Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi

(Originally published December 2010)

I arrived in Dar Es Salaam on Wednesday 15th December. The LAM flight was really good on a new Embraer 190 jet with a cabin temperature of 15 degrees which i actually enjoyed! I headed straight to the hotel and caught up on emails and even calls as connection speeds in Dar are pretty fast… And enjoyed a few Kilimanjaro beers.

Good old Kili :o)

The next day i did a little touring, although Dar us pretty ugly and uninteresting. Visited the National museum, which is more of a concrete shack than anything else, took a short walk on the ‘waterfront’ and then headed into the sheltered a/c atmosphere of the Kilimanjaro Kempinski hotel for a drink as it was unbearably hot in the midday sun!

I had wanted to go to Mombasa and then get the night train to Nairobi on the famous Uganda railway that cost the British a whooping £5m to build in 1910 and never recouped the investment. Interesting (and somewhat gruesome) trivia fact us that over 2000 workers were killed in the Tsavo area during the construction… Eaten by lions! Schedules simply didn’t work out (the train only runs 3 times a week and buses travel during the day often arriving late) as I wanted to be in Nairobi on Saturday. So I got a direct bus from Dar to Nairobi via Arusha. A long 15 hours and some crazy (and I mean insane!) driving later I made it (in one piece, phew!) to ‘Nairobbery’. I also got a glimpse of the top of Kilimanjaro at sunset which was a nice bonus!

On the Saturday morning i headed to the National museum (excellent display on the origin of mankind with some world famous fossils) and then into central Nairobi and had lunch at the thorn tree cafe at the New Stanley hotel. I walked back to the hotel via the fair in the park (included music, fairground and food) mid afternoon and met up with the guys and crew who had continued up from Livingstone and just arrived in Nairobi. We had several beers by the pool as we caught up. That evening we headed to the famous Carnivores restaurant and indulged in the meat buffet. Having heard so much about the place I was a little disappointed as I didn’t find the meat particularly good and they had no kudu or springbok (or similar)… Meats I’ve had so far and I expected there too at least. That aside we had a good laugh!

Sunday was spent relaxing by the pool and in the evening i met up with a new group for the next week through the Kenyan highlands and the Masai Mara before heading south to Tanzania.