 8 people going onto the second week didn’t know that it was a split trip and I have to say I am not a big fan of them, but at least it didn’t affect my week.  So the trip was discussed in more detail, our local payment was paid and out insurance, next of kin and emails were loaded into Dan’s laptop that was passed around the group.  I had to smile during the meeting as Dan used some terminology that GG (MY other Africa   guide) used-and it just made me smile like an idiot.  PFT was the big one, which stands for Plan For Tomorrow (which is an awesome idea) and also the saying, like any overland trip ‘You get out of your trip what you put into it” and it really is such a true statement.  With my first impression kicking in on the group dynamic and for me to make a call, it seems like we have a mixed group, and I think I will hold my final first impression for a day as it seems a little mixed and I am not sure what to make of my new group just yet. 

After the meeting it was just after 7pm and Anne and I decided to just eat in at the hotel’s restaurant with Nicola and Linda joining us, which was nice to get to know everybody a little more and its always interesting to know people’s stories and how they came to be on an African tour.  The food at the Kivi Milimani is not the greatest, but then it is not that expensive and after the meal and 2 beers, we retired to our rooms as we had a 6am wakeup for a 6.30am breakfast and a 7.30am departure. 

There are a lot of memories flooding back of my last time here at the hotel.  On my round world odyssey I did a total of 24 tours and my 8 week African overland trip was one of the best, if not the BEST tour and group that I had over that 2 year period.  I am trying to keep in check the feelings that are flooding back as I don’t want to set the bar too high for this tour as I don’t want to be firstly disappointed after having an awesome group the first time (to which I have made lifelong friends) and I also don’t want to be the ‘know it all’ of the trip after having done an African overland trip already with Intrepid even if it is only a week long but it feels GREAT to be back all the same, with my ‘other’ African crew not far from my mind.