The Wandering Enginerds

On to my sixth and final continent! I arrived in Nairobi around 8pm and waited an hour for the driver to arrive to take me to the hotel, then we sat in traffic for another hour. At which point I had been in Africa for only a couple of hours and had already experienced the validity behind the phrase "TIA" - "This is Africa" - used to explain the non-sensical way things work in the African countries. I spent the next day walking around the city. I have never seen a place so poor, it was definitely worse than Nepal. The pollution was awful as well. However there was quite a bit of high rise construction going on. I was happy to be getting out of the city the following day for safari!  It took 8 hours to get to the Massai Mara National Park which is Serengeti NP just on the Kenyan side of the border rather than Tanzanian. There were 8 of us on the trip and after arriving at our camp, we did a short game drive as the sun was setting that night. We saw a bunch of animals...

I think everyone that I told I was going to Kyrgyzstan, their reactions were what? where's that? what do you do there? So if you find yourself asking these questions as well, here is a nice answer in blog post form. Kyrgyzstan is in Central Asia and borders Kazakstan, China, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. After an interesting experience with the Kyrgyz people on our overnight flight to Bishkek (they didn't understand the concept of personal space or remaining in your seat while taking off, landing, or taxiing), the capital and largest city, Courtney and I arrived in Kyrgyzstan early enough to catch the sunrise as we drove to the office of the tour company we had booked with. Some background knowledge, Kyrgyzstan was part of the former Soviet Union so it is a very young country. The official languages are Kyrgyz and Russian (a lot of people can speak English as well), and most of the people look Chinese but talk with a Russian sounding language which goes against your natural in...

I had an 8 hour layover in Dubai so I took advantage of it to knock off another bucket list item: see the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. It stands at 828m tall (about 2,700ft), has 168 floors, and absolutely towers over any other building in the city. It's so freaking tall. It's so tall that is the only building you can see in the center of the city from the airport even through the desert haze. It's so tall you have to use panorama mode in order to take a picture of it when you're near it's base. I was in love. Burj Kahlifa - Tallest Building in the World  There were so many cool buildings there and so much construction, I was geeking out all day long. It was also very hot there. The high that day was 95 degrees and that was the lowest it would be in the 15 day forecast. The metro was super clean and efficient. It is a big ex-pat city so everything was in English and there wasn't much Muslim influence aside from the mosq...