The Making of an Excellent African Adventure – Part 4: Turmoil in Kenya

The process of travel planning always involves all kinds of research and the discovery of new cultures and sights. Once we’ve decided on a destination, we start doing all of the specific research for the places within that destination that we may want to go to. At this stage, we are usually reading any bit of information that we can get our hands on either from travel websites or even on the news. However, the last thing that you want to read about your travel destination in the news are words like riots, tear gas, water cannons and political unrest.

Yes, but we’re also talking about Kenya – part of our Excellent African Adventure later this year.
The news of the turmoil in Kenya over the past few weeks has obviously been of particular interest to us as it was going to be one of the highlight locations on our African trip. While there are many countries in Africa that have long histories of violence or at the minimum political uncertainty, Kenya has been one of the strongest democracies and best economies in the region. While travel to anywhere in Africa always requires you to keep your wits about you, travel in Kenya has been comparatively safe. All of the events that are happening right now are certainly unusual for Kenya but at some point, we will have to make a decision in the next few months about keeping Kenya on the itinerary or not.

I think that Barb and I will be very disappointed if we have to remove Kenya from our travel plans as seeing the Serengeti and the Masai Mara National Parks was going to be a highlight of the locations to see some of the spectacular animals of Africa. If it comes down to it, any decisions that we make to change travel plans will not be taken lightly but after lots of research and consultation with the many contacts that we now have in Africa and at home.

We’ll see how things go.

Baden