Nairobi

My time in Harare ended so quickly.  Why does time seem to fly when one is on leave from work?

I had a thankfully uneventful flight up from Harare into Nairobi - it was a tad under 3 hours, lovely lunch and I even managed to read a few pages of my novel.  At this rate I doubt I'll finish it while I'm away.

I have been trying to remember exactly when I was last in Nairobi, but it's a long time.  I had good memories of it, but I think I am going to be very pleasantly surprised.  My first impressions are of a big, modern, vibrant and clean city.  The drive in from the airport (they are building another terminal, so business must be good) was in a Friday afternoon rush hour, so there was plenty of time to look around.  At the airport, the visa formalities and baggage retrieval went off so incredibly smoothly and quickly, I was surprised.

In Africa, it's quite common for hawkers to be selling a range of goods along the sides of the roads.  So on the drive into town, especially when the traffic started to build up (6 lanes - with a garden centre strip - of well behaved traffic, minimal potholes, a range of cars of all types and not all dilapidated bangers either, motorbikes, buses and always full mini buses) I became fascinated by the range of goods I could have purchased, all without stepping foot into a shop.  I could have arrived at the hotel laden with two types of passionfruit, bananas, knives (long hunting types), garden shearers, pens, packets of shelled peanuts, soft drinks, hats & caps, mobile phone covers and chargers, large wall hanging maps (of Africa, the world, Kenya), pears, rubik cubes, coat hangers, squash & tennis racquets, sunglasses and hand towels.  Simply amazing.  In Kenya the newspaper boys only sell from the roadsides in the morning - in the afternoon, you have to go to a kiosk to buy the paper.

And in town, I was surprised to see a Public Smoking Centre.  This was a room which could fit about 40 people, with an open doorway and the top half of the walls were decorative wiring.  When I asked my taxi driver about it (he was quite a good tour guide as well) he said that smoking on the streets is illegal, and if you really want to smoke you have to go to one of these Public Smoking places.  And when I took a close look at the streets we drove down, there was NO litter and I couldn't see a single person smoking either.  Could you imagine any government in Australia trying to introduce that?????

So, that's just first impressions from this afternoon.  I'm here for the weekend, so it should be quite full.