After the hike we left Kakamega at around 12 and carried on down towards Lake Victoria past Kisumu to a hotel in the tea plantations at Kericho. In Kisumu we found an Impala Sanctuary which was very interesting since the only animal we have seen in abundance in every reserve we have been Impala! We found the whole thing very amusing! Of all the things Kenya could possibly put money into they have am impala sanctuary! This is the power of do-good donors to bring about such interesting institutions all in unexpected places. You also had to pay an arm and a leg to get into this prestigious place to camp ($15pp to enter and another $15pp to camp)! Kisumu is a surprisingly large town but hardly offers much else, especially in the way of camping and didn't warrant us staying there for the afternoon to explore. It probably operates mainly as a fishing town and port on the lake with some governmental building s to represent the Western part of Kenya. For this reason we carried on to the tea fields which turned out to be a lovely little campsite at the back of an old hotel grounds. We enjoyed steak, fire baked bread and Joey's amazing and unique Amarula Oreo instant pudding to top it off!

One significant event for the day was crossing the equator. We'd missed it on the road out of Kenya and thought we had again since the sign is a few hundred meters off target! But we found an old sign and photographed ourselves next to it. In a small way was an achievement to know we'd driven to the equator in Africa!

The next day took us back to Nairobi where we stayed at JJ's again. There was a long detour early in the morning and then we joined the good road we'd come in on en route to Kampala. We so enjoyed Jungle Junction and it was full of overlanders this time and we met up with some other travellers who we had camped with at Iringa (Andre and Anne). There was a Swiss couple who driven from Europe and a South African couple driving from Dubai to Cape Town to name a coupl of folk we chatted to. This is always the fun part of camping - meeting the other overlanders and swopping stories! We took the opportunity to get some groceries and went to our new favourite frozen yoghurt place in Nairobi - Planet Yoghurt - for a small treat! We really enjoy Nairobi, it's far from the dangerous depth of anarchy and violence it's reputed to be!

Setting off early in the morning we made our quickest start leaving JJ's at around 7 - this was record time for the Graham-Jolly's, none of the other campers were even awake when we left! We had heard mixed reports about the road to Mombasa from Nairobi so we thought it best to leave early. Everything can change surprisingly quickly and be completely different to the information you've received from another traveller, even if the information is a year old. In all, the road turned out to be the best we have been on so far for a day's journey and we made record time reaching Mombasa by 3:30. We explored a little and then settled down outside a cheap hotel (Jamboree Hotel, "Camper's Haven") that offered a campsite (R40pppn) with salty water. Joey only clicked it was salty when the coffee tasted disgusting in the morning! They had some taps with fresh water and some with borehole water that tends to be very brackish.