This is a brief post for the short day we spent in Nairobi, woven into our patchwork of flights from Tanzania to Botswana – Grumeti to Arusha to Nairobi to Johannesburg to Maun and finally the Kalahari. Here we wait to board our Precision Air flight from the Kilimanjaro Airport in Arusha to the small Wilson Airport In Nairobi.As we approached Nairobi, we flew over the outskirts of greater Nairobi, a city of some four million people.After landing, we taxied by a worrisome collection of busted-up planes.We needed to get from the Wilson Airport to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for our redeye flight to Johannesburg, and since we had a day to make that happen, we hired a car and driver and went exploring. Like so many other cities, we passed collections of “informal housing.”We headed for Karen, now a wealthy suburb of Nairobi and named for Karen Blixen. Here she had her coffee farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Her home is still there and now a museum of sorts. It’s also where the Meryl Streep and Robert Redford movie was filmed. The house remains much as it was when she lived there, with a collection of her original furniture in the rooms.And there was some pretty old farming equipment scattered about, rusting and feeding termites. After lunch at a local restaurant, we headed back through Nairobi city toward the airport. We got off of the highway to creep through a congested shortcut. Our driver said everybody goes this way because the highway is so backed up. We weren’t sure how much to believe him, since if everybody came this way, the highway might be expected to be wide open. We suspected he might just be saving on tolls.Then we were hanging in the Kenya Airways lounge at the Nairobi International Airport for our four-hour redeye flight to Johannesburg. Yuck.
