resting in Nairobi

Just completing three weeks of 'down time' in this up-and-down life I lead!  That is, time to edit and back-up the photos from my last trip, to catch up with emails, as well as some serious admin related to the next few months.  So now I have my visas for Nigeria and for Equatorial Guinea (with accommodation and airport transfers) and a one-year multi-entry visa for India.  All of these things take quite a lot of work - filling in forms, uploading photos and screenshots of flights and accommodation bookings, visiting cyber cafes to print copies of visas and flight tickets (needed for Nigeria) ... but that also helps me to 'balance the budget', spending very little following my expensive trip around the Indian Ocean.  My bed in the hostel dorm here in Nairobi is not as cheap as in some countries (around US$10 a night), but that does include a  fairly good breakfast, and of course there are no other bills to pay as there would be if I were at home living a regular life (electricity, gas, water, council tax, internet, etc).  I also remind myself sometimes that I never have to change bedsheets, wash the kitchen floor, etc!

I did spend some time chatting to fellow travellers staying at the hostel, and had a couple of outings.  I walked to, and around (and back from) the Karura forest - 28km walked and blisters on one foot by the end of it - which was a great escape from the traffic noise of the city around it.  Amazing that a natural area of trees, wetland, streams and waterfalls could survive and be so well-maintained in the middle of a crowded city, but I was reading that only a couple of decades ago it was a no-go area, with on average one dead body found there every two weeks, but then in 2009 it was fenced off and cleaned up, and now gets some 20,000 visitors a month.  It's large and so doesn't feel crowded at all - I saw a few birds, many butterflies, a few small groups of Sykes monkeys, and even a small duiker in the forest, which disappeared into the undergrowth before I could get a photo.  Apparently there are also civets, genets and honey badgers there, but these are rarely seen (the forest is closed at night).

I also took a two-hour tour of the famous slum, Kibera.  With no paved roads or paths, no water or sewage system (people pay to use toilets and washing facilities that have been set up at various points but the place is still full of sewage), it holds somewhere between 250,000 and 1 million inhabitants depending on who you believe.  My guide walked me around the muddy paths, into one 'house', and showed me a small school (one classroom), and provided some explanations as to what life was like there.  Many single parent families, much prostitution, high HIV rates ... generally a very sad and difficult place to live.  Probably not a place that an obvious foreigner could wander round alone, but my guide explained that people knew that the money I paid him for the tour (only US$12) would be split 50/50 between him and some community projects.  I saw one of the projects, where huge vats of food were being prepared for children, the women receiving some of my money, but doing the work for free when there were no tourists.   It was very sad to see such poverty.

I'm hoping that next week, in Lagos, I will be able to visit Makoko slum - and compare the two.

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