Heading out to Kenya… African Journey Pt. 1
During the summer of 2006, due to my beautiful girlfriend working in a hospital in Nairobi, I had the chance to head out to East Africa when she was finished working so we could go on safari and do some travelling around in the region.
The trip to Kenya started in reality about 6 weeks before the flight. Sorting out flights was one thing - expensive - but the next obligation with a trip to East Africa was the injections. Yellow fever, Hepatitis A, Diphtheria, and Tetanus - (insert more killer diseases here… 
). And these didn’t come cheap! In fairness I could have left one or two out but because we wanted to do some other travelling, so we needed some to prove we were immune before we travelled back into Kenya from any other country in East Africa. I got them at a new GP just down the road from where I work, which had just opened and so I was able to get them without making an appointment. I rang ahead to check if they had the stuff in stock and they said they did so off I went after work to get injected with some diseases… In off the street and back out again - immune to everything
So a couple of weeks later - there I am standing in Dublin Airport at 8AM. Check-in goes smoothly if a little long, but not long enough to bother me. Still enough time to get to my flight to Heathrow. It was an AerLingus flight which is great because the service and everything is really very good. I’ll fly AerLingus every single chance I get, rather that fly cheaply with a Ryanair type airline. So arrived in London and because I’d allowed a bit of time just in case for my connecting flight I walked around the airport without being in a hurry. Bought a few essentials for the journey - watch, sun glasses, etc. (You’d think that I would have remembered these…)
One look at the departures board though and things aren’t looking so good any more. They’ve changed the gate that my plane leaves for and its going to be delayed by 4 hours!! This is a bit of a pickle as I’ve got people collecting me in Nairobi… but what can I do? And without being able to get in touch I resigned myself to the situation, no point complaining as there’s little that can be changed. So I bought a few magazines, and set out to find as comfortable a seat as I could manage. But anyone whose spent any time in an airport knows that that’s asking a lot. Actually its impossible. So after about 15 minutes trying every different type of seat I could find I gave up and started to browse the shops again. Some twice. In the end I’m pretty sure I was considered a security risk, and my description was being circulated by security staff!
So after a couple of hours I headed down to the gate. A good long walk down to my British Airways flight at gate 25. Looking around - I’m amazed by the number of Indian people who are waiting to board the plane. Only about a dozen or so Africans. Now I know the British used Indian slaves to build the railways in East Africa, but really I don’t know anything about the countries that I’m going to fly to right now. This is possibly the worst prepared I’ve ever been heading out to a foreign country.
Boarding the plane some time later, I’m one of the first on the plane. But because I really bad at reading seat numbers on planes I sit in the wrong row. But so did the two girls that sat next to me… So when the three people came looking for their own seats they said they’d sit in our seats. No big deal. A good laugh was had by all and it looked good for the journey as everyone was jovial about the situation.
One of the other realizations that came with this trip was that people who travel on their own are either really friendly or crazy. The two girls who sat next to me were very friendly. There was some good natured banter which is always good on a flight that is going to take 9 hours. We all tell each other our names but because of the noise I hear neither or them… So like an idiot for the rest of the flight I’m too embarrassed to ask them their names. They were both solo travelers but for different reasons - One was English and on a gap year from college and heading out to teach in a school and the other was an American girl from one of the southern states who was heading out to meet her mother. So I settled down for the flight with a couple of books and some in-flight movies and a few good chats about Africa and home.
Part 2 is here for anyone who wants it…
