Thursday 25 Aug
Last day, flight home at 23:10, so we had a good part of the day to relax. Our transfer to Mombasa airport was going to be at 3pm for the internal flight back to Nairobi. While we were still eating lunch we were told our driver had arrived and was saying that there were massive queues at the ferry crossing so we needed to go… NOW!
So we finished lunch, did a bit of shopping, got freshened up and changed, and then went. Okay so maybe that was a bit blasé. But how bad could it be? We were already allowing 3 hours for a 1.5 hour journey!
Quite bad, actually. “Queue” is too neat a word for the solid mass of cars, trucks, minivans and hand-carts filling the road leading down to the ferry. Our heroic driver cooly moved into a police-only lane and was duly stopped by the police. But they seemed happy to receive a couple of discretely folded notes and miraculously we were now near the front of the queue/scrum! I’m astonished that with all the vehicles and pedestrians jostling everyone, no-one seemed to get bumped or mashed.
On the other side of the creek we rolled off the ferry, now with plenty of time, so our taxi driver kindly pulled over and went off to find our favourite cashew nut vendor so we could buy another two boxes of cashews (we had bought one box on the way from Watamu to Diana four days ago). And then it was off to the airport. Our driver basically got an enormous tip.
As an aside, this post is scattered with pictures of one of my favourite things to spot on the roads in Kenya: the saccos. These are local buses, basically converted minivans with a dozen people squashed into them. They follow the universal model of local buses around the world, being driven by fearless young men with a low life expectancy whose feet are made of lead and glued to the accelerator pedals. But in Kenya they just have the best, loudest and most mad paint-jobs I’ve ever seen!
And so we end our trip in Nairobi airport, choking down an absolutely vile beef burger because for some reason BA need to close the check-in gate more than an hour before the flight actually departs. There were no less than three X-ray security checks: once to get in the airport building, once to get through to the departure gates, and once to get into the BA departure gate. I must admit, I’ve been to some dubious countries before, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen security taken as seriously as Kenya.
Related Images: