In the markets they sellsandals made from old car tyres

Tag : african sandals


The time warp is even more apparent at the Mountain Lodge - ourfirst stop after leaving Nairobi - nestled on the lush, cool slopesof Mount Kenya, with every room looking out on a waterhole wherewildlife come to drink. It's decked out like a Swedish sauna, everysurface panelled with timber, walls decorated with woollytapestries in earthy browns. After a dinner of Russian eggs, leg oflamb and creme caramel straight out of 1971, the year the MountainLodge was built, we relax with glasses of the African liqueur,Amarula Cream.

As with so many areas of the travel industry, when it comes tosafaris, boutique is in. At the top end of the market, lodges havebeen forsaken for luxury tented camps. Abercrombie & Kent'sKenya Hemingway Safari, for example, offers the faux authenticsafari experience sleeping under mosquito nets and canvas, albeitwith cocktails at sundown and a flush toilet in every tent (toolate for the old adventurer, who spent his safari in the '30s withdysentery).

I do become increasingly discomfitted by how much the safariindustry romanticises the nation's colonial past - Hemingway, KarenBlixen, Out Of Africa - and ignores the present. It almost feelslike tourists like me take refuge in game parks because we're lessscared of wild beasts than by the people, politics and poverty ofmodern Africa. In the main, tourist contact with Africans islimited to guides, porters and the richly decorated warriors ofset-piece Masai villages.

This is a shame because I find that some of the most enjoyableparts of my trip are when we come close to Kenyan life, drivingthrough hundreds of iterations and reiterations of the Kenyanvillage - some with timber buildings, some with concrete buildings- the shops and schools with names that seem lifted from anAlexander McCall Smith novel. We pass "Blessings Preschool", whichoffers "baby class, middle class & top class"; later I spot"Starshine High School".

A few times in the towns we pass second-hand clothes markets withtrousers, blazers and parkas jumbled together and piled high on theground for picking through. This is where clothes donated overseasto charities end up, Mwarema explains. In the markets they sellsandals made from old car tyres. Everywhere the people are friendlyand kind but there is also a sense of desperation, made more acuteby the drop in tourism revenue since the election.

When we return to Nairobi, the sense of economic decline becomeseven more evident. Having visited Kenya as a child, I'm struck byhow little has changed. Sure, there are modern elements such asNairobi Java House, a local coffee chain, but mostly the city lookslike it's stuck in the '60s - when the country was freshlyindependent, AIDS did not exist and Africa had hope.