Qatar to Nairobi

The train from one terminal to the next.

Back to the craziness of sub Saharan Africa.

Friday, September 29^th

I had a couple of hours to hang around the airport Haman Aiport in Qatar before the next leg. The airport was amazingly large, new and modern. It h ad five terminals and all the name brand shops you would expect. I was going to buy a book called Worth Dying For, the Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall, the same author who wrote the Prisoners of Geography which I am reading now. Maybe next airport.

I boarded the flight at 8:30 am and when I checked on the TV screen to see our flight route, the first thing I read was: For your personal safety stay in your seat when praying.

The flight was again long and I travelled another 4500 kilometres. Just before we landed there was an announcement that said that we were not allowed to bring any plastic bags into the country and advised us that if we had plastic bags (duty free for example) we could be fined.

I crossed the equator and arrived in Nairobi by 2:20pm. I am now in the southern hemsiphere. Going through customs was easy with the electronic visa I obtained a couple of months ago. When I emerged from the airport there was a woman there with my name on a sign and she took me to a van where I a driver was waiting. He was a very friendly guy who told me that it would take a while to get to my hotel because traffic in Nairobi is crazy. He wasn't kidding. Traffic is on the other side of the road now. We left the airport on a two lane road and I could see a congested three lane highway to our left and in between there were cars driving on a dirt part. All those lanes merged into two lanes. It took forever. I had forgotten how crazy this part of Africa is. Morocco has nothing on this, by comparison it looks normal. This is more like the chaos of Ghana. There are people everywhere with stalls or mini shops all along the roads, cows wandering in traffic, bicycles, scooters, cars beeping horns and garbage everywhere. You can see why they are banning plastic bags. This is not a place where I would want to walk around alone.

En route the driver, Patrick, told me about a couple of optional tours I could take the next day that sounded very interesting. All I needed was some sleep.  

The traffic was horrible getting to the hotel and the driver took a different route to get us there faster, it still took over two and a half hours to arrive at the Jacaranda Hotel. This is a very nice hotel complete with a doorman, a metal security screener at the entrance, a nice restaurant, a bar and a large pool. I have my own room for the night as I am I night early. It has a king size, comfortable bed.

I was exhausted and not very hungry because of the lousy food I had on the plane, so I did a bit on the computer and then went to the desk to ask if I had to change rooms tomorrow, and the lady said yes because I would be getting a room mate. Then I went to bed really early.