Leaving Serengeti......

It's time to leave the Serengeti and head to the Chobe River and the Zambezi Queen. We awoke at 6:00 in the morning for what would be an arduous day of travel to Johannesburg, South Africa. We had travelled to the Serengeti on a slightly larger bush plane, but this was to be our transportation to Kilimanjaro International Airport where we would transfer to another plane for the trip to Nairobi. In the bush you get a single engine, dirt runway and a pilot named Steve. At Kilimanjaro, we were upgraded to a paved runway, two engines and a co-pilot as well. 

At Nairobi, it would be a 737 to Johannesburg and a night at the Intercontinental Hotel at the airport.  It all sounds like the trip would only get better with each stop, but in reality the best layover was at Kilimanjaro, a nice, clean, small airport with great wi-fi; the worst, the four hours we spent in hot, stuffy, crowded Nairobi, We finally arrived in Joberg at midnight and by the time we cleared customs and walked across the street to the hotel, checked in and got to our rooms it was one. We left the next morning at ten to face another six hours of travel.

As inconvenienced and stressed as we may have been, our day was pretty easy compared to the daily life of the vast majority of people we saw in Kenya and Tanzania and would see in the remaining countries. What we saw has been haunting me for awhile and I wanted to take some time to show village life.  In the cities, there are cars, congestion, careers and the chaos one finds in all large cities third world country or not, but in the villages it is dirt roads, walking everywhere, hand to mouth existence, and no services except what's provided by aid groups.

This is a typical village road. The paved one is a few miles away.

Store fronts in a small village.

Storefronts in a larger village.

The people do have a sense of humor.

No matter if the roads are paved or not, one sees few cars, an occasional motorbike, a rare tuk-tuk, but people walking everywhere. 

A Maasai. The men, no matter their age, always carry a stick, used for fighting or fending off animals. 

Off to collect fresh water. How far will they walk?

Mother and child

Moving goods is no easier even if the roads are paved.

In the subsistence or vendor economy most people live in, it's all about selling anything, anywhere by the road or in roadside markets to exist. The first three pictures are from the regional city Arusha.

The next photos are from a thriving Maasai market on the to Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

The butcher  shop. Refrigeration does not exist for most.

They sell just about everything.

Those of you who have been reading my posts know how touched we were in Cambodia by the people. The same goes for India, but their per capita income is, respectively, $2,400 and $3.900 per year. In Zimbabwe it's $600, in Tanzania, $1,600, in Zambia, $1,700, in Kenya, $1,800. If nothing else, travel certainly heightens one's respect for the resilience of the people who survive on so little. You can not visit these places and leave untouched.