Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Map
Saturday, 28 September 2002
Sunday, 29 September
Monday, 30 September
Tuesday, 1 October
Wednesday, 2 October
Thursday, 3 October
Friday, 4 October
Saturday, 5 October
Picture Section
About the Author
Also by Bill Bryson
Copyright
Also by
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Troublesome Words
Neither Here Nor There
Made in America
A Walk in the Woods
Down Under
Notes From a Big Country
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Shakespeare (Eminent Lives Series)
Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors
Icons of England
At Home
A Really Short History of Nearly Everything
We meet at the Kenya Airways check-in desk at Heathrow, the five brave souls who are to form our party from London. In addition to me and Dan, they are: David Sanderson, a thoughtful and kindly fellow who is soon to take up a post in Johannesburg as CARE’s regional manager in southern and western Africa, but joins us now in his capacity as urban specialist; Justin Linnane, an intent but amiable young maker of television documentaries who has volunteered to make a video record of the expedition; and the photographer Jenny Matthews, whose brilliant and compassionate snaps grace this volume. White-haired and sweetly unobtrusive, Jenny is easily the wonder of the lot. If you saw her in a supermarket you would take her for a schoolteacher or civil servant. In fact, for twenty-five years she has gone wherever there is danger – to Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda. She is fearless and evidently indestructible. If things go bad on this trip, it is her I’ll hold on to.
The first good news is that Kenya Airways has given us all an upgrade on account of our genial goodness and dapper manner, and so of course gets a glowing mention here. It is a nine-and-a-half-hour flight from London to Nairobi, and we are very pleased to pass it in comfort, with a better class of drinks and our own party packs.
An hour or so after we are airborne by chance I come across an article in The Economist declaring Nairobi to be the new crime capital of Africa. My attention is particularly arrested by the disclosure that street children come up to cars waiting at traffic lights demanding money and if it’s not given they rub balls of human excrement in their victims’ faces.
I share this information with my new companions and we agree that Dan, as group leader, will be our designated ‘rubbee’ for the week. Conveniently, Dan is in the lavatory when the matter is discussed and so the motion carries unanimously. In order not to spoil his enjoyment of Nairobi we decide not to tell him of our decision until we see children advancing.
It is nighttime when we land at Jomo Kenyatta Airport and pleasantly cool. We are met by Kentice Tikolo, an immensely good-natured Kenyan lady who helps run CARE’s Nairobi office and who shepherds us into waiting cabs. In Out of Africa, Nairobi was depicted as a sunny little country town, so I am disappointed to find that at some time in the past fifty or sixty years they took away that pretty scene and replaced it with Omaha, of all things. Nairobi is merely yet another modern city with traffic lights and big buildings and hoardings advertising Samsung televisions and the like. Our hotel is a Holiday Inn – very nice and comfortable, but hardly a place that shouts: ‘Welcome to Africa, Bwana.’
‘Oh, you will see plenty of Africa,’ Kentice assures me when we convene at the bar for a round of medicinal hydration. ‘We’re going to show you lots of exotic things. Have you ever eaten camel?’
‘Only in my junior high school cafeteria, and they called it lamb,’ I reply. I take the opportunity, while Dan is at the bar, to ask her about the street children I read about on the flight.
‘Oh, that’s the least of your worries,’ Kentice laughs. ‘Carjackings are much worse. They can be quite violent.’
‘What a comfort to know.’
‘But don’t worry,’ she says, laying a comforting hand on my arm and becoming solemn, ‘if anything goes wrong we have excellent hospitals in Nairobi.’
We retire early because we have an early start in the morning. I am disappointed to find that there is no mosquito net around the bed in my room. Unaware that Nairobi is malaria-free, I slather myself with insect repellent and pass a long night sounding like two strips of parting Velcro each time I roll over in the bed and dreaming terrible dreams in which Jungle Jim, assisted by a tribe of white pygmies, chases me through the streets of Omaha with dung balls.