Africa | The Bucket Lust

After a few hours of driving, we had reached the Tanzanian border. Already a new currency to figure out (and I still hadn’t figured out the Kenyan conversion yet). We were swarmed at the border by hoards of women selling beaded jewelry. They wore traditional dress, with long colourful capes, shaved heads and a plethora of piercings in their ears and nose. They followed us from Kenya to Tanzania trying desperately to get a dollar from us Mzungus. Other than that, the border was quick and painless and we hopped back in the truck.
Tanzania apparently has 117 different tribes within its borders. As you drive by the small villages and camps it’s amazing to see the women all decked out in Masai outfits, children slung in a blanket on their back and a 10 litre pail of water balancing on their heads. It seems like all the women carry things this way: bundles of sticks, buckets, or piles of goods wrapped in blankets. And yet their stroll is graceful and effortless… I have no idea how. And yet, city life in Tanzania seems to be an interesting mix between traditional and western culture; while one person herds goats along in a brightly-woven, caped outfit, the next person bikes along wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
Before long, we arrived at the Meserani Snake Park. This was to be our campsite for the evening. We struggled to set up our tent (which we have now mastered only a few short days later) unpacked our sleeping mats, and trucked off to the snake park.
The snake park was like a small zoo for snakes and crocs and turtles. Kelsi and I had an awesome time checking out the cobras and the scaly alligators for a good 45 minutes or so. We were only slightly put off when we saw a bunch of fuzzy baby ducklings huddled in the corner of one snake cage just waiting to be eaten. Ahh the sad facts of life! At the end of it all we got to hold a little snake of some sort and then we celebrated our bravery with a beer at the bar (which was conveniently attached to the park).
It was an early night for us after dinner as we had to be up early the next morning to make it to Karatu: our final campsite before our 3-day Ngorongoro Crater excursion.
In the morning, we set out to a nearby city to grab all the necessities for the Serengeti trek. Money, last minute snacks and an Internet cafe to book our accommodation for Zanzibar. We had an hour and a half to explore the place… I got nothing accomplished. After searching the streets for an ATM that was in service, we finally found a working bank and tried our luck. The MasterCard system is rare here in Africa, where most of the banks work through Visa (keep that in mind if you find yourself over here). Everything seemed to be going well at this ATM that we had found, until my card refused to pop out. I tried with some tweezers to grab it, when all of a sudden the machine shut off and sucked in my card. Great. So into the bank I went.
The bank was full of people lined up here and there. There wasn’t a line in the place shorter than 15 people. After asking some staff, and being placed in a number of lineups, I was finally moved to the end of a long queue at the back of the bank that moved slower than a glacier. Kelsi came to find me 45 minutes later where I had moved up a measly THREE people. No one was very helpful, and no one seemed particularly concerned with moving people along quickly. But a long story short, a little over an hour I was sent on my way with my bank card, no money, and told to use another bank’s ATM. The other ATM’s in the city believed I had already reached my daily withdrawal limit, and so, I was stuck borrowing the last bit of Kelsi’s cash to make it through the following three days.
After lunch back at the camp, we packed up and drove the two and a half hours to our new campsite in Karatu.
Karatu is only a short 20 minutes to the crater. We all had another early night so we could be up before dawn to start the day!

Alright, although my last entry was posted just last week, I actually finished my South America trip 8 months ago. Adam and I both made it home safely to our respective cities and tried to settle back into the real world. 5 days later I was already itching to get back on the road. So I did what any normal, travel addicted person would do and called up my friend Kelsi in New Zealand…
“Wanna go to Africa and India with me?”
Zero hesitation “Yup. When?”
This is one of the many reasons why Kelsi and I got along so well in the three short months we knew each other; we are both always down for an adventure.
So 8 months later, after not seeing each other in almost exactly a year, we reunited in a campsite called Acacia about a half hour outside of Nairobi. We were about to begin another 4 month adventure with 11 countries, 2 continents, and infinite amounts of laughter and fun! We went to bed that night listening to the sounds of lions roaring in the national park across the street… Life is sweet!
We spent 2 full days in Nairobi before heading out on a tour southbound. The first morning we set out on a city tour with Edwin. All the staff at Acacia camp are incredible; they are helpful and friendly and will stick to you like glue anywhere off the camp grounds just to make sure you are safe! Edwin was our guide for the day and he was a great wealth of information about the city and local customs.
We started by heading to a lookout point in the business district. We climbed to the rooftop of a huge building in the center of the city. To our excitement, the roof had a helicopter landing pad that we got to stand on for a perfect 360 degree view of the stunning landscape!

The city suburbs, spreading primarily East, are divided mainly by ethnicity and religion. This area of Kenya has a number of cultures all trying to live symbiotically. Unfortunately, from talking to locals, it seems like identifying Kenyans as “Kenyans” and not as “Arabs” or “Masai” or “Christians” is still a work in progress.
As we continued our city tour, Edwin explained that crime in the city had depleted rapidly after a new police tactic came into play. “Don’t worry about anyone stealing your purse and running off with it,” he said “if that happens, just drop to the ground! There is a plain clothed police officer on every street corner in Nairobi that has the right to shoot anyone who robs another person!” Wow… Not sure of that made me feel any safer, but apparently it’s an incredibly effective system for deterring thieves.
More fun facts we picked up that day were a few useful Swahili phrases. “Hello” is “Jambo”, “What’s up” is “Mambo”, a white person is “Muzungu” and one of our favourites is “thank you very much” which is “Asante Sana”… For those of you that have seen the Lion King this may be familiar. “Asante Sana, squashed banana!” Actually, the Lion King is more useful for Swahili words than I would have thought. “Simba” means Lion, and “hakuna matata” ACTUALLY means “no worries”. When our waiter at dinner later asked us if we needed anything and we said no, he replied with “hakuna matata”. We laughed thinking he was joking, but that is honestly a well used phrase here in Kenya.
On our way back to the camp ground, we asked to drive by the slum area of Nairobi. Nairobi’s slum is the second largest in Africa, housing over 600 000 people! (That’s twice the size of South America’s Rohcina favela in Rio ). The houses sprawled across the area: brown, rusted and made of makeshift scrap material. We saw some kids swimming in a large brown puddle on the side of the road, right in the middle of a construction zone. They looked like they were having a blast, but it was a sad fact to see such standards of living.
For dinner that night we went to this highly recommended restaurant called “Carnivore”. Since Kelsi and I are both essentially carnivores ourselves, we figured we’d fit right in! The premise behind carnivore is “all you can eat meat”. Each table is given a little flag; when you can no longer eat any more, you have to “surrender” your flag by knocking it over. Challenge accepted!
Everyone is given starters with their meal. Spinach soup, bread and butter, small corn on the cob chunks and a delicious salad with all the accoutrement you could need. Then comes the meat… Each with a different spice or sauce to go with it. The usual beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, pork ribs etc. And then the slightly more unusual crocodile, ostrich and ox balls. We obviously tried it all, and everything was incredible! Waiters came around with large skewers and sliced off chunks of each meat to put on our sizzling hot, cast iron plates. We ate and ate, and ate some more. For about 2 hours the two of us sat there trying to finish all the protein on our plates. Finally, when we felt like we were going to explode, and when both of us could no longer hold a conversation because of our meat coma, we surrendered our flag.
… Then came dessert. I’m amazed we got through it to be honest. When our driver came to get us three hours after dropping us off, we were ready for bed. We skipped out on any kind of socializing at the bar (because I think a beer would have killed me) and I passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow.
The next day we failed at any and all cultural experiences. We tried to catch a local soccer match, but no one could figure out when and where the teams were playing. So we spent most of the day at the camp’s pub meeting all the other travelers who were trickling into the hostel to start or finish their tours.
At 5:00 that evening we had a pre-tour meeting. There were 22 of us on the trip, with 5 more joining us a few days down the road. Kelsi and I are on a full, 42 day excursion to Cape Town, but most everyone else drops off at different points along the way. We got the details of the trip from our guide Chris, and then were sent back to the bar to get to know everyone!
The next morning, after a night out at the local nightclub, we all hauled our exhausted bodies into our respective tour groups and hit the road. We grabbed some snacks, water and toilet paper for the road and set out for the Tanzanian border. Day 1 of our 42 day excursion had begun!