Fools Gold

We arrived in Kenya after spending a full night in the airport in Doha, Qatar. We had no complaints about spreading out on the floor and chairs among all the Hajj travellers. Qatar Airways was supposed to put us up in a hotel but every time we went to the counter to ask they just kept giving us food vouchers. So we ate very well all night.

We weren't sure if our host would be at the Jomo Kenyatta airport even though they told us we would be collected when we arrived. We've been travelling a while now so negotiating a good taxi price to town was relatively easy. We made our way to the hostel and called our host from a payphone. Through the static of heavy down pouring rain we were told we would be picked up the next day after lunch.

The next day we decided to go to the city center before heading to western Kenya. Getting to Nairobi center was just a short trip in a very crowded matatu. The matatu is a small van like bus with 3 rows of seats. You kind of have to flag them down, then hop in before they pick up speed. I banged my head twice and put a contusion on my knee trying to get it right. Suprisingly they play extremely loud uncensored music. I kept looking at the lady next to me to see her reaction to some of the lyrics but she never moved. Very quickly we learned this was just Nairobi matatu style.

Our host did meet us but it was after numerous failed attempts to reach him. The time was 6 pm when he and his brother walked up to the hostel. Somehow it turned out that we needed to take a taxi with them to the brothers house in one of the city slums and without really understanding the arrangement we ended up paying for all of us to go there. So much for being collected.

We spent the next day trying to cash in a gold coin so our host could buy some things for his school. We followed him to numerous jewellers while collecting more people in our party on the way. We were excited to be in Nairobi but as the day wore on we weren't really sure what was going on. On the quest to exchange the gold we picked up a female pastor, a young girl claiming to be the pastors daughter, a strange man eating lunch with our host when the young girl reunited us with our host and several building security guards. Somehow all of these people were involved in the exchange of this gold.

After hours of tireless trekking our host walks us through some back alley streets without saying a word until we asked and were told we're going to book our bus tickets. He also said he didn't have enough money to get back home so he was sending us by ourselves. Turns out the coin was gold plated and he would have to find his fare the next day. Well, this meant we would be arriving in a small rural town at 4 oclock in the morning, by ourselves, with no idea of where to go and not knowing if someone would meet us. No way! We could have done that 2 days ago and had much more money in our pockets. At this point we had zero Kenyan shilling because our host used it all.

We did a bit more walking around and he miraculously got his fare from some street vending man so we booked his bus ticket and boarded the Akamba bus for Rongo that night.

Joronda