October 21, my seven-week vacation in the USA was over. I climbed aboard Delta flight 258 at 2:30 pm. After enduring seven and a half hours in the air, five hours sitting in Schiphol airport, eight more hours traversing Europe, the Mediterranean and northern Africa, waiting through customs and immigration where they took my temperature to make sure I wasn’t importing Ebola, I was back in Kenya. The trip was one I have done many times and is quite routine by now, but something felt different. This sense of routine gone awry continued.

I met Sammy, my usual driver. He drove me to the Pan Afric hotel where I was greeted warmly, had a chicken sandwich and beer for dinner, woke the next morning to the Pan Afric breakfast buffet, showed my hotel receipt to the security guard so he would let me out of the hotel and once again met Sammy for the trip to Lewa.

Lewa waiting for the rains.

The trip up was the fastest I have ever experienced. We left at 8:00 am, bounced over the speed bumps, passed cars, trucks, mutatus, donkey carts, boda bodas, bicycles and pedestrians and flew up the road. It was just a couple of hours until we passed Karatina, then Nanyuki, Timau, and Subuiga finally arriving at the Matunda Gate on Lewa just after noon. Been there, done that, but somehow things didn’t feel quite the same.

Anne met me at the gate and we drove the 18 kilometers over the rough dirt roads, passed the NRT offices, wound our way through the Lewa Swamp, forded the Sirikoi River and arrived at Anna’s cottage to be met by Rahema and Hadija.

It took a couple of days to get over the jet lag (a full week to be completely back in form). During that week I stepped back into the Kenya routine. We drove the 10 kilometers to work and back each day, passing zebra, giraffe, ostrich, rhinoceros, gazelle, impala, waterbuck, warthog, and even a couple of lions, breathing the dust kicked up by the car and swept back into our open windows by the wind. I took the long trip to Meru to shop, visiting with my ladies in the market. I rode Tom Gleason’s mountain bike up the government road to Ngare Ndare and back. I sat in the office working. Anne and I watched a couple of videos. We enjoyed the dinners Rahema prepared for us. We trekked through the yard to take our evening showers. We talked about her projects and mine.

But…?

It was just yesterday that I figured out what was different. Me. I was no longer looking around at the buildings, people, culture, and wildlife as a visitor who was fascinated by the strangeness, by the otherness. I no longer felt like a visitor. What was unusual about the routine was that it now felt …routine. While things are still interesting, challenging and fun, I am, in some sense, home.

Oh yeah. An elephant tore up the plumbing again last night. Routine.