Back in Laikipia

I have made it to Laikipia. Not quite to Ol Pejeta yet, but to Mpala Research Center, which is about an hour away and is Princeton's home base in Kenya. I will spend the night here, pick up and pack my car in the morning and drive to Ol Pej to get settled. I had hoped to go to Ol Pej directly without spending the night here, but my travels were hectic and once I unloaded at MRC I just couldn't make myself get back in the car again.

The trip started well enough. I got to the airport early and made my (only somewhat tearful) farewells to Mike. My flight ended up being delayed 45 minutes or so because the plane was late for whatever reason. Once the aircraft door closed I shut off my cell phone for three months and prepared to take full advantage of the on-demand in-flight entertainment Delta offered. That didn't work out so well. I slogged through The Social Network at half speed, rewinding every 20 seconds because the picture blurred and the sound cut out. By the time I tried to start my next movie, the pictures was nothing but garbled pixels and there was no sound at all. So I slept, curled up in my seat and the empty adjacent one. I woke up about an hour before landing and fiddled in vain with the video controls.

Once the sleep wore off, I checked my boarding pass for the next flight to find which gate I would have to go to. Not listed. What was listed was the boarding time: 9:30am. A glance at the flight tracker on my screen (the only part of the entertainment that worked) told me that we would be landing at approximately....9:15 am. Somehow a 45 minute delay had turned into a 3-hour late arrival and my 4-hour layover in Amsterdam seemed woefully inadequate. I kept an eye on the flight tracker, hoping that perhaps it had overestimated our remaining flight time. "Just kidding!" it would say, "We will actually land with plenty of time for you to stretch your legs, grab some food, and stroll leisurely to your next gate!" Instead, I watched, increasingly distressed, as our pilot did two large, leisurely loops around Amsterdam, the projected landing time climbing to 9:26 before he announced that we'd been cleared to land.

We landed in a fog so thick that the thump of the wheels on the runway took my by surprise: it fully appeared that the plane was still engulfed in cloud. We then proceeded to taxi forever. Apparently Amsterdam's landing strip is located several miles from the airport, or possibly in Paris. What little time I had left to make my plane was dwindling and my hopes of my baggage making the flight were long gone.

When I finally made it into the terminal, I looked frantically for a board telling which gates flights were departing from. There were none. There was one Delta representative with such information, but she was swamped with people asking if it was too late to make flights that left an hour ago. I picked a direction and booked it until I finally found a board that told me my gate was two terminals away. More booking it to the gate where the last of the passengers were going through the at-gate security check for boarding.

I went through the security check, thoroughly unamused when my bag was pulled aside for extra searching. The security guy made a joke when he pulled my extra pair of socks from my bag. I looked at him with daggers in my eyes, annoyed at everyone plane-related. I made it onto the packed flight only to find that the aisle seat I had requested three weeks ago had apparently been given to someone else, leaving me with a dreaded middle seat. An hour delay at the gate gave me a sliver of hope that perhaps my bags would make it on the plane. The rest of the flight was uneventful: sporadic sleep and on-demand entertainment that worked.

We arrived an hour late to Nairobi. The visa process was mercifully quick, although there were a handful of those annoying people who think their time is somehow more valuable than everyone else's and who therefore skipped to the front of the line for some reason justified only in their own minds.

Fifteen minutes at the baggage claim all but confirmed my suspicion that my bags would not be arriving. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get anyone to tell me if more bags were on their way, and there were a lot of people still waiting. Hope kept me waiting for twenty minutes more after which I got in the long line of people reporting delayed luggage. By the time I was done with that, it was almost three hours after I was supposed to have landed and I was afraid my ride would have given up and left. But my name was there on a piece of paper when I walked out and at that point I was so relieved that nothing else mattered. We went to my hotel where I had a late dinner, wrote some emails, took a cold (ugh) shower with my few toiletries, and went to bed around one.

Compared to yesterday, today went very smoothly. My driver and I stopped first at Nyayo house so I could go to the Immigration office and get my pupil's pass stamped into my passport. Then we went to the airport to claim my luggage, which had obediently arrived on a 7 am flight. From there it was straight to Mpala, after pinballing between several gnarly Nairobi traffic jams and finally finding an unobstructed route out of the city. I stayed awake the whole trip, although I did not hold up my end of the conversation with the driver very well.

Now: Mpala, a hot dinner in five minutes, a (hopefully) hot shower thereafter, and an early early bedtime so I can finally get settled tomorrow.

Safe & Sound

I have finally made it to Mpala! The trip was long but relatively free of set-backs compared to what I was prepared for. The only snafu was a possible block or cancellation on my debit card due to my activities in London, but it looks like I will be able to get that resolved with little problem.
The flight to London was unexpectedly short: only 6 1/2 hours compared to the 8 I expected. I suppose it is closer than the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, this meant I didn't get as much sleep as I expected. They kept the cabin lights on for about the first hour and a half and the last hour, which made it impossible to sleep during that time. All told I think I got to Heathrow with three or so hours of broken up sleep. The plane was a bit late getting in, which, combined with some confusion about how to navigate the Tube, resulted in my being about 20 minutes late to meet Caroline and her friends. They were still waiting though, so we were united and off to the British Museum soon enough.

The British Museum was very cool. I am still shocked that it is entirely free and open to the public. It truly is the museum of stuff the Brits stole from everywhere else. It was very cool seeing some of the stuff, like the Rosetta Stone, but for a lot of the artifacts it was just a shame that they could not be seen in the proper context. The best examples of this I think were some of the Egyptian and Greek statues. Some of these things were massive and imposing even in the sterile museum. I can only imagine that they must have been even more so in their intended context. But an impressive museum nonetheless.

From the museum, we found a lunch spot where I had a delicious burger with prosciutto & avocado as my last meal in the Western world, and then hopped the Tube to go see Big Ben, Parliament & Westminster Abbey. This is when I found out that my card wasn't working and started to stress & panic a bit. Luckily I was able to send a couple emails to Mike and Mom to see if they could contact the bank, Caroline lent me enough pounds to get me out of the country, and everything seems to be working out just fine. In a weird coincidence, I found out that James, one of Caroline's friends, went to Wake Forest with Christopher Browder, Martin Schindler & Will Rawley (from Collegiate). What a small world.


The flight from Heathrow to Nairobi was awesome because I got an unexpected upgrade to business class. I was sitting in my assigned seat and a guy came up to me and asked if I would switch with him. He had been upgraded but was traveling with his brother, who was sitting in my row, and they wanted to sit together. I jumped at the chance. It was lucky that he asked at that point before everyone had boarded: I was the only person in his brother's row, but we were on opposite ends. Later the plane completely filled up and he would probably have tried to switch with someone who was next to his brother. Anyway, business class was great: more room, more comfortable chair, better service and more sleep!

I got through the Nairobi airport with no trouble at all and found my ride to Mpala. Once I stepped off the plane I was hit with the earthy, human smell of Kenya's air and finally started getting excited about this trip. The ride up to Mpala only increased that excitement. Kenya is at once a familiar and foreign place at this point, so as I watched out the van window I felt weirdly both at home and out of place. The most amazing part was how green everything is, especially in Laikipia. All the plants are lush green, there is a carpet of grass where I am used to seeing dusty brown ground, and red, yellow and white flowers dot the landscape. It is very beautiful. My first wildlife sighting (besides a Maribou stork eating trash by the Nairobi airport) were some impala, but shortly after I saw two huge leopard tortoises. They were a fair way off the road and I know I wouldn't have noticed them if the ground had been its normal brown color. But against the bright green grass they stood out plain as day.

There are some familiar faces here at Mpala, which is nice. Since it's Sunday (and Easter) not much official business is happening and I will have to wait until tomorrow to obtain my car. It's nice to relax anyway. I took a low-pressure but semi-hot shower and zonked out for an hour and a half. Dinner will be served soon and the board says we'll be having chicken curry. Yum!