We all met up at the truck bright and early(ish)- 9am, learning that she(the truck) was called Nomi. We also met Steve, our driver/general hero of the trip. We rolled the sides up, put the music on and started out on our first road trip. Then 20 minutes down the road we stopped… for a stock up of food, sim cards and drink. The team clambered back on the truck a few hours later and were ready to roll.
With all our faces stuffed with snacks and getting very excited about starting the trip we carried on getting to know each other whilst leaning to the windows and watching Africa pass us by. Its brilliant being able to see so much from the truck, definitely the best way to travel. We saw the difference between countryside and town living, but in every place we passed there were hands waving at us. The kids running along side the truck trying to race us was a high point for me!
We drove through the rift valley and had a half hour break to take some awesome photos and go to the loo (some decided to hold it in after seeing the toilet though!). One of our group Chris just couldn’t say no to the sales men and ended up buying a lot of stuff, some good some not so much.
We arrived at beautiful lake Naivasha at around 4pm and were shown how to put up our tents and also had to pick our tent buddies for the month. The task of putting up the tents went surprisingy smoothly. Before dinner we had a little walk around camp and saw colobus monkeys and vervets just above us in the trees, amazing! We carried on down to the lake, less than 5 minutes away from camp and saw a hippo! AWESOME… what a perfect first day!
August 11th, 2010 at 9:19 am
Well written Anna hartwell-douglas. ( nice name). Day one
sounded wonderful. To travel on that truck open windows with Africa passing you by must have been awesome.
Yes the fabrics on sale are a bit bright for our taste.
Glad you managed to put up the tents. Can get a bit tangled to the uninitiated (mmm dont quite know how to spell that ).
I smiled at your purchases. Food and SIM CARDS ! !
Love all the articles. I am travelling with you. Thank you
August 12th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Anna mate that sounds amazing. Glad it’s going really good can’t wait to hear more about it all! Pictures look good too, so jealous! Love you man
August 23rd, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Wow! Lake Naivasha!! Heard and read about it so many times as a boy and now you go and get there ahead of me! There is only one word for that..Abuse! Africa looks awesome but can you not have a quiet word with the boys and get ‘em to pull over, put on the genny, set up that dish and then hire a chunk of satellite bandwidth? You could then upload a decent amount of photos to Facebook so we could actually see what the place is like….
Africa..What a place. If me latest funding bid comes good, I’m over there.
Keep on Trucking guys…