East African Adventures part 1

It has been a while since my last post - things have been crazy busy! We have reached the end of the first year with my project and, as I am responsible for putting all our year end reports together, I have had a lot of work to do. 

I am now back in Nigeria after a trip to Kenya and Tanzania. For the first week in Nairobi I was attending a workshop, sort of related to my project but focusing on our future approach to secure livelihoods for the whole organisation. The hotel was lovely, it was great to meet people I have been working with remotely, and it was nice to be a participant in something rather than one of the organisers / presenters. We didn't get much 'down time' or time outside of the hotel, but I did get to have a couple of nice meals out in the city, and I went to a Masai Market on the final day. A highlight of one of the evening meals was seeing President Kenyatta at the restaurant! And a highlight of the hotel was that they had a gym! A real life gym with modern exercise equipment! I was very excited and managed to go three times in 6 days - which helped balance the effects of the hotel buffet table.

CHEESE! (Thankful for the gym!)

Too busy to try the pool unfortunately

Finally got some Ethiopian food!

Sampling the local beer

Out for nyama choma (grilled meat)

On Saturday Ken and I were travelling to Tanzania, so we left the hotel towards the airport earlier than planned and called into a hotel that had been recommended. It was a new hotel which had a nice restaurant looking out over a part of the national park, and sometimes animals can be spotted (Zebras, giraffes etc). We didn't see anything but birds and a deer, but we had a glass of wine and a nice sandwich. 

Check out the arrowroot crisp (the speckled one) - I wasn't a fan of boiled
arrowroot but the deep-fried crisp version was quite nice!

On arrival at the airport at 4pm we found that we had been bumped from our 7pm flight on to the 11pm flight which was a real pain. Not only did it mean hours of airport time, it meant that we would land in Dar Es Salaam at 1am and then have to be back at the airport for 4am for our next flight - not really enough time to get to the hotel and have any decent rest. He offered us refreshment vouchers but I was in no mood for a cheese sandwich and bottle of water! I had the bright idea instead to ask if there was a lounge we could wait in, and he obliged by putting us in the business class lounge. We had wifi, comfy seats, and free access to food, coffee, and a lot of alcohol! I settled in to a bottle of Gordon's gin, and my colleague hit the red wine, and the time just flew by! 

 
 

As predicted, we were in for a pretty rough night once we landed in Dar. I had tried to contact the hotel to warn of our late arrival with no luck. So we went to the hotel anyway, which turned out to be in a terrible part of town, only to find that they had no record of our booking or pre-payment. So we headed to a little motel near the airport, had less than two hours sleep and then headed back to get our little flight up to north west Tanzania. It was a gruelling journey, but the time in Tanzania was well worth it....