Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Come On And Safari With Me

(Editor's note: First blog post from Kenya and you are using a Beach Boys lyric for the title?  Writer: I know, isn't it grand?).

Carol, Julia, and I had done a three day safari in Sabi Sabi, South Africa in 2014.  It was fabulous, but it also stoked my interest in doing a longer safari trip in East Africa; the hotspots of safaris being Kenya and Tanzania.

So, with our new friends from our Machu Picchu/Galapagos trip, Sanjiv and Meena Bansal, we planned a trip through one of our travel companies, Inspirato.  (Bolger Co. does a LOT of the travel planning for Bolger trips, but Africa is a bit out of our league.)

Carol and I flew to Paris and then to Nairobi.  We pre-booked a cab to take us to our hotel.  Well, as my friend John Passacantando would say, "it's not an adventure until the first thing goes wrong."  We got that out of the way early, as the company coordinating our travel forgot to pick us up.  

So there we were, standing at the chaotic Nairobi airport, without a clue of what to do.  We were tired, grumpy, and a bit overwhelmed after a lengthy wait at immigration.  Given that it was fast approaching midnight, and we had a 10am flight the next morning, things were looking grim.  

One gentleman who was involved in the cab stand in some fashion helped us, and things got better when we were joined by a second fellow.  Their patience was wonderful, and eventually it got sorted out.  The car/driver company had another car waiting at the airport, so they stuck us in that car and called another van for the other couple.

We were pretty exhausted by the we got to the hotel close to 1:00 am.  My mood wasn't improved when I checked the score of the Cardinals-Giants game.  Everything got better after that -- the Giants came back and won the game, and we got to the safari camp in a relatively painless way.

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