Some Colors

The arrowroot was purple and starchy and pasty . It was on the breakfast buffet at next to a steamer tray full of pale yellow corn on the cob. There was coffee, too, and it was quite good, and omelets made by a quiet young man. It had rained sometime during the night; from my seat at the window in the dining room I looked out over the wet concrete patio at shiny, leafy plants. The air smelled of smoke – there was some kind of fire just a block or so away. I was smudgy with jetlag, but feeling quite well considering the 24 hours of transit.

To get to the hotel I shared a taxi with Steve and Alex, newlyweds from Britain, and Arno, a landscaper from Holland. All three were joining tours starting at this same hotel in Nairobi. We were all sleepy and a little silly and fell immediately into a traveler’s camaraderie, joking about nothing while squeezed into the back seat of a car with a dangerously wobbly rear tire. We bounced through the darkened streets of Nairobi. Steve talked to the driver, I waved at the little girls in the car in front of us and at the man in the minibus who waved first at me, Arno pointed to some huge squat birds perched in a sprawling tree on a roundabout. We tumbled out of the car into the dusty hotel parking lot with no sense of where we were, and that was just fine.

Alex had been liberated of her sleeping bag at the airport in Zanzibar; this led to a shopping expedition which she invited me to join. This sounded like the perfect first day outing. It had a goal – buy a sleeping bag, with a sub goal picking up some local currency. It was weirdly mundane, but also, allowed me to see one of my very favorite travel sites – a supermarket (or, in this case, a department store with a supermarket in it). It was also short – we’d run out for an hour or two, tops and then call it good. This would free me to squeeze in a nap or to just loll about the hotel grounds in a time zone without feeling like I’d wasted the day by staying in.

It took about 15, maybe 20 minutes to get to the mall by taxi. And there we were, in a shiny shopping center, food court upstairs, café on the main floor, tables full of laptops and lattes. It wasn’t quite that “you could have been anywhere” feeling, but it wasn’t what I expected, either. Already, not 24 hours on the ground, I was confronted with how wrong I am about everywhere and how I must see it with my own eyes to know. I am always grateful for this feeling, for learning that my American assumptions about the world are complete and utter nonsense. And how lucky am I to be reminded that I know nothing of the world, over and over, right in the place where I have got it wrong.

I carried a plastic shopping basket up and down the aisles of supermarket. There were many salty snacks, more potato chip varieties than I’ve ever seen. There were lots and lots of peanuts and cashews, boiled and salted, fried and salted, roasted and salted. There were tropical juices, tree tomato and mango and pineapple and guava, in little boxes and big bottles and, in the produce department, fresh squeezed. “What’s a tree tomato?” I asked the man behind the juice counter. “If you taste it, you will want to buy it,” and he poured me a glass. “It’s good for the blood,” he insisted, but I didn’t care, and of course, I bought the juice because it was delicious.

There were no sleeping bags in the store, they were out of stock, so Alex bought a wooly blanket for about seven dollars, and I bought an orange scarf for the same price, a much smaller stretch of fabric but bright and soft and insanely vibrant against the turquoise linen shirt I was wearing. I bought arrowroot chips, crunchy and salty, and much tastier than the arrowroot slices on the buffet at breakfast. They were pale, flecked with purple. Back at the hotel, I sat on the patio and ordered some coffee. I ate my chips and drank my juice, too, and while I sat there, typing, in my orange scarf and my turquoise shirt, a little bird landed on the leafy shrubbery in front of me. He was noisy, courting his mate, I think, who I could hear but not see. He would say something and she would respond. Then, he popped up right where I could see him and he was bright, so bright, and shiny, reflecting the sunlight. He was an iridescent blue, the color of a gemstone that I don’t know the name of, and black. He would call and his girlfriend would answer, call and answer, and then, they both skipped up into the air, behind me, and out of site.

My travels to East Africa are sponsored by Intrepid Travel as part of their “classic journeys” campaign.” Most – but not all – of my expenses were paid for by Intrepid Travel.