There’s a [now expired] urgent travel advisory on the U.S. State Dept. web site regarding Kenya. Seems that crime is totally out of control in Nairobi. So maybe I won’t even live long enough to worry about getting sick or taken hostage!

But there’s good news too. When I get to Cameroon, I’ll be the guest of my friend Rob at the U.S. Embassy. Rob looks after America’s business in the city of Douala. I’m sort of a guest of the Embassy. That is probably good, right?

And when I get back to Kenya then I’ll be the guest of my friend Iris at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy. She’s been there for about 35 years. Iris doesn’t have status as a diplomat but she sure has lots of experience with Africa’s ways.

I am in good hands in Africa! And as an added bonus, Iris has arranged a driver and a hotel for me during my overnight in Nairobi. Somebody is at the Nairobi airport holding a sign with my name. 

It’s an overnight flight to London so there won’t be anything to see. But London-Nairobi is an all-day flight. I’ll get to see Europe and the Sahara Desert from the air from my window seat! So I must try to sleep on the way to Heathrow.

Swiss Alps : January 17, 2007

Lightening doesn’t strike twice

My 747 is filled to the rafters with a very diverse set of passengers.

We flew over top of some unremarkable English and French clouds earlier but now we’re in the Alps. Oh! This view of the mountains is fantastic! And it comes complete with scattered picturesque mountain villages. At some point, these become the Italian Alps, which are just as good. Only I can’t help thinking that probably there ought to be more snow here in January. Global warming?

On out over the Mediterranean. There’s still too much cloud cover to fully appreciate the famous shoreline. Rome is a little ways off to our left. I’m looking right and we pass Malta. I sure do appreciate these GPS locater displays. How else would I know with confidence that I’m looking down at Libya? Sudan is next. Creepy country. By now the sun is setting and there isn’t really anything at all to see. But now I can say that I’ve sort of been to Sudan. Yikes!

The sunset is a fiery red in the direction of what my GPS display informs me are the Darfur Mountains. Hell on Earth is just a little ways over in that direction. 

[NOTE: Little did I know.. my diplomat friend gets posted next to Korea but then next after that he gets assigned to creepy Sudan! American civilians are not allowed to visit war-torn Sudan so this is as close as I’ll ever get.]

My hotel looks all right. It’s got a restaurant. The place is not at all scary, and not lavish either. It’s just exactly right. Before she takes my bags from the trunk, the driver hands me a large envelope with my name. Iris has left me something.

I notice that Pauline’s car has a cell phone number printed on the side, and I ask her if she’s got a card. No card. She’ll write it on my envelope. That works. And there is a room for me, which Iris has paid in advance. The driver takes note of my room number and we agree that she will be back for me at 5pm. All set.

While I’m filling in the registration card a very pretty girl in a frilly party dress strikes up a conversation with me. I can be so slow at times but I do catch on, even if a bit late, and then my registration card begins to demand my undivided attention. Finally, she leaves, but in doing so she sort of twirls so that her dress brushes my hand. I am much too involved with my hotel registration to look up.

Inside my room (alone) I dig out my converter plug – British to U.S. – and turn on my laptop. No Internet. I’m sure the hotel’s web site mentioned Internet. I call the desk and they tell me that it’s off for the night. “It will be turned on again at 8am.” There has been very little strangeness up to now so this wins the prize as the strangest Kenyan thing so far. Why in the world would they want the Internet to be shut off at night???

My package from Iris contains a personal welcome letter, a Globetrotter series guide to Kenya, a small book How to be a Kenyan, a magazine called TN – Travel News from East Africa, and a road map of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

I open my patio door, which faces the back. It’s about midnight here and I listen to peculiar jungle-ish noises. I’ll see about that in the morning. I make sure my patio door is shut tightly and locked.

In back of the hotel / restaurant is dense foliage. That’s where the birds are. It’s very nice. And right inside the city, too! There’s a bar here that looks out onto it all. This hotel is a very comfortable place.

On the way back to my room there is a lizard walking along the wall. Fine, just as long as there are no snakes!

I think I should probably just stay in the hotel all day and catch up on little bits of work, in between naps. I wish they would hurry up and turn on the Internet!!! And I’m expecting calls from both Iris and Rob. I feel like another nap now.

 

Grrr. Now I learn that I must come down to the office to plug in my laptop for Internet access. Better than nothing, I suppose. I pay 1/2 day to remain in the room until my ride to the airport so I figure I’ll nap. And read my new Kenya books! Iris calls during one of the naps. We have little to talk about because she’s already read my journal to this point!

She is down in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean today. She’s much closer to Somalia than me and all is quiet. I’m to be comforted knowing that the Somali Muslims are not causing very much trouble anyplace in Kenya and I am unlikely to be murdered on CNN. I’m not actually worried about that, just amused that my friends are fighting over how to divide my travel insurance payout when I’m dead.

Iris says she only wants to inherit this journal, which is fine. Iris also reports that there being an international conference going on this weekend in Nairobi, the police will have deployed extra undercover police. This causes the criminals to back off for a few days and so I will probably make it out of the country safely.

And Iris urges me to get to the airport in plenty of time because Kenya Airways is notorious for deliberately overbooking. Nairobi traffic at 5pm is likewise notorious and if I’m late then I’ll be out of luck.

So, first I call Pauline. The operator must place this call for me so I do it from the lobby. I ask her to come at 4:30 instead of 5:00 and she agrees …I’m pretty sure. It’s difficult to understand her clearly. Then I call the airline and they tell me I need to be there not two hours early but three hours early. So now I need to call Pauline again. I ask the nice lady at the hotel lobby to please talk to her, figuring they’ll speak in Swahili or something and it will go more easily. But they speak English.

Only now they’re abruptly disconnected. The clerk says, “Pauline hung up on me! I wonder why she did that.” I laugh and say, “Well, it’s a cell phone. I think she was just cut off. This happens to me all the time in Las Vegas and I’m not surprised there, so I’m sure not surprised here.” Pauline calls back, and gets cut off again. The clerk insists, “She hung up again.” Whatever.

Maybe I’ll just take the hotel’s own taxi – but somebody needs to tell Pauline not to come in that case. She waited for me 45 minutes at the airport last night. I’d rather go with Pauline. Three hours early for a flight is just ridiculous.

At lunch I’m seated near a couple that’s in a room across the hall from me. He looks Dutch. She looks Kenyan. I imagine him to be a retired mercenary or hit-man on the run from Interpol, and she is his sex slave. Something rough about them both, and not quite right. And some exceptionally well-dressed Kenyan men – either businessmen or government officials; and probably corrupt in either case. Maybe this is an underworld hangout …or maybe I’m just influenced by the Jeffrey Archer novel I’m reading at lunch.

I end up taking a hotel cab to the airport, after my hotel clerk finally is successfully able to speak to Pauline. I notice there are no stoplights, and barely any discernable order to the movement of vehicles and pedestrians. Seems to me that stoplights would help matters but my driver seems to think this is fine the way it is. He points out the national capitol building on our left and the very nice Uhuru Park on our right. He tells me that ‘uhuru’ means ‘freedom’ in Swahili.

At the airport, Kenya Airways annoys me further by requiring me to check both my suitcase and my duffle bag. Up to now, I at least had a few things in the duffle bag in case of any mishap (lost or stolen luggage). Now I’ve got nothing but my laptop.

I can’t find a sign displaying gate assignments so about an hour before the flight I ask at the Kenya Airways counter for my departure gate. Gate 4. At Gate 4 they’re actually leaving to Zanzibar and Dar Es Salaam and I’m told that I belong at Gate 9. At Gate 9 I need to do the whole metal detector thing in order to enter the waiting area. I guess they’re not very confident about being able to secure the airport as a whole so they do each set of passengers as they board.

Only as soon as I’m inside secure waiting area, they announce that the flight will now depart Gate 4 after all. Sigh. When I go back to Las Vegas, maybe I should wear metal-free slippers, and do without my belt, and give away all my coins to beggars. I’m getting tired of dealing with metal detectors.

 

As I settle into my seat on the plane I notice the luggage handlers are carefully noting the number on every single bag as it rolls up into the plane. Seems that Nairobi Airport is especially careful and I appreciate that! The flight to Douala stops 40 minutes in Yaoundé, Cameroon, the capital; and is otherwise uneventful. It’s a night flight and I’m asleep most of the way. Only interesting thing is they say everything in both English and Swahili. And it’s disturbs me they keep referring to the pilot as Captain Crunchy.

Douala, Cameroon : January 19, 2007

First in Line VIP

I normally don’t stand up until the movement of traffic in the aisle has allowed me to actually begin to move but I realize this is an exceptional situation because I’m in the very front of the economy class and the business class in front is near empty and most of these people are not getting off here. So I can be first!

Leading all the other passengers, I walk down the ramp to the tarmac and I’ve already got a bad feeling. It’s dark and dingy and very un-airport-like. I’m directed to walk under an overhang and up some steps into a building that looks like a long-abandoned dilapidated warehouse which only days earlier has been restored to any semblance of usefulness. This place is an extraordinary mess! I wish I could take pictures but (1) somebody might think that I’m a terrorist plotting to blow it up, which is hilarious, and (2) besides the place is much too dark for picture-taking.

Unexpectedly, Rob has sent his regular driver for me. I’ve heard about him. Rob relies on him a lot. I forget his name but he’s holding a sign with my name printed on it. (And here, just by the way, I am the one and only passenger greeted by such a sign!) He takes my passport and goes to speak to the officers at the head of the passport control, and poof I’m special again and we are passed through to the (horrible looking) luggage area …where both my bags soon appear!!

Customs opens the larger of the two bags and looks inside for not quite one entire second and then we’re let outside into Cameroon. Bags are locked in the car and we go back. By this point I’m a little confused but it turns out Rob has arrived someplace else in the airport and we’re all going to meet up with the visa officer. Normally, you’re supposed to get your $100 Cameroonian visa before arrival into the country but it’s possible to get one issued at the airport under certain circumstances. Besides, the visa-issuing officer here turns out to be a friend of Rob. And Rob’s driver frequently greets officials here like they’re his best friends. Members of the U.S. Foreign Service are strictly forbidden to engage in bribery but there is no law against them being very, very friendly with the people who are in a position to make your job either easy or difficult. Everything goes easily and I get my visa stamped into my passport.

Rob takes me to his house, which is not very far. On the way, I notice that the highway is of surprisingly good quality. The house is in a wealthy neighborhood. Rob has told me that this is one of the most expensive cities in the world, for ‘ex-pats’ – Number 25 in the world. I don’t know if anybody understands the reason why it’s so expensive. Rob mentions how much the U.S. government pays annually to rent this house… but I’m reluctant to repeat the amount here. Douala is the commercial capital of the country and the largest city, and Rob is the only American Embassy official posted here.

As when I visited Rob in Haiti, there is a gate and a guard. He honks and the guard looks out and lets us in. The house is very big. and the backyard and pool are enormous. Rob has official parties here for a couple of hundred people at a time so it’s a good thing it’s big. My room is at the back. There are metal grates on all the windows and my bedroom door is of steel which I am advised to bolt shut at night. There is a mosquito net over my bed. Rob suggests that there is not really any reason to begin taking anti-malaria pills until after I get my first mosquito bite.

Traffic is better than usual, they tell me, and it hardly ever comes to a complete stop. There is a lot of commerce going on beside the road, and when traffic slows a lot of it spills out into the road, with young people waving all sorts of things available for sale. We buy some bags of nuts and some bananas. Both are excellent – tree ripened bananas are a lot better than those you get in an American grocery store (which are always picked green).

I’m horrified by the slabs of beef – or perhaps more likely Bush Meat – hanging in the open near the side of the road. Cameroonians seem to have very little appreciation for the problems caused by germs. Rob mentions that we’re passing an area that was recently hit by a bad outbreak of Cholera, with hundreds dead. And right away, there is a river. You mean there is cholera in that river right there? Yes. If not now, then recently.

[NOTE: Below, this will turn out to be my favorite photo from Cameroon – and on the very first day! Of course, that’s not counting anything to do with Angu Walters which turns out to be life-changing for us all. This dreamy photo captures something about Cameroon, that proverbial “1000 words”]