On Safari Day 5
It was still rainy and miserable this morning… minding, we did wake up at 4 am to make our way to Arusha. We took our van to Nairobi and grabbed breakfast before jumping on a public shuttle for Arusha. Wow, public transportation in Kenya… I’m never complaining about Edmonton public transit again… ever. haha, the shuttle was actually ok… I guess I just kind of had a shitty seat. It was actually a fold down little chair that went in the aisle… hehe. and it was like a foot shorter than all the other seats so I might as well have been sitting in the aisle on the ground.
The journey was long too… and I almost peed my pants… haha. If we hadn’t had to stop at the border between Kenya and Tanzania, I would have definitely peed all over myself. Annnnyway, after we crossed the border, there was on interesting surprise… the rain had like washed out the main road between Nairobi and Arusha… but it looks like that was a common occurence because bus drivers, vans, semis… had all detoured over a little bit…
Seeing as I was a foot lower than everyone, I didn’t see it right away… but seeing that John’s eyes were as wide as toonies, I knew something was up ahead. That something was a small river with 2 or 3 tour vans already stuck in it, tourists with their pants rolled up walking across the river, and people trying to help the vehicles out! And yes, we were heading right towards it! God, it was scary… I held on to… well, I was in the aisle, there was nothing to hold on to! Luckily, our driver was the MAN and we were able to drive across this river… and it only took a couple years off my life. It’s funny when you get a whole bus load of people cheering for the driver though… haha.
A few bumpy hours later, we pulled into Arusha. We are staying at a small hotel here that is decent… and at least we know we’ll be dry. We basically just threw down our stuff and then headed to the snake park. I guess John isn’t the biggest fan of snakes but he was a good sport and held the snake too. It was just a little brown snake thingy… not dangerous… so don’t expect any pictures of us holding pythons or anything like that. The snake park was actually kind of cool… I mean, it’s not all that different than the aligator park in florida that my mom took me to but this is Africa… they had a poisonous one in the tree that wasn’t even in a cage! After some pics of us holding the small snake we headed back to Arusha.
The next thing we saw was a bonus because it’s not something that every tour group could go see. Our tour guide, Alphonce, is actually part of a production group called GrandMaster Records and he offered to show us his setup. Now, in North America, everything is over-the-top, bling-bling, and what not… here, they had a recording studio, video production room, and even an area to film music videos in this compound. Now, at first site, the brick walls, dirt paths, cement platform, etc. fit right in with the area around it… Arusha isn’t huge… when he showed us the finished product of some of the stuff they’ve done, if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it was produced there . Even in the farthest reaches of Africa, the combined creative juices of a few brothers have made a modern music production company. It was really neat to see how it’s done differently here but the end product is pretty much the same. I guess music is truely universal. I really like seeing these non-tourist things and just seeing how people are really not that different all over the world.
Tags: Africa
cheng.ev
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:13 pm
what kind of music was it? u should have hopped on the mic and spit a couple of verses!