Dec. 26, 2021 - It’s finally happening

We want­ed to avoid a stopover in a for­eign coun­try due to the unplannable quar­an­tine reg­u­la­tion while the Coro­na pan­dem­ic was still active, there­fore only a direct flight from Ger­many to Kenya came into con­sid­er­a­tion. For our trav­el peri­od, this was only offered by Lufthansa from Frank­furt Air­port. The trip there­fore start­ed, like our Kenya trip 2017, with us again at 7:22am at the Düs­sel­dorf air­port. Our son-in-law Philipp brought us there.

We bridged the wait­ing time in the train sta­tion with a large lat­te mac­chi­a­to and some cook­ies at Star­bucks. Then we took the Air­port-Express train as sched­uled to Frank­furt Air­port, where we met our co-trav­el­ers Andrea and Har­ry in the wait­ing area of the gate after an unprob­lem­at­ic lug­gage check-in (the hand lug­gage was for­tu­nate­ly not weighed).

Our air­craft, the Air­bus A330-300 “Old­en­burg”, was already wait­ing at the gate:

After short de-icing (it was Decem­ber 26 and very cold).

we start­ed on time at 11:30 am. The flight route was via Greece and Egypt, the flight last­ed a good 8 hours. Here is a pic­ture of Khar­toum, the cap­i­tal of Sudan at dusk:

Landed in Nairobi

Around 9:15 p.m. we arrived in Nairo­bi after a pleas­ant and smooth flight. Armed with all nec­es­sary doc­u­ments (vac­ci­na­tion cer­tifi­cate, Coro­na PCR test cer­tifi­cate, eVisa) we went to the immi­gra­tion counter. After the cold tem­per­a­tures in Ger­many, we were com­plete­ly sweaty in the arrival hall in no time.

The for­mal­i­ties took a total of about 2 hours, the clear­ance was just as usu­al in Africa: Pole-Pole (Swahili for slow). Of course, almost every­thing we had metic­u­lous­ly filled out and orga­nized was ignored. They did­n’t have any scan­ners to read the QR codes from the PCR test, so they just took a quick look at the vac­ci­na­tion card. By the way, nobody in Frank­furt was inter­est­ed in the test either.

Around 11:50 p.m. we were final­ly through. In front of the air­port exit, a Sun­world Safaris employ­ee was await­ing us. We were then tak­en by minibus to the Sher­a­ton Four Points Hotel, which is still on the air­port area and rel­a­tive­ly new. We had been there in 2018 as well. After check­ing in there, we all first took show­ers and got our bags into safari mode. Then we fell into our beds dead tired for a short sleep. The alarm was set for 5:00 am, as we were already being picked up at 7:00 am for the dri­ve to the Masai Mara.

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