What Dining Car?

Since we were going to go back to US on Dec 28 we didn’t make any plans for the holiday season and it’s a bit of a ghost town with everyone else traveling, so what are we gonna do!

We decided on a short adventure. Take the train to Nairobi and visit some of our CDC friends who were also not traveling. Its an overnight train, might be fun(??), bought tickets at the station a few days before we were to travel, very cheap, dinner served but no round trip ticket sold, have to buy return ticket upon arrival in Nairobi (hmmmm, first warning bell)

Travel day arrives, we ask our friend Ray to give us a lift to the station. We climb aboard, kids excited. Train is, well, dilapidated to put it mildly, but we are still psyched for an adventure. Kids still happy. Train to leave at 6:30p and around 6:15 we ask what time dinner is served. The conductor looks at me puzzled…. Uh oh… “WHAT dinner?” he asks. Turns out they stopped taking the dining car a week ago but as usual these sorts of things are not communicated when I bought the ticket. The blood drained from our faces as Kayla and I looked at each other envisioning all sorts of horrors that could be experienced when spending the night on a moving train with two small children who wouldn’t have ANYTHING to eat for many hours! BE AFRAID!!

Immediately we go into action, hmmm, 10 minutes to departure… Kayla calls Ray and pleads with him to return to the station as fast as humanly possible with anything edible from his cupboards. I got off the train to try to find something to buy in the station. Hakuna chakula hapa (there is no food here). I only succeed in having a very cathartic scream at some of the railroad officials. Suddenly I see Ray running towards the train with a plastic bag and like in some old black and white movie he hands the bag up to me just as the whistle blows and we are off. Thank you RAY!!!

We are singing with joy as we sit down to our dinner of bananas, frozen banana bread and M&Ms. The train makes many stops on the way of course and on one of the first stops we hear lots of commotion outside. It’s pitch black so I have no idea what’s going on and my Swahili isn’t good enough yet to understand the talk but something is up. And then the machine gun carrying policemen who are riding with us (yes, Max is fascinated with the weaponry) go out to investigate. After a while we are informed that “someone has tampered with the tracks”. Oh wonderful, now what? An hour later we pull away having no idea what really happened. Whatever, lock the doors and we are all off to sleep.

We all have surprisingly good sleep and we wake to our breakfast of bananas, unfrozen banana bread and M&Ms and some beautiful scenery as we move through parts of the Rift Valley shrouded in mist while we enter Nairobi. We still have lots of stops to make before we enter the city. Each time this train pulls away from a station it’s like being shot out of a cannon. It’s a good thing they blow the trains whistle to warn us before they move. Like Pavlov’s dogs when we hear that whistle we all drop whatever we’re doing at the time and run for safety, even little Esther has learned (the hard way, unfortunately) that when that whistle blows she scrambles and grabs for the nearest adult limb.

After eighteen HOURS we finally arrive in Nairobi, (sheesh!) head straight to the ticket office and of course there are no return tickets for the next week! Awww, too bad. Frankly, I’m not THAT disappointed, just hope we can get airline seats this late.

We had great fun in the ‘big city’ for a few days, also had no trouble getting a flight back (oh, yes, they have fixed the Kisumu runway so flights are now running direct again), the kids had fun too, they are actually pretty good travelers now (as long as the can eat and sleep when needed) an adventure was had by all.

P.S. A South African company has just bought the Kenyan railroad and are promising many changes. It would be great for tourism to ride the rails on an refurbished colonial style railroad, we can’t wait.