Skip to main content

Preparing for a trip to Kenya

This is my Nth trip to Kenya, primarily Nairobi in the last 6 months. I have spent 90% of my time till date in this beautiful country. The experience has been amazing and enriching. I have met people from various countries across the globe, observed the life of a Kenyan closely, basked in the natural beauty of this country and as a result changed for the better, as a human being.

Like always,  I am planning to write a series of posts about the experiences I have gathered, Inshallah! Time will tell, whether, like always, I will fail. :-) But, like the journey of an engineering degree starts with the first back, I will start with this introductory post, my first step. This one is just about how to prepare for a trip to Kenya, from India that is.
If you are travelling for the first time to Africa, your trip preparations should start at least 45 days in advance. This is mainly for the yellow fever and oral polio vaccine that one needs to take before coming to this country. Mind you, you can't take the shots from any five star hospital like Apollo. But you need to visit a sarkari health centre designated in your city/ state to give these vaccines (Google for your location). They will give you a yellow card with date and stamp indicating that you have taken the shots. You can travel only 30 days after taking these shots(this is a bit disputed rule. I have heard another version that says 10 days moratorium).
The next activity is booking your tickets. Kenya Airways operates 2 direct flights from Mumbai and one from Delhi. The flight time is about 6 hours from Amchi Mumbai and 7.5 hours from The Capital City. This airline is the equivalent of Air India. Cheap, convenient and sucks on service. There is an alternative for you to take the route via Doha or Dubai. With that you spend about a day travelling in extreme luxury that the economy class of any airline in the world can offer. I prefer suffering for a shorter time though! Book in advance to get real cheap deals on flights.
Visa can be secured at your local embassy or also on arrival. The on-arrival visitor visa costs USD50 and is a single entry visa valid for 90 days. The visa on arrival is simple and is the most effective option if you are here on a one-off trips and purely for pleasure. 
Once you are here, there is a lot to do. Plan well and plan in advance to make the best of the time. Best time to visit is between August to October since you can witness the large scale wild migration at Masai Mara (which I could not visit ... yet). Details posts on places I visited will hopefully follow. If you have any more tips and tricks about travelling to Kenya or Africa, or if you have any queries, do post in comments. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The oscar for dilemmas

As I was travelling from Goa to Pune in a Bus, I overheard some conversation and could see a lot of dilemma on the face of a fellow passenger. As the story evolved, I could connect with him. Thus it went: They were a couple, he was with his fiance/wife/girlfriend (a non-ma/behen relationship). There was another girl (pretty) who wanted to a lady's seat. She could get it only if this gentleman would give up the company of his travel mate as there were no other female passengers on the bus. I have been through similar situation and have said no and felt guilty about it till the society at large did something equally unjust to me. But this incident in the bus the other day, sparked off some more such dilemmas that I have come across quite often. I thought of having a golden globe of dilemmas; put them on the blog and see which is the most common dilemma. First being the one above, the second dilemma that comes to my mind is of cheating in exams. No No. Me cheating is taboo enough! It ...

The business of all that is complex

Very recently I have been following Jason Fried's posts on 37signals.com. I am impressed by his minimalist thoughts and the whole idea of customers 'growing out of' and 'growing into' your product. Per Jason, there are just a certain simple features that customers really want and a product company should strive to be the best at those features. But beyond these features, your customers will always have some desires and will keep asking for more features. One should learn to say no to such demands and crowd the Product with features that only a few of your customers will actually use. These frills not only hamper the performance of the product technically, but also make the Product manufacturer waste a lot of effort in the form of product support and other allied activities. This seems to have been working for folks at 37signals.com and many more such companies (SFDC, Flip Video recorders etc.) I then started thinking of this philosophy in the context of Indian IT co...

RSS - an answer to the caste discrimination

One of my old post on Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh drew a comment today. It posed a few question about the stand RSS takes on the issues of caste system in our contry. The reader also asked if RSS could be a possible solution. And this, my dear readers in the fuel for this post. Let me put forth some facts about the organisation called RSS right at the beginning. RSS is a social organisation. There is no formal registration and participation is completely voluntary. It is not a political, religious or profit making orgnisation. There are no posts, there are only responsibilities (in fact that what they are called). These facts make it clear that this is a place where entry and exit is pretty easy. There are no costs involved with either. Which means there is no-one who can tell you that he will get you registered with the RSS and do you a favour. RSS is for everyone. In my opinion it is a perfect place where caste ism cannot exist. There are no reservations for a certain community. T...