Spaghetti Bolognese in the Maasai Mara

Feeding Your Foreigner

We at Kenyan Tourist Services are very pleased that you’ve decided to set up your own safari/mountain climbing/tourist herding company!  It’s a slippery slope to take, with so many companies already on the market, filling the streets and chasing white people through towns with offers of help, so we’ve produced this handy guide to help you feed the foreigners you will have in your care.

Never be conned into thinking that they are like you or I; foreigners have very special dietary requirements which must be met at all times if they are not to wilt away or escape.  They can’t spend their money if they’re dead!  The following guidelines should help you keep your charges sleek and healthy during their time in the country.

1. Foreigners eat many times a day

We really do mean a lot.  You will need to feed your foriegner at least four meals a day, normally five.  How do you fit all these in?  It’s quite simple really.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner are read, of course.  You can then add in the meal ‘afternoon tea’.  Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just tea - you need to provide a large amount of stodgy food then too!  We suggest popcorn, doughnuts, huge piles of biscuits and some fruit.

As for that extra meal, there are plenty of times you can slip it in.  Why not feed the foreigner as soon as it awakes (with biscuits and doughtnuts again) a few hours before you serve breakfast?  Or what about a sneaky extra meal just an hour after dinner, before they sleep?

2.  Foreigners must eat meat three times a day

Unlike you or I, who can survive only with relatively clear arteries, foreigners’ blood vessels are a much larger capacity, and so they demand a large amount of meat to fill their veins with blood.  You need to give them meat at each of the three main meals.  If possible, make sure an egg accompanies each meal too.

3. Foreigners eat a large volume at each meal

You might think that a single plate of food would be enough for them, but you are wrong.  The major meals should have three courses at all times, not including hot drinks and biscuits.  This large amount of feeding has the advantage of making your foreigner sluggish and tired frequently, so you have to entertain them less.

4. Gender makes no difference, nor does activity

Foreigners eat the same no matter who or where they are.  A young man climbing a big hill needs just the same amount as a woman who will be sitting on a bus all day - lots.  Assume infinite stomach capacity.

5. Foreigners metabolise caffeine strangely

Unlike us, foreigners are actually put to sleep by drinks containing lots of caffeine.  As such, ensure that you never give your foreigner coffee at breakfast, but slowly increase the amount on offer during the day until you reach a crescendo at supper, where coffee is the only thing on offer.  If your foreigner seems reticent to drink coffee just before sleeping, ensure you give them poor quality coffee during the day and then the best stuff just before they sleep to encourage them to drink it all up.  It’s for their own good!

6. Foreigners cannot eat unfamiliar food

The foreign person cannot drink our water, which makes them ill, nor eat the food that we do.  However, they will have come in search of an “authentic African experience”, so will not eat food presented to them as familiar.  Your job is to con the foreigner into eating what they would at home, but thinking that it is an exotic dish.  There are many ways you can do this:

a) Give it a funny name.  Instead of saying “spaghetti bolognese”, call it “minced stew with noodles”.  Most foreigners will not notice the difference.

b) Give it to them in bits.  In America, doughnuts come with sugar on.  To trick your foreigner, give it tasteless dough lumps and then leave a pot of sugar on the table near them.  Within a few minutes, they should have figured it out themselves.

c) Call it a delicacy.  They will then feel obliged to eat it, and superior about their own country.

7. Cover everything in oil

Foreigners like everything to be covered indiscriminately in oil, especially things you or I would not suspect.  Salad is always a good one*, as are noodles or bread.  No special oil is needed - just a big vat of frying oil will do.  Endeavour to fry anything which can be cooked.

8. Foreigners like practicing their maths

They need plenty of practice to keep them sharp, and it occupies them for a while.  Every now and then, provide one less meal than there are people.  How about putting in 3 sandwiches for 4 people, with 5 bananas?  The mental arithmatic in making things fair will also tire them out for a bit so they stop asking you questions.

Follow these simple guidelines and you too can run your own successful tour company!

* ‘Salad’ means a big pile of leaves from any shrub you can find

Where Can You See Lions?

Only in Kenya!

Yes, we just got back from safari, which was all rather nice. We saw lots of animals indeed, all frolicking about in a big field they call the Maasai Mara. The song was lying about the tigers though. There are no tigers in Kenya.

I was expecting to have to squint at the little things in the distance, using the camera zoom to the max to even make out what animal it was. Of course, I had forgotten that these animals have been surrounded by minibuses full of people since the day they were born, following them about the countryside and staring. We got close. Very close.

And I saw loads of things! I saw springbok and topi and kudu and Thompson’s gazelle and Grant’s gazelle and buffalo and wildebeest and big elephants and baby elephants and a male lion eating a buffalo and lion cubs and a lionness hunting and vultures watching the hunting and ostriches and giraffes not being hunted and little giraffes who run like idiots and guineafowl and hartibeest and yellow-crested cranes and a cheetah under a tree and a cheetah cub and hyena and Egyptian geese and herons and impala and a sausage tree…

But no zebra. There are no zebra in the Maasai Mara (apart from me).

- Greg

Being British

If there’s one thing I’ve been pretty certain about all my life, it’s that I’m British. I’ve really been rather proud about the whole thing, actually. I blame the passport a little, for the pompous writing it’s got in the front demanding that foreigners care for me because I am British and great.

Since I’ve left the country, though, I have been moving further away from my ethnic identity day by day. Sometimes for expediency, sometimes for embarrassment and sometimes for humour.

It all started out of the lying-about-our-names phase. You know, there are some people on the street who you simply do not want to know your name, so you make one up. Then you feel much less uncomfortable when they tell you how nice a name it is and shout it after you down the street as you walk away. I’ve always liked ‘Sophie’ and ‘Susan’, so use those quite a lot. It also avoids everyone I meet telling me I’m named after the wife of Abraham.

But those are quite boring names, really. Would that I were able to keep a straight face more I would love to have the guts to introduce myself as ‘Flangewad’ to people, to then be told that it is a beautiful name. As it is, I still have to cough every time that particular party member brings it up.

Why stop at a name, though? If I don’t want these people to know just my first name, I certainly do not want them to know where I come from. It started innocently enough with accent-identification-failures (”Ahh, you’re American!”) but it soon became apparent that few people can place the range of British accents that exist. I now frequently find myself traveling with Anna the Australian, who has a fantastically crap accent she wheels out randomly.

So where have I gone for? I’m sure any of you who remember Sooty’s Big Day Out (or whatever it was called) cannot but forget my stirling example of a Scottish accent. Sophie the Edinburgher is able to be as rude to annoying people as she likes, because she has the right accent. Well, not the ‘right’ accent, maybe. An accent. Or a few accents which kind of merge together. Sophie does sometimes come out as Irish.

When we were up Mount Kenya, though, we shied our Englishness even more, and this time not to protect our personalities from unwanted attention or to amuse our companions (and sometimes other people riding the bus, who notice that in the same journey we purport to be from numerous countries). This time, it was all the fault of some fellow Brits. We happened upon a group of tweenagers.

At first we were rather excited by the prospect of meeting them. Whilst we stumbled about near the campsite halfway up the mountain (in the heather and the thistles and all manner of other growths which would have been so at home in England) we saw the exuberant little buggers arrive and spend a long time trying to take a photograph of them all jumping at the same time. We contrived not to feel old in their presence. We could be gap year students after all, right? There’d be no problem with us making some new friends and chatting to them.

It turns out there was a problem. It was them. And arguably our age, but mostly them.

The hut we were staying in had thin walls. Very thin walls, in fact. In many places you could just see into the next room. There was no sound absorption whatsoever, as well the tweenagers next door realised when they heard me singing the Wonderstuff’s ‘The Size of a Cow’ repeatedly. Everyone in the corridor could hear everyone else.

So what the hell possessed them to play Never Have I Ever in the middle of the night? There wasn’t even any alcohol! Over the next two hours we became well acquainted with them and in the end I felt sorry for Floppy Hand Job’s lack of sexual gratification at the limp wrists of his girlfriend. I was still unsure how Man Who Lost His Virginity to Woman With a Hairy Minge had managed to repulse the girl so that she wouldn’t speak to him again, but it sounded as though he and Girl Who Wouldn’t Swallow were getting on rather well. They shared a bed in the end.

We informed them again that we could hear everything, and they then talked about that fact for a while. It was very hard at breakfast the next morning not to ask them all the follow-up questions. The girl who pulled 20 men in 2h30 in Cambridge whilst dressed as a Barbie; what night club was that? Men Who Was Twenty Three, when are you going to tell all these people that you’re gay? Man Who Ejaculated on a School Keyboard, how much did it cost you to replace it?

Of course, everyone else in the hut thing had heard too. And worst still, someone asked us to keep it down in the future. So we fled as fast as we could from our British identities, shunned the tweenagers and moved as quickly as we could from their age range. Instead of befriending them, we found some nice American men who did aid work in Sudan. We could get away from our association with those horrible, noisy Brits then.

So we’re not tweenagers any more, and glad of it. We’re barely even British. Sophie loves her home in Scotland, with her husband and exceptionally ugly five-year-old daughter Alice. Her husband wants to put Alice up for adoption, but Sophie is worrying about how to afford plastic surgery for her. The story takes a long time, and by that point Annoying Bus Man has decided he doesn’t want to sell Sophie a fish anyway. He really just wants to get away from her. It’s rather nice to turn the tables every now and then.

The Water Goes Both Ways

I went to the Equator! I think this means that I was in a state of continual equinox, although I am not sure. More importantly, the water goes both ways! There were people at the Equator with water and tubs with holes in, and they put water in and on one side the water drained one way and on the other side it switched! Well, it probably did. Mummy wasn’t going to pay £3 in order to see someone put water in a bowl. But I imagined it really hard.

The moon has now turned the other way up, and is confusing everyone even more. No; it’s not the difference between waxing and waning. Mummy et al spent a long time with come condiments trying to determine what was going on, and they all failed. Then they asked the guide, and he got confused. He rang some scientist friends, and they did not know. Now we have to email him when we have figured out what the hell is going on with it.*

* It turns out crossing the Equator did not invert the moon. Bafflement continues.

Up Hill and Down Dale

Hello everyone! Just thought I’d give you a quick update on what I’ve been up to, so you can have a look at the photos which I’m sure will be uploaded very soon and contextualise them. And what a time I’ve been having!

We’ve been in Kenya for quite a while now, doing all the main tourist things. We’ve got ourselves nice and crispy, been to a horrible tourist market where you have to battle to be allowed to leave again, and seen some wildlife and stuff. Not that much wildlife, granted, but some more is bound to appear at some point, right?

I am currently a very filthy zebra, due to the amount of time we have spent in the great outdoors. Mummy has found a new zebra pocket in her trousers, so I spend most of my time with my head poking out by her left knee. Sometimes, though, I have to hide because lots of people feel the need to get me out and look at me. There is widespread shock that Mummy was able to get hold of a zebra somewhere other than Africa.

My most recent outside adventure was up Mount Kenya! It’s the tallest mountain in Kenya (Kilimanjaro is the biggest in Africa, but very expensive so we’re not going there) and we went up very high indeed. So high, in fact, that R got very poorly. Luckily, she did not die on the way up there though, and we all got to see the sun rising. On the way down Mummy fell over a lot, including into a river and flat on her face on some rocks. We also met some nice people.

Soon we are going to the Masai Mara to see even more animals! I am well excited. I may also get a bath at some point.

The Language Barrier

Almost every person in Kenya speaks three languages. Luckily, I can count myself as one of them (although I’m not really sure that English, Latin and BSL are really allowed).

Everyone speaks their own tribal language, as well as Swahili and English, which is the official language. This means that all the signs are in English, but the conversation on the street is all in Swahili. Occassionally, some Swahili signs appear too, but these are very rare and are normally matched by a replica sign with the English translation on but a few metres away.

Despite the prevalence of English, there are still a few words which have acquired different meanings here. If you ever decide to come and visit Kenya, you might be well advised to look out for the following phrases:

Notebook - a bundle of sheets of paper with a bit of glue across the top. If you want a real notebook which might survive more than a day in your bag, you should really try to take one with you to show people. “Fancy notebook” is a step forward and will do at a push - this refers to the crappy school notebooks young children use.

Meat - a thing in its own right. You will be hard pressed to find out which animal it originated from, if any. Chances are that all ‘meat’ you encounter will be goat. Goats are made mainly of fat.

Student - anyone 23 or under. If you are over 23 you will have to pay triple the amount that students do, even if you can produce a range of student cards. This is the difference between $100 park entry fees and $20 entry fees in some cases.

Juice - there is fruit everywhere in Kenya, a good deal of it rotting on the streets or being thrust through bus windows at you. Given the enormous amount, you might think that juice would be easy to come by. You are wrong. The phrase normally means very watery squash, with plenty of added sugar.

Coffee - it is a widely-known fact that some of the best coffee in the world comes from Kenya. In fact, almost all of the good coffee in Kenya ends up in British supermarkets. There is none left here. ‘Coffee’ refers to brown powder which dissolves into bitter gravy.

Tea - milk with a little water in. Sometimes, Brown will be added.

Volcano - very high up steaming rock which smells of rotten eggs.

Jambo - sometimes mistaken for the Swahili word for ‘hello’, this actually means ‘I want to sell you a safari, but will be taking a while to get to my point’.

Computer - box with occassional flashing light, normally identified by a big gaping hole in the side. These devices attract power failures.

Special Price - after a conversation, you will often be offered a special price for something you have seen in a shop. This is just another way of saying “tourist tax”, which you must pay on all goods if you cannot speak Swahili.

Mosquito Net - sheet of netting with big holes in it over the head and legs of the sleeping person. Sheet is normally too small to go over a bed.

Hassle Free - you will often see tourist shops described in their names as ‘hassle free’. This is all a question of scale. Instead of being followed around and lead by the elbow to things, you will simply be talked at incessantly.

Hello - think that man is being nice and friendly, eh? Well, he is! So friendly, in fact, that he has decided that he is going to marry you at any cost. Existing husbands will not deter him, so pick a religion in which divorce is not allowed. Make sure you mention your children unless you want to be questioned at great length about your contraceptive strategem. He went to England once, you know, and is involved in the media. Are you sure you don’t want a new husband? What about your friends? Well, what about a safari then?

It’s fun to stay at the…

That’s right, despite the adults being neither Ms or Cs, they have just got back from spending some time at the YMCA.  Apart from the alcohol ban, it was probably one of the best places we could have found to stay.

We’ve all been at Lake Naivasha, somewhere in Kenya, visiting Hell’s Gate National Park.  It’s one of the few (I’m tempted to say only but I’m not sure) national parks where visitors can walk or cycle through.  I got to sit in Mummy’s pocket with my head poked out during both of these.  As a result, I am now incredibly filthy.  More a springbok than a zebra.

We saw both of those, incidentally.  On first entering the park we stopped for a long time so Mummy et al could take photographs of zebra in the distance using all their zoom powers.  Had we known that soon we would not be able to move for my cousins they might not have spent so long doing it.  We are now all bored of zebras.

None of the Big Five were seen in the park but there was a volcano which Mummy and R and me (kind of) climbed up.  No lava, but plenty of steam whizzing out of the ground and some rocks which smelt really bad.

We learnt that you can cook many things on a fire when your gas stove has run out.  You can even bake eggs by breaking them into tin foil cups and hurling them in the flames.  We also had roasted yam, as we had incorrectly identified it as sweet potato in the market.

This unconnected rant was brought to you courtesy of very little sleep and heat rash (which is very very ugly, but not in any way painful or itchy)