Overnight in Nairobi

I'm actually writing this on Wednesday morning, because the internet, despite telling me that it had excellent connectivity, was acting up. Such is life.

Yesterday I packed up my belongings (much easier to do when already traveling; you just put everything you own back into the bag. It's much more difficult when packing to leave for travels) and carried my bags (backpack plus duffel) to the hospital, where I met Jeremy, the clinical officer who usually does the scheduling and coordinating with the visiting students and residents. He was at a conference in Switzerland (I know, he has a difficult life, too) for the last two weeks, so that's why he wasn't here. We went through the standard introductions and took a look at the schedule I had and discussed what touristy things I've done and what I still need to do. I'm still hoping to do some scuba diving at some point, so I hope we'll be able to fit that in.

Following that, it was a drive over to the Malindi airport, and when I say "airport", I'm being fairly generous. It wasn't quite the one room shack of the airports in the bush in Papua New Guinea, but it wasn't exactly DCA, either. There were two ticket stands/check in areas, one for each airline that operated out of there (Fly540, which I flew, and another one that I think is mostly for safaris). When the Fly540 agent came up, he weighed my bag and then hand wrote my boarding pass. To go through security, I had an agent go through my bags by hand, because the x-ray machine was broken. Then it was unassigned seating on the airplane, and we were off to Nairobi.

Traffic in Nairobi after being picked up was vaguely reminiscent of traffic in DC. It was about eight miles from the airport to the hotel, and took over an hour and a half to make the trip. Apparently, that's not normal; the lights were out in the traffic circles and the cops had to direct traffic by hand, which always takes longer. I was going to have dinner with the executive officer of the lab while I was here, but because of the traffic, we decided to reschedule for the weekend, when I'm back from Kisumu.

After a run on the treadmill this morning (a real treadmill... I was excited), I had breakfast and am now biding my time until I get picked up to be taken back to the airport for my flight to Kisumu. COL Coldren, my advisor during my MTM&H, was supposed to meet me here last night, but flight delays in Baltimore bumped his schedule back a full day. So I'm on my own for my first evening and morning in Kisumu, and then we'll meet up tomorrow morning when he flies in.

I don't know what my internet situation will be in Kisumu, but I'll probably be writing entries anyway. It'll just be a question of if they get posted as I write them or after I return to Nairobi.