The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

I. Kenya again

I decided to open the book called "Kenya" once more. 4 years had passed since my last visit, and somehow I had started to miss it.

This time the adventure began sooner than I had expected, as early as Prague airport on 13 February, where I found out that I did not have a valid visa.

After the PCR tests, one unpleasant surprise followed another… I will come to that later, but it could also have happened that I would never in my life write these lines.

II. Prague and Amsterdam

The motivation was clear, but the departure from the Czech Republic did not work out at all.

At Prague airport I found out that instead of a visa for Kenya I had received only a confirmation of payment. This slight complication meant that I had to postpone my departure by almost 2 days.

On Monday 15 February at 01:30 a taxi driver picked me up in front of my house. That is perhaps the only time when shared services like Uber will not help you, and so for a 15-minute ride you pay a Prague loan shark the monthly wage of a Kenyan tuk-tuk driver (more on that later).

The drawback of a free change of flight (we pleaded that the negative PCR test had not been delivered) is that instead of visiting Paris I was transferred to Amsterdam. However, the condition for boarding a plane bound for the Netherlands, introduced by that wonderful country so fond of tulips and so friendly towards grass, was that you had to take a new negative antigen test no earlier than 4 hours before boarding (it made no difference at all whether your sinuses had already been probed for the PCR test or not).

In the waiting area at Prague airport, by around 3 o'clock in the morning, I was already slightly nervous, since another change of flight was no longer possible and my PCR tests were close to expiring (a condition for visiting Kenya).

My calm state of mind was disturbed only now and then by the unconcealed disappointment of other waiting passengers at their positive results.

Having gone through tests of my mental and physical health for the sake of travelling in the last days before departure, and having heard, just before my negative results were confirmed, that China was considering introducing an anal test for Covid-19, I felt real relief in the nearest toilet.

On the way from Amsterdam to Nairobi, though, everything is only just beginning.

III. Nairobi

My last visit to one of the youngest capital cities in the world (founded in 1899 at a railway stop between the trading crossroads of Mombasa and its northern neighbour Uganda) took place in 2017, after a 9-hour drive from Eldoret (in the north-west of the country) on a road that was still being finished. And half asleep. At times I was afraid of falling asleep, at times of waking up.

This time everything went smoothly, even though this stop was more or less unplanned, probably much like the building of Nairobi itself, which in 1896 served as a store of fodder for the draught animals used in building the railway and 100 years later turned into Kenya's centre of several million people.

I do not know why, but whenever I travel to or from Kenya, I feel like that draught animal, with a large and a small piece of hand luggage filled to the brim with things I will not need anyway, but somehow I tell myself you never know. If it were possible, next time I would pack a meat cleaver, a water pistol and pepper spray.

If you travel from Europe in winter, it is plain to see how long you have suffered from a lack of sun, and when they drop you off at night, together with the brilliantly white luggage mentioned above, in the middle of the metropolis, the loving and business-hungry locals come running at you straight away (I wanted to write dogs, but that might sound xenophobic or even worse, and it would be politically incorrect, to say the least).

And so, trusting in safe travel with vetted black taxi drivers working for Uber, you hope that while you withdraw money from a cash machine they will wait for you, suitcases and all, and that when you come back they will, with luck, not take a machete to you. Just to be safe, though, you take a picture of the car's number plate and send it to your parents with a comment that you want to share a few photos from a peaceful holiday.

After landing at the airport I spent several minutes running around in confusion with my suitcases in front of the exit from the hall, as if I wanted to confirm that my navigational skills are not my sharpest sense, after which I chose, to be on the safe side, the shared service mentioned above.

Since even the drive to the accommodation I had booked ended up taking more than an hour, I was glad I had not decided to walk, although that option sounded more than tempting. Later I understood that I would have been creeping among giraffes and fighting monkeys for my luggage on the way across an abandoned part of the airport. Finally I would have had to get over a barbed-wire fence and wallow in the mud.

The late evening of the first day was crowned by the pleasant company of a funny firefighter who now and then earns a bit extra as a stunt driver on the broken roads near the airport. I think I even fell asleep for a few hours in the nicely furnished private accommodation just at the moment when the nasty mosquitoes, after their total massacre of the European, decided to get their second wind.

As that fighter of fire often reminded me during the night drive, it is all about mental well-being, about "mindset". As I realised later, he was right when he said "Life is too short". So why worry about the future.

IV. Mombasa: Kenyans do love us!

And we cannot blame them.

Judging by the picture, you might conclude that the beautiful azure coast of the most important trading crossroads of the 2nd millennium, and the beach resorts and apartments built around it, literally invite you to amazing experiences beneath the surface of the sea or to playing with dolphins out on the open Indian Ocean.

There is just one catch.

You have to close your eyes and hold your nostrils so as not to smell the stink of the city sewers, the stench rising from the ashes of a burning dump of mostly plastic rubbish, and the water polluted by oil leaking from tankers and by other disguised tragedies.

I would also recommend not taking photos from a posh restaurant of children floating in a little boat, hoping to find anything at all on the water that could be put to use, so that they can eat or exchange it at the famous market nearby. At the car hire it is also wise to choose dark tinted windows, especially on the driver's and front passenger's side, so that you avoid the looks of a large part of the population, which still suffers from hunger and, in the standing queue of traffic, knocks with one of its crutches on the bonnet of a car that only the top 5% of the inhabitants can afford.

History itself shows that although Mombasa has grown used to passing from the grip of one power to another, it is not particularly fond of Europeans.

They tried to subdue this more than 1100-year-old power of the south-eastern world as early as the 15th century, a hundred years later it found itself in the clutches of the Omani Empire, only for the British later to make it part of the East African community. Perhaps we will soon see another change, if China exercises its right as a creditor to the pledge on Mombasa's fortress, Fort Jesus.

Fort Jesus is the proof of it. In it you will find Arab slave girls as well as photographs of all the dead sultans and of Queen Elizabeth, the carelessly dumped skeleton of a 15-metre whale, and Portuguese wall paintings of naval battles right next to teenagers' messages about who was going out with whom when they came on a school trip.

If you are not a Muslim, you will probably not even stay in the city centre, but a bigger problem for us would probably be refusing an insistent guide impolitely, or not paying an African with a bamboo pole and a sharpened tip for supposedly guarding your parked car.

You get from Nairobi to Mombasa very swiftly with the reliable local airline Jambojet; only the ferry from the island African Manhattan towards the mainland may hold you up for about an hour. During this unique experience, what struck me most was the way the Kenyan government had interpreted the anti-Covid measures, which at the same time explains why Kenya is still not out of the woods. On the upper deck of our boat there were about 500 free seats, while on the boat next to us the crowds mingled rather like at the Rolling Stones concert on Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro in 2006.

Then all that remains is not to collide with one of the aggressive European car drivers or with the crazy owners of every kind of vehicle, cart and jaywalker, and after several dozen kilometres heading south to finally start enjoying yourself on the beach at Diani Beach.

In that promised place, so popular with holidaymakers from all over Europe and from northern Kenya, a well-earned rest awaits you after a demanding trip of almost 2 days.

Well, at least that was the plan…