Ice skating in Nairobi

Just went ice skating with my eight year old today! I promised that I would take her on an 'a deux' trip there years ago and finally got around to it at long last. It feels odd ice skating in Africa. My daughter just couldn't get used to feeling cold, especially when she fell and put her hands on the ice.

The traffic on Mombasa/airport road was horrendous due to the road works that trickle on for years and bring the city to a grinding halt during rush hour(s). It always looks like the yellow JCBs are just maddeningly parked up on the verge doing nothing too. I had thought that 2.30pm would be an OK time to go but it wasn't.

Anyway - amazingly enough we had the skating rink absolutely to ourselves. When we arrived I panicked as I thought I must have got the times wrong as there wasn't a soul around, but when they had put the lights and music on it was fantastic fun and my daughter put so much determination into mastering the art of skating that I nearly slipped over in amazement. There was a nice man swishing around on the ice whose job it was to coach anybody who wanted help, but most of the time he was just showing off.

I did think to myself, 'odd to be skating in Africa but at that price (800 shillings), only in Africa would you have the rink to yourselves'. In Southampton it would probably be far more expensive and so crowded that you would be petrified of someone skating over your fingers and slicing them off when you fell over. We progressed quite well from grasping onto the side walls for dear life to swooshing around the middle over our allocated hour. I did take a moment to worry a little that the solar rink is on the second floor of a high rise building, vaguely wondering exactly how much all that ice weighed and whether the floor could stand it.

We loved skating so much that we are thinking of going back tomorrow - but that's only traffic permitting - you never know, it could be another 2 years.