Hi! Welcome back.

(Re)pack your bags

Almost immediately after hitting send on the previous installment, we head downstairs to meet our group. It definitely felt like the first day of school for a bit, but I'm actually extremely happy with how chill everyone has been. Which I guess makes sense - spending a lot of money to rough it in a tent selects for a certain kind of millenial.

Not that there's been that much roughing it so far, but we'll get to that.

Our first couple of days, we get told, are out in the Masai Mara national park - and in a twist that's extremely exciting for me and exactly nobody else, we are going to have to repack our already very small bags into a new, smaller overnight bag. And, we'd have to fit our sleeping bags and pillows in there too, cause it's a campsite. A towel wouldn't hurt either, nor would warm clothes. Did I mention all this had to fit in a day pack?

(I know, right?! Very exciting.)

The travel montage

Bags repacked, we head out through Nairobi in the back of two big safari trucks - out from the swanky CBD, through what our driver told us (weirdly proudly? or at least matter-of-factly) was the biggest slum in the country, then out past the national park-adjacent upper-class suburbs, which (amusingly, to us) are called 'Karen'.

We cut through the city, and the suburbs that surround it, and the farming regions that surround that, and the turbulent streams of traffic that weave through its various strata, all with different business but equal in their busyness.

We watch as walls and tarmac become trees and weirdly familiar red dirt, and then we drive for several more hours after that. Truly we would soon be deep in the wilderness, far beyond any modern conveniences.

So imagine our disappointment when we rock up to the campsite, after such exciting packing hype, and such a luridly described travel montage, to be greeted with freshly laundered sheets and hot showers.

Look, I only have one data point so far, but it's possible that the rhetoric about how rough it's going to be is a lie, planted purely to weed out those with the incorrect vibes.

Or maybe they're just easing us into it. I guess we'll find out.

Next time, baby animal content. Yeah. Get hyped.

See you soon,

Rocky.