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.
The bits we drove through on our short stay were a weird mixture of impoverished third world country, with its legions of pedestrians walking who-knows-where on dirt berms in the middle of nowhere, and developed economy with its malls and hotels. The taxi hawkers at the crowded, antiquated Jomo Kenyatta airport (apparently some of them will dump you at a random spot, rob you blind, or demand more money) and haggling over transportation make me tend toward the former, though. Interestingly enough, the touts vanished the moment we latched onto a slightly more expensive, reputable-looking taxi broker.
Thankfully, we ended up in neither, with a (short) night at Macushla House B&B, after deciding to avoid the exorbitantly expensive downtown business hotels. I’ve rarely seen such polite, welcoming service, made especially memorable by great food in a colonially decorated mansion’s private dining room, just for us, whee! Everything in the place, although it is relatively newly built, tastefully reminisced about colonial days. While probably not so great for the natives, if you were a wealthy white resident, the Empire must have been a grand old time to hang out in Africa.
Beyond the superb decorations at the guesthouse, everywhere you look, something is named after Karen this, Blixen that…sort of ironic given that Out of Africa was as much a sad look back at a colonial past that had already vanished by the time Isak Dinesen wrote the book. There’s not much reminiscent of her description of the Ngong hills in the smog and barbed-wire-topped walls enclosing the gated communities around Nairobi national park. I’d be curious to see the park on a clear day, but the ads for real estate investments in planned golf communities in the area I read in Kenya Airways’ inflight magazine (in between advertisements for all kinds of random marine maintenance and paper bag manufacturing companies, whose PR agencies should mainly be taken outside and fed to wild animals) didn’t give me much confidence. I just somehow can’t imagine it would live up to the romance.
If I hadn’t come to this conclusion before, our one night in Kenya finally convinced me that organized religion can bite me — muezzins can be charming, when they’re not belting out their call to prayer at 4 a.m., and the legions of pentecostal congregations scattered around the area broadcasting repetitive hymns over external loudspeakers during most of the night didn’t help our sleep quota much. Especially considering that Karin dreamed we’d had a wakeup call at 3 a.m., jumped up, and headed for the shower.
The thing that really shocked me, though, was when our driver, upon returning us to the airport, switched off the dome light and asked us to pay him in the dark, gesturing at the policeman wandering about the cars dropping off passengers. “Please give me money in the dark, don’t let him see it or he will want some.” Wow.
This sounds really negative. Sorry. Macushla is amazing, even if the tiny bit of Nairobi and surroundings that we saw on our very short stay didn’t make much of an impression.
Macushla House
Nairobi, KE
+254 (0) 20 891 987
www.maclusha.biz
