Funny Thing About Kenya

"All the news out of Africa is bad," wrote Paul Theroux, before journeying between Cairo and Cape Town. Theroux took the news as a challenge, a dare. "It made me want to go there," and so he went.

I wanted to go there for different reasons: the television show I write for was on hiatus, British Airways was offering a decent rate, and ever since I was a little boy I've just always wanted to contract malaria. (Fingers crossed!)

So here I am, writing this from a banda hut on a remote island in the predominantly-Muslim Lamu archipelago, off the coast of Kenya, quite near the border of Somalia (Hmmm. Somalia. Somalia. Why does that ring a bell? Quick, someone hand me a newspaper). A far cry from New York City, where I live, and where I write jokes for a living. From what I can tell so far, there's nothing funny about Kenya. (For that matter, there's not much funny in Kenya. Our Luo guide Andrew told me a Masai joke that apparently goes over big in the tribes. It wasn't much of a joke. More of a sentence: "Masai soldier says to Bantu farmer, 'When it rains, what are you going to do? Move your land?" That's when Andrew laughed. So I laughed.)

I am the guest of a constitutional expert working for the United Nations. After touring Nairobi and Lake Magadi in the Great Rift Valley, we are here off the Kenyan coast, where I am chewing on coconut and nursing a disappointment incurred earlier in the week: despite being a guest of the UN, I don't get to wear one of those cool blue helmets. Apparently they don't do that when they're on vacation.

To be sure, I never imagined I'd come to Africa. I didn't exactly feel a pull to return to my homeland. To put it mildly, I am not from here. "The white man in black Africa, alone in his post, odd man out," as Theroux describes him, is "a stark example of the perfect stranger." That's me: with my SPF-45 sunscreen, I am, I assure you, a stark example.

For that matter, it's quite possible that had I read Theroux before heading to Nairobi, I may not have come. His account of contemporary Nairobi, formed only a few years ago, is of innocents getting "limbs lopped off by pangas -- machetes." The Nairobi he describes is a dangerous, violent city full of marauders who'll kill you for your shoes. Last time I checked my closet, I don't have a single pair of shoes worth dying for.

Theroux's experience is not uncommon. The driver who has been shuttling us around was hijacked a few days before my arrival, and within 24 hours of stepping off the plane at Nairobi airport I had heard more than enough horror stories of roadside attacks on locals and tourists alike. Admittedly, Kenya isn't Somalia, but it's "Somalia-adjacent" -- both literally and figuratively.

And yet, I've managed to travel unscathed. So far my time in Kenya has been everything I'd hoped for: an adventure like Paul Theroux's -- a dark star journey, a "safari," in the true sense of the word -- and a retreat like Henry David Thoreau's -- "to front only the essential facts of life." Somewhere between Theroux and Thoreau -- that's where I am, chewing on coconut.

And that's the news out of Africa.