Sleeping Around (29 page)

James and Aylin didn't get in until 7.30 in the morning. They'd been working all night. Although both of them were utterly exhausted, they very kindly offered to escort me down to the ferry terminal (the ferry's last stop was only a short taxi ride from the airport). We still had a bit of time before the ferry departed, so we wandered down to a delightful little outdoor cafe on the waterfront and ordered black tea and some particularly sticky buns.

After our tea we were sitting back taking in the view when I interrupted our companionable reverie and said, ‘Thanks for being such lovely hosts'. This heartfelt if rather trite declaration was greeted with absolute silence.

I turned around and both James and Aylin had dozed off.

KENYA

15

‘I am a real Kenyan, I love my country, I love my family and you will go home full of mamories.'

Thadeus Mutinda Mutisya, 34, Nairobi, Kenya

CouchSurfing.com

‘Welcome to Nairobbery!' my host Thadeus Mutinda Mutisya beamed as we drove into the centre of Nairobi. ‘Some people call it Nairobbery,' he continued, ‘because some people get robbed often.'

When Mutisya then told me about a story in the
Daily Nation
newspaper that morning, I contemplated heading straight back to the airport. A man had been robbed in the slums, then his penis was chopped off with a machete and his body was dumped on the rail line. Gee, times must be tough to have to steal a penis—although I'm not exactly sure why you'd need a spare penis.

Maybe it would have been safer if I'd couch-surfed with George Ndungu, who listed his occupation as ‘Chief Head of Security'. Then again, I didn't quite fit his criteria for ‘Types of people I enjoy'. He said: ‘I enjoy young mature woman serving in social services, but who fancy enjoying the inner gift.'

Catherine might have also been a safe bet: ‘I live in a peaceful neighbourhood, clean and bully-free. No guns allowed.' In her case, though, I may not have been considered serious enough for her liking because she said ‘I don't like jokers'.

Chal, on the other hand, would only take guests who were safe: ‘We would like to welcome born again Christian guests who are safe and will not drink beer, smoke or use drugs. They should note that we don't go to the pubs or have drinking sprees.'

My host Mutisya was not quite so confident about his guests' safekeeping. He said: ‘Security is ok sometimes when in my place.' He did, however, offer to teach his guests how to kiss a giraffe:

Enjoy a home far away from home, learn about our culture, visit my village with our family on weekends, help in shopping, learn a bit of Kiswahili language, visit our beautiful places in town and learn how to kiss the giraffe.

I told him that I might pass on kissing a giraffe. Have you seen the size of their tongues?

I rang Mutisya from the airport and he offered to pick me up. He was right when he said that he would be easy to spot—Mutisya waltzed into the arrivals hall wearing an over-sized bright red Coca-Cola T-shirt with smart beige slacks and yellow thongs.

‘We are not staying in Nairobi,' Mutisya said when I jumped into his dusty Toyota. ‘We will visit my wife and children for a short time, then we will go to my village.' Mutisya's village was Mukuyuni in the Kangundo region, two hours east of the city. ‘I have big plans for you,' Mutisya gushed excitedly. ‘You will meet all of my family in the village and you will be very tired.'

‘How many are in your family?' I asked.

‘I have five brothers, three sisters and many, many cousins and you will meet them all. Then we will go meet some animals.'

Mutisya should have had a fair idea where to meet some animals. He ran his own tour and safari company.

Before we went to visit his wife and children for a short time, Mutisya took me on a tour of the city. Which turned out to be a tour of nondescript buildings. Our first stop was the National Conference Centre, a tall modern building in the centre of the business district.

‘You must get out and take a photo,' Mutisya urged. ‘It is the tallest building in
all
of Nairobi.'

Mutisya must have been very proud of Nairobi's tall buildings because at our next stop Mutisya said, ‘Take a photo. This is another nice tall building.' Mind you, we did stop a number of times to take photos of other buildings that weren't blessed with that crowd-pulling height advantage, including the Ministry of Finance building, Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, Ministry of Police building, Ministry of Education building and the City Morgue.

Besides the ‘very nice buildings', Nairobi was just as I imagined it: dusty, smelly, noisy—and that was just the people on every street corner jostling for pole position to sell stuff to passers-by.

‘Take a photo of the street,' Mutisya commanded as he pulled up in the middle of Kenyatta Avenue. ‘Now take one the other way. And look, there is a signpost, take that too.'

I'd been in the country for less than an hour and I'd already taken almost a hundred photos.

At the end of our tour we did stop somewhere that wasn't a modern building. It was more of a collection of wooden sheds. We had a brief stroll around Nairobi's oldest city market, although the old stalls were mostly selling very modern souvenirs like T-shirts and key rings. Well, the ones that weren't selling wooden giraffes, that is. I did purchase two authentic African souvenirs, though—two very authentic African bananas.

‘Nairobi has a small city centre and the rest is mostly slums,' Mutisya said as we drove down a street lined with corrugated-iron shacks and thick with ragged children slinking about in the shadows.

‘This is a very dangerous area,' Mutisya said matter-of-factly. ‘Make sure your door is locked.'

I'd checked before he'd finished saying ‘locked'. ‘If someone knocks on the window, ignore them,' he continued. ‘And whatever you do, don't open your window.' There was no way I was going to open my window. I'm quite attached to my penis and anxious to stay that way.

When we turned down a potholed dirt road where people in rags and yapping dogs huddled around piles of burning rubbish, Mutisya said, ‘This is a nicer part of town'. This nicer part of town was where Mutisya lived. We parked next to a donkey and cart and entered a small doorway set into a whitewashed brick wall that led into a dusty courtyard criss-crossed by crowded clotheslines. Several lodgings that seemed to be mostly full of screaming children overlooked the courtyard.

When Mutisya's five-year-old boy William skipped out to greet me, I gave him a colouring book and a big pack of crayons and I don't think I'd ever seen such delight in a child's eyes.

‘That's not my son,' Mutisya said.

I don't think I'd ever seen such sorrow in a child's eyes when I took the presents away from him and gave them to the real William.

The inside of Mutisya's house was quite gloomy, with the only light coming from one small candle. And when I say house, I'm actually talking about a one-room hut. Most of the space in that room was taken up by a double bed. There was a rather fetching brown-velour couch against one wall and an ornate brass glass-topped coffee table was squeezed in between the bed and the couch. There were no wardrobes or cupboards, so all the family's clothes were hanging around the walls. In one corner was the ‘kitchen', which amounted to nothing more than a small gas cooker and a sink. In the other corner was a separate ‘room' with a flush toilet. Just that alone made Mutisya's house worthy of being in a ‘nicer part of town'. I remember reading somewhere that in one area of Nairobi there were only ten pit toilets for 40 000 people.

Mutisya's wife Terry Mwongeli was happy to see me— particularly when I gave her a big box of Belgian chocolates that I'd bought in Turkey. Terry very proudly showed me five-week-old Lorenzo, who was gurgling away in a bassinette on the bed.

‘I named him after a couch surfer from Italy who stayed here,' Mutisya said.

Terry prepared us a breakfast of bananas, avocado, fried egg, coconut and bread, while William, like kids the world over, was happily colouring in with his tongue sticking out.

‘When is William's birthday?' I asked.

‘February the twenty-fifth.'

‘Oh!' I said. ‘My daughter Jasmine was born the day before.'

‘Then they
must
marry each other,' Mutisya said. ‘I will come to Australia with some cows.'

‘Cows?'

‘Yes, to give to you and your wife as a dowry.'

I showed Mutisya a photo of Jasmine and he was suitably impressed. ‘She is very beautiful,' he nodded. ‘I think she is worth five cows. Maybe six.'

It was a good offer. Mutisya's parents only got one cow from his wife's family.

The minute we finished breakfast, Mutisya stood up and said, ‘Now we must go'. Then, without even a glance in farewell to his wife, we were out the door.

On the drive out of the city Mutisya kept pulling over to the side of the road. He seemed to know just about everyone in Nairobi and, like some royal dignitary, he would either stop to shake hands or wave and smile as we drove past. On one of our regal stops we picked up Mutisya's cousin Willy, who jumped into the driver's seat. ‘I don't have a licence,' Mutisya shrugged. ‘And I don't know how to drive.'

That would certainly help explain the seemingly random careering all over the road.

‘You can just buy a licence in Kenya,' Mutisya said. ‘Or you can do the test, which is easy anyway. You just have to drive fifty metres and be able to go from first to second gear, then they stop and hand you your licence.'

Mind you, I was soon unsure if Willy knew how to drive either. He had a somewhat unnerving penchant for overtaking into oncoming traffic and then veering uncontrollably onto the shoulder, scattering chickens and the odd startled bystander. Willy hailed from Mutisya's neighbouring village and was working as a driver so he could afford to finish the fourth and last year of his training as a motor mechanic. A driver who is also a mechanic is highly sought after in Kenya. Given the state of the roads and the state of the driving, it wasn't hard to see why.

When we stopped for petrol, Mutisya asked me if I wanted to get out and take a photo of the petrol station.

‘I'm fine, thanks.'

I also declined to take a photo of the supermarket where Mutisya stopped to get some rice and oil for his family in the village.

Not long after leaving the supermarket, we were out of the city and speeding through wide-open plains dotted with flat-top trees that looked just like the plains in
The Lion King
(but without the musical accompaniment). Within minutes I spotted my first African animals. Okay, they were only local cows and goats, but African animals nonetheless.

After more than an hour of driving across the unchanging plains, we turned off the main road and drove through the village of Tala, which was the last major town before Mutisya's village. And when I say drove through, I mean we drove right through the middle of the weekly market, scattering people, cows, goats and an entire class of schoolgirls in neat green dresses. Most of the produce in the market, which included maize, coffee beans, millet, sweet potatoes and onions, had been harvested from the surrounding farms.

We stopped for lunch at the Backyard Club Restaurant on the edge of town. A waiter in a crisp white shirt and bow tie greeted us at the entrance, then escorted us to our own private whitewashed mud-walled dining hut with a conical thatched roof. The hut was one of about a dozen clustered around a large central, open-sided bar. Each dining hut housed six to ten built-in, throne-like chairs set around a small central table. These ‘traditional' huts were named after ‘traditional' European football teams. As soon as we sat down in the Juventus hut (I refused to sit in the Arsenal one), Mutisya immediately summoned the waitress, by grunting at her, and grunted an order for some grilled chicken and Tusker beers.

‘The owner's father is a senior police official,' Mutisya whispered as we sat down. ‘So that is why he can afford to own this place.'

Mutisya leant over and gave me a sly wink. ‘It helps if you have corruption.'

‘Does Kenya have a lot of corruption?' I asked.

Mutisya scoffed. ‘Kenya is the world capital of corruption.'

Wilson, the owner, joined us for a drink before taking me on a tour of his recently opened, and somewhat empty, corruption-funded restaurant.

‘Your lunch is very fresh,' Wilson said as we stopped at the open-sided kitchen. The chef was plucking a chicken, which up until only a few minutes before had been clucking away happily in the cage next to the kitchen.

Back in the Juventus hut a gorgeous waitress appeared with a jug of warm water and soap to wash our hands. ‘In Kenya we eat with our hands,' Mutisya said, miming putting food in his mouth with his hands.

‘I think we should order some more food,' Mutisya said. ‘You must have the famous Kenyan dish
Nyama choma
. Do you want cow or goat?'