Day 21: Today was a pretty eventful day and for the first time we felt the difference between Canada and Kenya. The day started pretty badly with me and Neal going to the golf course to tee off for 8 o’clock only to find out that the owner of the pro shop did not turn up for work that morning even though we had rang the day before to let him know that we would have been at the club for 8. We waited around for 45 minutes and then we decided to post pone our game till next week we were pretty disappointed because we can only play midweek in the morning since we don’t have an handicap and we had to re arrange work schedules in order to accommodate the game in the morning only to find out that the pro shop was closed!
In the evening we went shopping for groceries and on the way back while in the taxi we were stopped by a police road block. The “kind” policeman asked for our ID and we supply him with the CARE IDs that the office had given us. Apparently the policeman was not happy because they were not official IDs TY bravely tried to tell him that we were assured by the office that those IDs were more than enough because they had our passport number, but the policemen pointed out that unfortunately they do not carry any immigration information. We were 2oo meters form our apartment we told the policeman if one of us could zip home to get the passports and obviously he refused. Then he instructed the taxi driver to “talk to us”. The driver said that we needed to bribe the guy and he suggested we gave him 500 bob. We agreed but we told the guy to carry out all the negotiations and to pay out of his own pocket so there would be no link to us … probably a very naïve approach! So the driver got out the car and gave the policeman the money. Next thing we know the policemen is asking us “…What are trying to say”, then the driver had another little chat with the guy and he drove off. We couldn’t make out what it was going on but after wards we realised that the silly driver didn’t give enough money to the policemen… like we would have mind paying 50 bucks to get out of that sticky situation because after all we were breaking the law by not carrying our passports. The driver did well to come out of that situation I think he told the policemen we had just been shopping and we had spent all our cash! This was the first “incident” we had with the Kenyan police but I guess it will not be the last. Karibu! We were a little worried for our action but talking to people we just followed the standard procedure … we dealt with issue the Kenyan way. By the way we now carry an authenticated copy of our passports with us but I am sure that the police will find a problem with that too.