| Date: | 06/06/2004 |
| Title: | good bye nairobi and friends! |
| Location: | addis abeba, ethiopia (2447 m) |
| Text: | 53 194 kilometres on the road on monday, after yet another night in pain, i went to the clinic to see a doctor. the medication had not shown any effect and after less than an hour of sleep that night i was totally exhausted. a stool test showed no sings of amoeba and my doctor suspected salmonella, which are more difficult to trace, as the cause of my stomach problems. i was lucky; the pains subsided the very afternoon and two days later i was back on my feet. returning from kampala i spent my last three nights in nairobi. it was a definite goodbye to a town that had become a home away from home and where i had made a lot of good friends. i felt a wave of sadness when the taxi driver handed me his business card, telling me to call him whenever i needed a ride in nairobi. "i won't return," i told him, "not for a while, for sure". later, when i waited for check-in to start, with nothing else to do i read the card and had to grin, it said: INNOCENT MURAGE - NEWBORN CHRISTIAN - TAXI DRIVER - +254 720 882 972. i had a bad start back in addis abeba. the baro hotel was full and i made the mistake to follow the taxi drivers recommendation to a 'nearby' hotel with "big, clean, self-contained rooms for sixty birr" which turned out a grubby brothel with tiny rooms at 80 birr, way out of the centre of town, where teenage prostitute didn't take "no" for "no" and kept knocking at my door until i told them i was gay. i was glad that i didn't receive a subsequent visit by a hopeful teenage boy… |