Hobo’s on Tour – East Africa

Ok, so here I am behind my desk at the office pretending to be hard at work when really I’m scouring Google and BootsnAll for anything that I may have forgotten as well as any last minute information about my destinations.
No matter how hard I try to focus, my productivity has surely dropped to way below 10%… shocking!!! But in 10 working days I’ll be free from this mundane Monday to Friday 9-5 necessity just chilling out getting ready to leave so who can blame me?. Besides my bosses are so incompetent and so easy to fool that I just can’t resist getting paid to research my trip.
I’m supposed to hand in my notice this coming Friday and then work one last week but whether or not I can actually stick this place for that much time… it’s going to be tough and we’ll have to see, I’m going to have to try much harder to get out of bed at 7am every morning, I’ve been getting up a few minutes later and later every day for the past month and now, I just about get in on time. It’s also going to be difficult to keep my mouth shut at work, they still don’t know I’m leaving for Africa and not talking about my trip is getting so much harder!

So there’s now only 14 days remaining, for the best part of this year, my trip has just felt like a distant dream, and now, every single day it’s becoming more and more of a reality, I feel like someone who’s been unconscious for the past few months and somebody’s suddenly started slapping me to wake up, with each slap I wake just a little bit more.

I’ve still got so much to do though; Andrew (The father of my travel buddy, Phoenix) is lending me a heavy duty rucksack so I don’t have to buy one anymore… £££ result! Next Wednesday I’m having my yellow fever jab, £52! Robbery! Where do my taxes go I wonder? I still have a few clothes to buy as well as some essentially comfortable walking shoes, and a multitude of other random bits and pieces that I probably wont need but don’t want to be without… just in case.
Months of planning and I still leave everything until the last minute, I’m such a typical hobo! Lol.

I had a flurry of excited text messages from Phoenix last night asking me to bring out plenty of chocolate and a couple of girlie magazines… typical female! Lol.
She’ll be leaving the refugee camp that she’s currently working at (near Kitgum, northern Uganda) in the next few days and slowly making her way across to Nairobbery to meet up with me at the airport… I haven’t broken it to her yet that I land at 5am… I’m sure she’s not going to like getting up at that time of the morning at all!
It’s been 8 months since I’ve seen her, I know we’re going to get on very well with each other and I’m looking forward to seeing just how much she’s grown as a person since this 9 months volunteer project was her first big trip abroad, and for an 18 year old I’m sure it has altered the course of her life.
“May we live in interesting times.”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under East Africa, The Final Countdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.