London to Nairobi and safely at our lodgings

We got away from the gate in London right on time and headed east towards Continental Europe.  Our flight path has taken us past Bosnia, over the beautiful mountains surrounding Sarejevo and Montenegro and we are now just about past Greece in our southward trip towards first north Africa and finally Kenya, which is on the east coast of Africa straddling the Equator.  We expect the weather to be around 80 every day for a high and in the low 60’s at night.  Our missions always coincide with the rainy seasons in the spring and the fall, this is why our airfare is lower than at the high tourist times, such as spring break for European college kids.  If the pattern holds true to form, we will be in jackets in the morning on the way to work at the clinic, the clouds will burn off by 10am and it will be warm the rest of the day.  The rains usually come late in the afternoon.  More than once, a torrential late afternoon rain has cut our clinic short for the day, since people don’t go out in that kind of weather or will be scrambling home to try to prevent damage from flash flooding, etc.

We are a little more than 5 hours away from Nairobi at this point and have just had lunch.  I had curry chicken with spinach and a rice dish.  A small salad, a roll and some chocolate mousse rounded out the meal.  Our first flight was too warm for my liking.  This flight has been absolutely frigid.  Even I, who am always too warm, am bundled up in a blanket.  The hot meal plus a cup of coffee afterwards has helped to take the chill away and it’s now looking pretty likely that a nap is in my future.

I did get some good sleep of a little more than an hour and feel much better now.  I’ve done some stretching and went back to the galley and got some juice and a snack.  The current estimate has us arriving in Nairobi around 9:20pm local time.  I’m sure it will be midnight by the time we get our visas, a t4iour footlockers and other luggage, get everything loaded up into a truck, arrive at our lodgings by bus, unload everything and then get assigned a room.  We will have an early morning because we are going up to Lake Naivasha for a photo safari.  Those of you who regularly follow this blog will know that we’ve been there more than a few times and there were some outstanding wildlife photos captured by Pastor Robert Tiner on the last trip in April.  Those photos made me jealous enough that I got a comparable Nikon camera (D5200) to the Canon (t4i) that he had used.  I consider myself a serious amateur photographer and have worked hard all summer to learn all of the features of this camera and some stunning new photo techniques.  I hope that all of this effort will pay off in some fabulous animal pictures, portraits of the people we encounter and a great landscape or two.  Each safari and each clinic have their own personality, with differing people, weather, places and situations.  My goal is to give you a taste of the incredible variety of flavors we will experience.

We made it through immigration and customs without too much trouble.  Since the International Terminal at Kenyatta Airport burned down in August, they have gotten a pretty good replacement for it up and running in the cargo area.  We were bused from our plane on the tarmac to the cargo area and things did go pretty smoothly.  We then loaded up all of the footlockers and luggage onto a truck and took two small buses to our lodgings in Karen, a suburb of Nairobi.  We got our room assignments and I was showered and in bed by 1am.  I set the alarm for 5:45am and had a short but decent rest before getting up to breakfast and the safari.  More on the Saturday's safari and the rest of the day to follow.