August 10 – Carnivore Lunch
So, we left the Porini Camp at 9 AM after a morning nature walk and some breakfast. We had a 4 hour drive in front of us before we got to our lunch at the world famous Carnivore restaurant. Our driver, Tony, was very familiar with the back roads and avoided all of the big bumps. When we were on decent roads he was flying! He completed the drive back to Nairobi about 45 minutes faster than going out to the camp.
Once we reached Nairobi we headed for lunch at the Carnivore. Now, I have been to numerous Churriscarria restaurants around the US and this was no different. We started with some soup and salad and then they brought the meat. There were skewers of lamb, beef, chicken, pork, turkey, ostrich and alligator. There was also ox balls, which I decided not to taste. My brother was the only one brave enough to eat the ox balls, not my cup of tea. We arrived at the restaurant at 1 PM and we were told that we needed to be at the airport around 2 PM for our 3 PM flights.
We finished the meal at about 1:55 and then ordered dessert. Everyone was starting to enjoy their dessert when I went outside to check with Tony on whether we had enough time to finish or should we be heading to the airport. Well, he said we had no more than 5 minutes before we had to leave. So, I returned to the table and told everyone to eat dessert quickly because we needed to leave. We got in the car at 2:10 and got to the airport at 2:20 hoping that we wouldn’t miss our flight.
To our great surprise our airline, AirKenya, was a single gate terminal at the airport with a few people hanging out front checking our bag. We were through security in less than 5 minutes and we are now waiting at the gate for our plane. The next leg of our trip should be the best of all, seeing the great migration of the wildebeest through the Masai Mara. We are taking a very small plane to Siana Springs and the airstrip is supposed to be just a few minutes from the camp. So, our drive this morning should be our last long drive of the trip.
All in all the long drives have given us a great perspective of the culture of both Uganda and Kenya. If we would have flown from one town to another we wouldn’t have gotten the same understanding of the lack of infrastructure in Uganda. It seemed like Nairobi was much more developed than Kampala and the country of Uganda seemed more antiquated. Over the next few weeks I am sure that I will start to digest everything that we have seen. It has been an amazing journey and I look forward to seeing our home again.
We have been gone from San Diego for close to 2 months. We haven’t seen our house, talked to any of our friends or been to the beach. I am looking forward to being home but glad we have this one last leg of our journey. We will return to San Diego from Nairobi next Thursday and that will be a long 26 hour journey through Cairo and NY. We will see how the kids survive that journey, but so far they have been great on just about all of our travels. To the last leg of the journey ….
‘Til next time ……
Larry Kesslin 