One year ago today: Oct 1, 2005 (From Kenya to Tanzania, by way of crazy aggressive Masai women)

Sadly, we needed to move on from our VEF visit to Arusha, Tanzania. We would begin a ten day safari the following day, so we enjoyed one last morning with Wilson and Nancy Peru and set off for toward Tanzania.

We opted to fly from Kisumu to Nairobi, and then we would take a bus from Nairobi across the border to Tanzania (map). It would end up being a very long travel day, but at least we avoided the 8-10 hour bus ride from Kisumu from to Nairobi. After a long flight delay of a few hours and a short hop to Nairobi, we boarded a bus for a 5 hour drive to Arusha.

We had heard about the aggressiveness of the Masai when it comes to tourists. They are notorious about being hard-nosed about demanding money for photos and when selling things. We would learn this first hand at the border crossing from Kenya into Tanzania. I don't remember exactly how it came to pass, but I remember being constantly harassed by Masai women, who kept insisting on putting bracelets on our wrists and selling us stuff. It had been a long day of travel and I pretty much lost it and started yelling and cursing at the Masai women. Travel really does sometimes bring out our uglier sides.

As we were walking back to the bus on the Kenyan side of the border, there were a couple of guys standing next to the bus door. We didn't realize it, but they were just pretending to be the bus drivers and directed us to follow them to customs. We followed them for a while, and then heard our real bus drivers whistling and hollering for us to come back to the bus. That was a scary moment, and we're lucky to have spotted our real bus driver.

So it was a relief when we finally arrived at Arusha, where our safari guide for the next 10 days met us at the bus and took us to our hotel for the night. We enjoyed hot showers for the first time in Africa that night and looked forward to our extended Tanzanian safari.


Confrontational Masai woman at the border of Kenya and Tanzania.