Driving back to Nairobi was a lot quicker than driving to Arusha, considering that Billy didn’t have to bribe anyone in this direction. We stopped briefly in one of the towns on the way back to meet up with two of Billy’s brothers. One is a cop, and used to be a pretty good one in Nairobi.. but apparently he was a little “too good” and was shuffled out into the boonies. Haveing a driver with a cop for a brother does have advantages, as Billy can call him and find out where the police barricades will be. When we got back to “base-camp”, I noticed that in the laundry book there was some fine print at the bottom of the pages that read “Note: by African custom, ladies do not wash other ladies underpants”... guess that explains why that wasn’t a category on the laundry form!

Jim and I relocated into a different apartment today. We were hoping to move later in the day, but the woman who informed us of the opportunity assured us that if we waited, even that long, that it might be too late and may be given to another customer. So we got everything moved before 9:30am, at which time we headed to Magadi. The new place was a lot like the apartment we had the year before, except there were 2 bedrooms, and in an act of supreme generosity, Jim said I could have the large bedroom, and he and James would share the one with the 2 smaller beds. Yay!  Large bed, and a private bathroom =)

The only disadvantage is that we now had upstairs neighbors, and one of them wore high-heeled (read: clicky) shoes.

 

We spent the day in Magadi again, and, Holy Gods was it hot! I finally got to see the  magadiite I had read so much about. It’s an odd, white,  putty-like material... While driving around the salt pond roads we learned that the salt from the evaporation ponds is collected by hand.. there were a lot of people out (in the middle of the day no less!) raking the salt into piles and then shoveling it onto a truck. We came across a fish stranded atop some green-scum on what we came to call “Green Lagoon”, so I did my good deed by lobbing a couple of rocks in it’s direction to break the surface tension. It was a pretty good size for a Magadi fish, a good 3-inches or so...

I spent the morning trying to turn traveler’s cheques into cash, which isn’t as easy as one might think. Of course, using them wasn’t as easy as I expected either. I was offered some insultingly low rates, and then learned at the American Express bureau that the rate for buying them shouldn’t be any less than 2 kenyan shillings below the rate for American dollars. Oddly, they wouldn’t buy them from me, but they did tell me where a good place to try was, and that exchange rates were negotiable! Sure enough, we went to the Chase Forex right down from Billy’s office and I was able to negotiate a better rate. Absurdly, Jim got a lower rate for his 1999 hundred dollar bill than I did from my traveler’s cheques.