African   Histories

Dawn in Africa. Still from the bed of a hotel in Nairobi it is possible to be appreciated that Africa has a different light, that the negrura is opened to passage to blows at night, evacuating abruptly and offering a perspective different from any object, as if covered with a shining varnish layer everything what touches and gave a more beautiful and alive aspect him. Early we went, with the same excitation that a group of children in his first excursion, to the encounter of our future companions of adventure, and also with the most important element of our expedition, a cross-country vehicle Mercedes (lightening, robust germanic technology) that will be our appendix in the 2 next weeks and will serve as house, dining room, hall reading, dormitory, terrace with views, classroom and forum of social gathering. With regards to our companions, the group seems extracted of a meeting of the UN because in 25 people they are up to 8 nationalities, Briton, North American, Australian, keniata, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Swedish. Without difficulties we did not place all the luggage and we were located in the truck expectant, and one same one becomes a bet on which it will happen in a space where the privacy is not possible, and in which you will be elbow with elbow with which you do not know anything in the 2 next weeks. With these thoughts in my head, the truck ignites its powerful diesel engine and our Australian driver begins to roll the first kilometers of the total of 5000 that hopes to us.

The Nairobi word comes from the Masai enkare nyarobe, that means fresh water, since here there was a well where the Masai took their flocks to water. Its altitude of 1870, which gives a very healthful climate him, caused that Nairobi grew quickly from its foundation in 1896 like camping of construction of the railroad, assuming the condition of capital in 1907 on Mombasa, whose climate is much more unhealthy, by the pressures of the farmers seated in High Earth.

Nairobi is a great city, at least big, with skyscrapers that impose their compact presence and contrast with the chaos that is lived in the streets; it seems as if these skyscrapers had been made to lodge all the order and the effectiveness of the British ex--colony and to move away most possible of the ground where expression is in its Maxima disorganization and the African chaos. Nothing else to leave the city, one realizes of which, unlike Europe, where we have modified, manipulated and destroyed our natural surroundings, and we only found virgin nature in certain limited areas, in Africa the reserves are the cities, where concentrates all the activity of the humans in few square kilometers, but that the true owners of the country are a exuberante nature and the wild animals that one is to only 10 minutes of the city vagando freely by the interminable savannah.