Travelling times fifty

Some people may wonder if we've had enough of travelling. Well, we do. It's one thing to travel from here to there. But in Kenya it's al a bit different. In the Netherlands when you don't have a car, you take a train for long distances. Since the Netherlands is small, you hardly have to sit for more than a few hours in the train (if there is no delay) and you have some room for your bags and legs to move. In Kenya however, public transport (PT) is a "problem". Problem is a wrong word since the PT system is actually pretty extensive. You can always find a small bus to take you nearer where you want to go in town and the same small buses (called matatus) can take you a lot closer. Now the trouble with matatus are the "problem".
First: the van is a 15 (!) people carrier. This means without the driver, 14 passengers. It's like a Ford Transit with 14 seats. This means that space for legs is very limited. And if your a tall Dutch guy (or lady) this is a problem. This basically means that there are only 5 seats in the whole matatu that are fit for us tall Dutch people:). Not counting the fact that there is no real place to keep your bags, so on your lap will have to do (you can also put it in the back sometimes, but you really don't want to let your bags out of sight!). This points to the second "problem":
Sitting in a very cramped position with at least one bag on your lap for at least 2 hours is not comfortable. An hour is okay, 1,5 hours, doable, but more than that, not really:) And usually, we take more than 2 hours. but somehow we manage.
Third: If you've been in Kenya, you know the roads are not very good (understatement!!!). So sitting in a cramped space, for at least 2,5 hours, with a bag on your lap, and a crazy driver trying to either avoid every pothole by driving everywhere on the road where there is no pothole (even on the wrong side of the road or not even on the road for a couple of minutes) or trying to drive over every pothole he sees (we're not sure which) makes travelling a little annoying sometimes.
Fourth: Some matatus have a sound system more extensive than your local disco. So riding for 2,5 hours, in a cramped space with a bag on you lap, a driver hitting/missing every pothole and the rap/hip-hop music beating at you (110 dB) and at every stop people trying to sell you food, clothes, accessories, animals or whatever is getting to us just a little bit...

Our next "challenge" with travelling is sleeping. We would like to sleep somewhere where we can get a little rest. But on a tight budget and no real knowledge (except what the Lonely Planet tells us) that's hard. Usually these are the things we face in the evening, at night or early in the morning:
- Dogs barking
- People talking/laughing/etc.
- Mosques "chanting" (is that what they do?)
- Restaurants full of noisy people
- Hard beds, hard pillows, too small covers
So every time we have to find a place to sleep, we have to look very hard and sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't.

Lastly: eating. People back home used to call us health freaks, simply because we were very keen on eating at least 200 grams of veggies every day. We've changed a little bit here. We've become worse. We try to eat brown pasta, try to avoid additives and such and if possible eat organic. Kenya however is the worst place to go out for breakfast, lunch and dinner (every day) to get food that is healthy and good. Kenyans eat a lot of starches (without much taste) or just about everything fried (deep). Not the healthiest options, especially if you want veggies (which is usually cabbage or nothing). We'll live, but we try to eat good food every time we go to Nairobi...

We don't want to make it all sound horrible, but it's not a bed of roses either :)

Luckily we're in Nairobi now. Mostly because we're both not feeling very well at the moment. We're going in and out of being sick every week. Last week it was Nynke, now it's us both. So it's going up and down, and actually we're tired of travelling. We would like to go home, but our plane leaves in two weeks. So we have to hang on just a little longer...

In the mean time we visited one of our sponsor children here (Mutugi) in Eastern Kenya. This was great and fun! (So there's still some fun things out here as well!) He was a little shy at first, but after playing soccer for a bit, he opened up a bit. We'll tell you more about that next time. Next we visited a friend we met in Nairobi. That was lot's of fun as well. We walked about an hour to his house from the road and went home (or at least part of the way) at sunset on the back of a bicycle (can you imagine the look of all the Kenyans, a white person on the back of a bicycle with a Kenyan riding?). It was very nice. Also we went to the place where Nick was 5 years ago. That place changed a lot! It took a while to recognize some landmarks, but most of it was still there. It was fun for Nynke to see all that she'd heard quite a bit about.
Then we went to Nairobi and crashed. Postponed our travels a day and we're trying to get back into shape before tomorrow. Then we will travel to Western Kenya to visit our second (and last) sponsor child. Visit some nice places (forest and National parks) and probably be back in Nairobi sooner than we're planning right now. So just a little more travelling and than the "big" travel back home...