Kenya - Nairobi Again12.02.98 - Nairobi againToday we had a lot of organising to do. I sent 7 postcards, bought US$100 in travellers cheques, visited several travel agencies and airline companies (inc. Air France to try and change our tickets to fly out of Harare instead of Johanasburg) and we all sent our urgent e-mail in a frantic 30 minutes on-line! Later we bought some snacks at the local general store (a superstore by Kenyan standards) called 'DownTown' and me and Brad bought more sun-screen (no easy task in a country where everyone is black) in preparation for hitting the beach at Mombassa.After all that we were pretty much dead, I did some washing while it rained outside and we had some of the more hopeless articles of clothing done by the laundry service in our Hotel. After that was dinner at 'Nairobi Burgers' near the hotel and back to do more washing, write my Journal and read my book. Not a very exciting day but we really needed to get organised for the rest of our trip.
13.02.98 - Air FranceWe had to confirm our flight plans with Air France. We are now flying out of Harare instead of Jo-burg - we didn't want to have to travel all the way down to South Africa in just two weeks to fly out, its a long way in a short time. We also had to confirm that Brad could get off the flight in Perth rather than Sydney because he would be starting work there not long after we got back so he wasn't going to be returning to Sydney. We sent some more e-mail since we only did urgent stuff yesterday and we had time today - so e-mail we did.They had a pretty cool, if low-tech, internet set-up in Nairobi at the 'Thorntree'. The majority of users use a 'fidonet' network which is served over the phone-lines connected to a DOS computer. This, in turn, is connected to a linux box via ethernet connection, the linux box acted as a gateway - filtering e-mail for transmission over the internet. They said they usually had a leased-line connection but that was out of action because of water (El Nino!). All of Kenya's telecommunications goes through a single satellite transmission centre on the Rift Valley! We are basically just killing time for the rest of the day, we went and saw 'Face Off' at the movies, which was a novel experience since the audience all applauded and cheered at the appropriate parts of the movie. We then got dinner back at the hotel and caught our bus to Mombassa, which was interesting...
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