Thursday 17 - Friday 18 August 2001
NEW YORK-LONDON-NAIROBI
Nik and I left Newark International Airport for London on the evening of 16August2001. Virgin Atlantic offered us edible food, attractive flight attendants, and a comfort pack full of essentials like eyeshades, tissues, notepads, pens, flight socks, and personal hygiene products. What more could one ask for in steerage? We sat in the center section with claustrophobic Nik in his mandatory aisle seat. The seat on the other side of me was empty, always a plus. It made up for the occasionally unruly children sitting behind us. When dinner was served I quickly downed the accompanying bottle of courtesy wine and the rest of the evening zoomed by.
We arrived at London Gatwick the next morning, got fleeced at the currency exchange, checked our bags into storage, then took a ride on a seriously overcrowded local commuter train to London Bridge station. From there we crept through London traffic across the Thames to meet at the office of Nik’s friend Hean-Lee Poh who generously allowed us the use of his apartment for the day. We walked up to the bus depot stopping in a few stores along the way. I was last in London back in the summer of 1982. Alot of the retail operations now looked incredibly homogenized: Boots Chemists, WH Smith Bookstores, and of course Starbucks Coffee. The American influence? We had a pleasant bus ride to the Poh compound in Wapping. (Nik might want me to memtion the gorgeous blond on the bus who helped us find the right stop, but it's something I've tried to put behind me.) Anyway, the sun was out and the temperature quite agreeable. A perfect London day.
Arriving at Hean-Lee’s place near a quay in East London, we took naps for what we thought would be an hour, but turned out to be 2 or 3. Jet lag had clearly caught up with us! A good portion of the afternoon remained so we took the tube to central London then walked across the Thames to the Tate Modern gallery, stopping along the way for a forgettable lunch at an adjacent Fuller’s Pub. We strolled the lowest gallery floor of the Tate Modern then walked east along the Thames to see the sites. At London Bridge rail station, our second visit of the day, we took the tube to Hean-Lee’s, getting lost only once or twice "whilst" transferring.
Hean-Lee arrived back at his place not long after we did. We went out for a cruise in his BMW, stopping to treat him to dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant. London traffic was as ugly as expected, but we eventually managed to drive along the Thames at a good clip with Hean-Lee pointing out sites as well as the dearth of mailboxes and garbage cans along the streets (Evidently they were favored drop-off points for IRA bombs in the 70s and 80s.). We arrived at Victoria Station just in time to catch the special Gatwick Express train which we found wonderfully spacious and devoid of all but a few passengers. Hean-Lee surprised us by knocking on our window to say a final farewell after we thought he had gone back to his car. A stand-up gent even if he later told Nik we were absolute lunatics for climbing Kilimanjaro.
At Gatwick, 30 minutes later, we picked up our bags from storage then got to the British Airways ticket counter where we were among the last to check in for the Nairobi flight. A bit of confusion and excitement ensued: we were not seated together and Nik was not provided with an aisle seat. The ticket agent managed to work some wonders and got us into another 4-seat center row with only 3 people total. With now-content Bulgarian in tow, I entered the x-ray area where one of the security personnel swore, on Queen and Country no less, that my 800 ISO film would not be damaged by the scanners. It survived.
In the duty-free area we met 2 robust young women from the San Francisco Bay Area headed to Kilimanjaro with Mountain Travel-Sobek. They seemed to have done even less research for the trip than Nik. No mean feat that. Nik had a nice chat with them before boarding while I browsed the duty-free area. At the gate I demanded that Nik count the number of children on the flight so I could steel myself for another round of the screaming, kicking, and general annoyances which had at times marred the Newark-London flight. Nik’s count was sloppy and incomplete for which I chided him severely on the plane.