The missing masai

After the planned trip to spend the weekend in a masai village fell through (the masai contact owed Daniela 3000 shillings - about 25 pounds - so failed to return her calls) I had a vacant weekend in Nairobi. So on Friday night Daniela and I went to the Institute Francais in the middle of Nairobi to watch a live concert of Kenya's top bands. The Institute is a real oasis in the middle of the city - so civilised and 'normal', they even sold fresh panini and croissants, it was like walking into the Riverside Studios - a real shock! The concert was excellent. We sat outside in the gardens and were entertained by a wonderful variety of Kenyan pop bands and soloists. The Kenyans really know how to enjoy themselves. It was heaving but everyone danced with absolute abandon and confidence - I don't think I've seen people dance like that in Britain unless they have taken something to 'enhance' their enjoyment! Warmed up by the dancing and french wine, Daniela and I popped into a local club to see some friends. It was a pretty standard club but being the only whites certainly made for a less than standard experience on the dancefloor. It's not often that you see people dancing to Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky' without any sense of irony and it's certainly not often that I find myself the object of desire for every man on the dancefloor. I was under no illusion that I had suddenly developed a Kate Moss-esque bone structure or an Angelina Jolie body - no, it was simply the colour of my skin that made the men weak at the knees. It's a shame that being white comes with a lable of affluence and a ticket out of Kenya to a perfect life abroad. I'm doing my best to explain that life in the UK is not all gold-plated baths and huge houses but it's a myth that is hard to erase.
I had a wonderful night, the group of friends I was with are enormous fun and we're all going camping this weekend - to where I have no idea but they're organinsing it so I know it will be fun.
Saturday was a bit of a slow day after my marathon dancing session to 80's classics. Daniela and I decided to cool down at a local swimming club where you can sit outside, swim and relax in the palm-tree gardens. This would have been a much more relaxing experience had we not, again, been the only white people there. It's never the most comfortable experience getting into a swimming pool in a bikini with strangers around but when they are openly staring at you and you have an audience of about ten children gawping and pointing it really does make you feel pretty self conscious! As I was swimming up and down I had a sense of what it must be like to be a zoo animal - I could almost hear children pointing and saying 'look mummy, it's a lesser spotted white person'!
On Sunday Daniela and I decided to make the most of the day and set off to the Ngong hills armed with a lot of water (it's seriously hot now), a small picnic and sturdy footwear. The hills leap out of the flat landscape that surround Nairobi and are most famous for being the place where Robert Redford crashed his plane in 'Out of Africa'. We walked from one end of the hills to another - the steepness challenged Kilimanjaro at times and it was with a real sense of accomplishment that we completed the climb 5 hours later. We hitched a lift back to the nearest town and decided to have a coke before we caught a bus back to Nairobi. We ducked into a local 'bar' and interrupted a party of about 8 people who had clearly been in there all day drinking Tusker and Guiness. They thought it was hilarous that 2 white people had come into their bar and insisted on buying us drinks and dancing for us. It was a little strange to watch some very drunken men and women gyrating provacitively to 'When the Saints Go Marching In'! One of the men kept telling us to 'feel at home' (unlikely) and to feel safe as he was in the Kenyan army (again, unlikely!) He even showed me his army identification card which would have been convincing if it hadn't said: height 5' 8'' when his head was almost touching the ceiling!
A great weekend and I loved seeing the real Nairobi - it made such a difference to all the previous times I've been there when we've driven through with the doors locked and windows firmly closed. It gave me a real buzz to be walking along the streets and amongst the people, almost as one of them. It's by no means safe in Nairobi, muggings, attacks and worse happen daily but there are fabulous places and fabulous people if you are lucky enough to actually get out there and find them.