Llygad y dydd

By Charlalaliz

Nightmare of a journey

In the morning, our group spilt into 2 - us who were direct return after the climb (10 of us) and then the 17 who stayed on to do a week of independent travel in Tanzania/Kenya. I'd have loved to do independent travel, but simply couldn't afford it.

So we set off from Moshi at around 11am on a bus, heading to Nairobi where we'd spend the night. At about 1pm we pulled over in a bus station, and were told that we had to change buses to get to Nairobi. We were then informed that if we wanted to eat then we'd have to buy food from a local supermarket. So half the group stayed on the bus and half went in search of food. They returned with bread, crisps, biscuits and water - so we all had crisp butties (not very substantial mind).

We set off from this station at 2pm, carrying on our journey to Nairobi - including the border crossings which seemed to take even longer than the previous time. My blip was taken from inside the bus - of a basic building in front of land that was for sale.

We made it to the outskirts of Nairobi at 7pm. The traffic was absolutely horrendous - it was sooo busy, and the drivers were insane!!! There's absolutely no respect for other drivers, no lane control, no signalling, no regard for speed. It was terrifying!!!.

We were told that we were to stay in a hotel, which we arrived at at around 9pm. The staff at the hotel said we weren't booked in there. At this point we were off our bus and on the streets of Nairobi, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, sticking out like a sore thumb because we're white and touristy.

A local bus driver tried to help us out - he'd been told of our situation and rang various people to try and get some answers. Apparently we were to wait for another Childreach group and head to a campsite in the centre of Nairobi. At this point we were all completely fed up - what should've been a 6 hour journey had taken 10 hours and we'd been lied to about the hotel. We wanted to go to the airport and spend the night there as we thought it'd be the safest option.

Adam who was the oldest guy in our group and had travelled a bit in Africa before decided to take on the role of leader, and reassured us that things would be fine. He eventually managed to get hold of a person at Childreach, who told us we couldn't go to the airport incase anything happened - they wouldn't take responsibility for it. Adam has firm words with the person on the other end, explaining everything that'd happened. Apparently there was no other group, but we still had to go to the campsite - they reassured us that it was nice, that they'd done a risk assessment, and that there'd be hot water.

Reluctantly, we went to the campsite, thanks to the bus driver who'd stuck with us. When we got there, there was loud music blaring out, and we found out this wasn't a tourist campsite. We were also informed that we hadn't been booked in here either. We waited for ages and the owner let us have 2 rooms (not tents) until 4am when we'd have to get up to be taken to the airport.

The music went on until 2am, clearly Childreach had not done a risk assessment as they'd know that music is played on that night. Needless to say we got absolutely no sleep that night.

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