2017/09 Part 2 Amboseli - Mon Namanga |
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Namanga is a country town, more relaxed than Nairobi. Three passengers on a motorcycle was normal here, sometimes four. We saw one guy with a haybale strapped to his back, so heavy that the bike’s front wheel was sometimes airborne. Another was dragging 12 foot long pieces of lumber with one end on the ground. It made us think of the dangerous things we did in our youth when our only transport was a motorcycle!
(It looks like I have a blank last page and Sandie doesn’t like that, so I’ve included a couple of pictures of us and Nzuki to take up the space.)
In Namanga we saw lots of motorcycles fitted with a cargo bed and two back wheels, 
but there were still oxcarts in use too. Livestock was everywhere, mingling with the traffic.
Crossing the border was generally a friendly affair but somewhat chaotic. There were new buildings so most people didn’t seem to know where to go.
We didn’t have visas in advance as that would have involved sending our passports away to a remote Tanzanian embassy, too risky in the time window we had.
We had to formally exit from Kenya in the Kenyan building and then go to the Tanzanian building, where we filled in visa forms, went somewhere else to pay $50 each for our visas and then took our receipts back to pick our stamped passports. There’s no obvious formal crossing point and when we came outside the van was sitting close to a Landcruiser and our luggage was quickly transferred.
There was no customs check, at least not for us.
Nzuki introduced us to Ayoub who was to be our guide for our four nights in Tanzania. We said goodbye to Nzuki and thanked him for what had been a great few days. He said it was possible that he’d be our guide for the Masai Mara when we returned to Kenya, but it wasn’t certain yet.
We climbed into the Landcruiser and Ayoub drove us into Tanzania towards our next stop at Ngorongoro Crater. This seems to be a good point to end this part of the journal.