I have never flown over a place where a city just stopped, separated by a vast expanse of reasonably pristine bush (national park, hooray!) by nothing more than a rail track. I’ve never been anywhere as smoky and smoggy as the outskirts of Nairobi.
John’s Eats and Trips
Aug 222010
Aug 212010
The next hop of our trip took us to Chumbe, a coral island beach resort off the South-West coast of Zanzibar. The founders and management pride themselves on their ecological credentials, but beyond being a lovely place in a stunningly beautiful location, it’s as good an argument against compost toilets as I’ve ever seen.
Aug 202010
Holy everloving shit, I’ve never seen so many giraffes in my entire life. Already flying into Tarangire national park in Tanzania, with a redheaded English aviatrix at the stick, we got an idea of what would await us. She insisted that, occasionally, the guides waiting to pick up tourists at the rough-hewn airstrip didn’t do [...]
Aug 172010
The trip to Zanzibar, although long, was reasonable enough, and aside from four hours spent (as probably the only haram dhimmi kafir infidel types in a surreal windowless Nairobi airport basement sleeping lounge — $42 for four hours — thoroughly uneventful. The only real excitement came when we learned Kenya Airways had lost Karin’s suitcase.
Part of the problem with having a nice wine fridge and a girlfriend who likes filling it is that someone has to actually figure out how the damn bottles fit into it. And that is the abominable, reprehensible, enviable problem with our dear Smeg cabinet — advertised by the despicable lying British shits who seem [...]
It’s a good thing to get away from the chaos of 14 Juillet in Paris, when you’re not too inclined to go stand in line at 6 a.m. to see Sarkozy review his military toys (even though I really want to see that some day…but then again, 6 a.m…) It’s an especially good thing if [...]
This is the out-of-the-way-of-all-the-tourists place to go to on a warm summer weekend afternoon for large helpings of gut-burstingly good steak tartare or cheeseburgers (assuming you remember to tell them to leave off the damn ubiquitous cocktail sauce. Why does everyone in Europe put that crap on perfectly good burgers?)
There’s something mildly dispiriting about eating in the “cheap” version of a high-end place. It’s probably a natural instinct to always want whatever’s perceived as better, which is what leads people to stupidities like blowing $1k on an iPhone app that says “I’m rich”, or spending 2,000 pounds on a pizza. Note to pizza diners: [...]
“Power lunch” was how Karin described this place, and that’s not far off. You can almost imagine Patrick Bateman trying to get a reservation for lunch. The charming Italian manager pushes it off that track quickly, though, but it’s still a cool-looking restaurant.