25 May 2019

Cycle trip arranged via social media 🚲 πŸ΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ ΏπŸ“±

Last week I undertook a two-day bike ride in northern Scotland to travel up to my friend’s wedding.  The whole process of getting it sorted was pretty fun, and the ride itself was incredibly enjoyable, passing a variety of terrain and affording some lovely interactions with very generous Scottish dwellers. This is a bit of […]

18 September 2018

Lunch with my cleaning lady

On Saturday I went for lunch with the lady who cleans my apartment and her sister at their home in Kibera: one of the big informal settlements in Nairobi. The conversations and anecdotes that came from our afternoon were rich with the colour of the lives they’ve both lived, and the families they’re raising. On […]

6 April 2018

The Edges of Society in Kenya (in a weekend)

Over the Easter weekend a good friend (Ben) and I spent a couple of nights an hour out of Nairobi. Despite the primary goal of “getting a way from it all”, the short excursion ended up showing several aspects of Kenyan culture not always visible from the day to day: The Chinese influence, a hangover […]

18 November 2017

A week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

At the beginning of November I spent a week in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. As covered in the previous post, I was there connecting with businesses about training their teams to be effective and efficient in data analytics, and between meetings was able to get a decent impression of the city. This post […]

27 July 2017

Moving to Africa: one year on

Today I’m flying back to the UK for a month to catch up with friends, family and some clients I’ve been working with. The date on the plane ticket is a year to the day from when I took a flight in the opposite direction and touched down in East Africa for the first time […]

29 June 2017

What Technology Wants (…in Rural Kenya)

I’ve spent the last few days living in a village in Western Kenya. It’s been an excellent experience that’s not only opened up what’s happening in another part of the country, but also reminded me of some concepts I’ve been reading about recently.

5 January 2017

Finding a Decent Profile Pic in Western Canada

In a slight detour from the East Africa Business journey, I’m updating this week with what I got up to over the festive period. Continuing the tradition of ostensibly treating all forms of travel as being the search for a decent profile picture, this is an evaluation of how the Western part of Canada fares. […]

10 November 2016

East Africa Miscellany

In writing a blog post each week about what I learn around East Africa, I invariably keep notes on little things that I see/hear. Not all of these fit in with a particular topic and so have (until now) remained unpublished. As I close in on evaluating the different countries, this post is an aggregate […]

3 November 2016

Tanzania: An Introduction

This post is the last country profile that I’ll be doing for now as I close in on my evaluation of East Africa. It covers some of the different aspects of Tanzania, such as its size, history, and whether it can indeed be considered as being in East Africa…

27 October 2016

A Tourist Guide to Kenya (without Safari)

Safari means “to travel” in Swahili and has evolved into more or less anything where you move around to look at animals. It is a prime activity in our search for a Decent Profile Pic. Kenya is one of the international hotspots for going on safari and yet despite being here for a month I […]