How I Wound Up Traveling to Kenya to Play Ice Hockey

Given my affinity for awesome hockey jerseys, I was on the internet recently, searching that very topic, when I happened upon a striking kelly-green jersey with black and red stripes and a big heraldic lion holding a hockey stick in its mighty paws on the chest. The jersey was for a team called the Kenya Ice Lions, and I wanted one immediately. I also assumed Kenya, in this case, must be referring to some small town in Canada I’d never heard of, and definitely not the arguably more popular country in East Africa. But upon further reading, I learned that the Kenya Ice Lions were indeed located in the country of Kenya—Nairobi, to be exact—and not the small Canadian town it turns out exists only in my mind.

I also learned that not only were the Ice Lions the only ice hockey team in all of Kenya, but they also skated on the only ice rink in the entire country, located inside Nairobi’s Panari Hotel. It turned out I was a bit late to the party, too, as the Ice Lions’ story had already spread far and wide among hockey fans a few years back, thanks to a short film about them made by Tim Hortons, the popular Canadian donut concern, in which the team traveled to Toronto for a scrimmage against a team of firefighters who had their work cut out for them after NHL stars Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon suited up for the Ice Lions as surprise ringers. Last but not least, it turned out my new friend Slava Fetisov had already managed to make it all the way to Kenya to skate with the team. And when I heard this last bit of information, I decided it would be totally weird if I didn’t do the same.

Through a bit of Facebook stalking, I was able to track down an Ice Lions player named Ali Kilanga and dropped him a line. “I would like come to Nairobi and play hockey with you guys,” I told him, cutting right to the chase. Much to my delight, Ali told me to come on over. The only problem, it turned out, is that the team’s ice rink had temporarily closed during the pandemic and the players were currently staying in shape by playing roller hockey.

“Not a problem,” I told him, neglecting to consider that, despite years of ice hockey experience, I’d never once played roller hockey.

“I think I’ve got some old Rollerblades in the closet,” I thought. “How hard could it possibly be?”

I’d never been to Kenya before and, after a bit of googling, learned that the medical community was recommending what seemed like several gallons’ worth of injections—some for diseases I’d never even heard of and at least a couple that I’d always wanted to try—prior to making the trip. I assumed these shots might be necessary were I to be hanging out on a savanna in a pith helmet and goggles while intermittently submerging myself in whatever standing water might be available, and perhaps not entirely crucial for an intercontinental hockey mission. Still, just looking to get out of the house, I made a doctor’s appointment for the first time in roughly 15 years anyway, at which I unfortunately learned I had apparently shrunk an inch in height.

“Fear not, Dave,” I thought, trying to console myself, “hockey skates always give you three and a half more inches.”

More importantly, however, my doctor gave me the roughly 47 shots I apparently required to visit Kenya, and I was on my way.

I managed to find a direct flight to Nairobi from New York City and boarded a plane at JFK with what appeared to be mostly Kenyans and older Americans who, based on their loose-fitting clothing, animated discussions on wildlife, and complete disregard for hair care, looked like they might be going on a bucket list vacation of some sort. Either way, I was confident I was the only one retrieving hockey equipment at baggage claim once we landed after our 13-hour flight, and I was feeling pretty self-righteous about it by the time I stepped out of the airport and into the balmy Kenyan air.

“Is this your first time to Kenya?” my cab driver asked as we headed for the city a few minutes later.

“Yes,” I told him. “I’m here to play hockey.” “Hockey?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, “hockey.”

“Hockey?”

“Yes, hockey.”

We rode in silence for about forty minutes after that, but I could tell he was impressed.

Given that most of my knowledge of Kenya up until this point had been gleaned from nature shows and a quick perusal of the country’s Wikipedia page while waiting to get through customs, I assumed I’d see countless lions, tigers, and other beasts on the way into town. Who knows? Maybe they’d even walk right up to the car to pop their head in and we’d form lasting friendships people would talk about on the internet for years to come. In the end, though, it was mostly just a lot of cars and motorcycles, the odd bit of roadside construction, and one impossibly lonely-looking man sitting on the side of the road, selling already tied neckties, as if he were hoping to entice commuters into stepping up their look at the last minute.

“Pull over immediately!” I thought to ask my cab driver in an attempt at sounding like I really get how things work around here. “I need a necktie posthaste!”

But I figured he already thought I was a weirdo after I tried to sit in the front seat with him, so I decided against it.

We arrived in Nairobi proper a short while later. Normally, when I travel, I like to stay somewhere more residential in hopes that it might give me a better sense of how the locals live. But since I knew I’d be carrying hockey equipment around, I booked a room at the Stanley Hotel, located in the city’s Central Business District, just a few blocks from the parking lot cum roller hockey rink where I assumed I would be completely dominating the Kenya Ice Lions in a few short days.

When my cab pulled up to the hotel, a security guard had a look underneath with a mirror attached to a pole.

“They are making sure we don’t have bombs,” my driver explained.

I would soon learn this was standard procedure for all cars stopping at the hotel, but at the time it made me feel dangerous, and I liked it.

After dropping off my things in my room, I decided to go for a stroll around the city and maybe grab a cup of delicious Kenyan coffee—or just “coffee,” as I assumed it was known in these parts. Downtown Nairobi reminded me a bit of downtown Los Angeles, or even downtown Cleveland if you blur your eyes just right, only with way more people. In fact, there were people pretty much everywhere, crisscrossing every which way as if a massive festival a few blocks away had just let out only moments ago.

As I made my way down a main drag, I couldn’t help but notice a guy in a Vancouver Canucks hoodie walk past me.

“Maybe Nairobi is a hockey town after all,” I thought.

As it turned out, I would spot tons of folks in hockey gear over the course of my visit. I figured it might be just Baader–Meinhof phenomenon kicking in, but 26-year-old Benja, one of the Kenya Ice Lions players I was soon to meet, told me otherwise.

“People wear hockey gear here all the time,” Benja told me. “But they have no idea what it is—they just think it looks cool.” I grabbed a coffee and continued my stroll before remembering I hadn’t eaten all day and ducking into a restaurant I’d found nearby after searching for Kenyan food on my phone. I was excited to try the local fare and ordered some fish with rice and beans and a red sauce that was so spicy, I assumed the chef might have been trying to pull a prank on me. But with the help of a bottle of Tusker lager, the local beer of choice, I hope I managed to at least appear that I was in no pain whatsoever.

My Ice Lions contact, Ali, had agreed to meet up with me the next night, Friday, for what he described as “a polite drink,” so I was on my own for the rest of my first day in town. As jet lag kicked in, I decided to head back to the hotel for a nap before plotting my next move.

Normally, on a hockey-centric trip like this, I might search for a game in town, but since the Kenya Ice Lions were literally the only team in the entire country, I figured I might have to come up with an alternate plan that evening.

The little I’d read about visiting Nairobi suggested it’s not a great idea to walk around the city alone at night. But between all those shots I had to get before coming here, the fact that so far I’d been getting nothing but good vibes from this delightful city, and the unmistakable air of menace I try to project whenever in public, I was not to be deterred. I wandered a few blocks, trying and failing to blend in with pedestrian traffic before ducking into a couple bars for a look around. But I was still pretty wiped out from my journey, so in the end I decided to just head back to the hotel for a quiet nightcap while enjoying the beautiful weather at the poolside bar.

My hope, of course, whenever I’m forced to travel alone is that I’ll luck into some conversation with a friendly local at a bar or restaurant so that I might get some hot tips on what I might get up to while in town, or maybe even get invited to their home for a quality hang or two. So, I was thrilled when a beautiful young Kenyan woman named Nuru smiled and gestured toward the seat next to her as I approached the hotel bar.

“How are you?” she asked as I settled in.

“Good,” I replied. “How are you doing?”

“Good,” Nuru smiled before taking a sip of her Coke. “You are visiting Kenya?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m here to play hockey.”

“Sorry?” she asked, sounding weirdly Canadian for a moment.

“Hockey,” I repeated. “Ice hockey.”

“Ice hockey,” she said back to me.

“Yes, ice hockey. Do you know it?”

“Sorry?” As best I could tell, based on my experience with the cab driver and now this lovely woman at the hotel bar, bringing up hockey was not the path to easy conversation in Kenya. I decided to hit reset and order myself a beer.

“Would you like some company tonight?” Nuru then asked me, bursting the illusion that I’d just happened into some pleasant conversation with a random beautiful woman on my first night in Nairobi.

“Yes, I would,” I replied in an attempt at subterfuge. “And you are keeping me wonderful company at this very moment by talking to me at this bar while we sit at a completely respectable distance from each other.”

“No, I would like to keep you company in your hotel room,” she clarified. “I can give you a massage and then maybe there are other things you might like.”

“I like hockey,” I told her, doing my best to dazzle her with my naivete. “Is that what you mean?”

“Sorry?” she said once more.

It was at this point that I figured it might be time to finish my beer and call it a night, but as soon as I set my empty bottle down on the bar, a fresh one appeared before me.

“This is from the gentleman at the other end of the bar,” the bartender explained.

I assumed my night was about to get even more complicated, but as it turned out, the gentleman in question was just celebrating a birthday and wanted to buy a drink for everyone else at the bar.

“I am Lameck,” the fiftysomething birthday boy said, suddenly appearing next to me with an extended hand. “I am from Tanzania.”

“Happy birthday, Lameck,” I replied, shaking his hand. “Are you interested in a massage by any chance?”

“From you?” he asked guardedly.“No, from her,” I said, pointing to Nuru.“I already asked him,” she snapped. “He’s not interested.” “Sorry?” I replied.“He’s not interested,” she repeated, seemingly annoyed. “What brings you to Kenya?” Lameck then asked me. “Hockey,” I told him.“Hockey?” he replied.“Yes, hockey,” I said again as he slowly backed away toward his seat. I began drinking my beer more quickly while staring straight ahead in hopes that Nuru might get the hint I was definitely not interested in escalating things in the sex way. It didn’t work.

“It will cost one hundred dollars,” she suddenly said, picking up our conversation right where it left off.

“American?” I asked, somehow back in it with no resistance whatsoever.

“Yes,” she replied.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “The only game I’m here to play is hockey.”

“Hockey?

“Yes, hockey! Why does this keep happening every time I say ‘hockey’ in this town?”

I went back to my beer. And once again, before I could set my empty bottle back down on the bar, another beer appeared before me. I looked down the bar to see birthday boy Lameck smiling and waving at me.

“Thanks for this, but I need to go to bed,” I yelled apologetically to him.

“Are you American?” Lameck then asked.“Yes,” I answered.“If you don’t drink that beer, you are a disgrace to your country,” Lameck said. Between my jet lag and the beers already in me, his argument somehow seemed valid, so I started drinking this latest beer while staring straight ahead once more.

“Fifty dollars,” Nuru suddenly said.“Sorry,” I said turning to her, “I have a girlfriend.”“So?” she replied. “You should enjoy life.” “I am perfectly satisfied with my current level of life enjoyment,” I told her. Suddenly, Lameck appeared next to me again.“You know, I trained with American soldiers when I was in the army,” he said while standing just a little too close.“What sort of training?” I asked. “Guns?”“No,” Lameck replied. “If I need a gun to kill you, I will use yours.”“But I don’t have a gun,” I said.

“That is my point—I don’t need a gun to kill you,” he continued. “You see what I mean?”

It definitely felt like time to go now, but before I could get up from my seat at the bar, yet another beer appeared in front of me. I reluctantly drank it, if only to somehow honor my country.

“Thirty dollars,” Nuru said as I finally stood up to go back to my room a short while later.

“Thirty dollars?” I asked. “Why would you agree to do ‘other things I might like’ for that price?”

“It’s a one-time deal,” she replied. “Next time, it’s full price.” “There won’t be a next time,” I told her. “Or a first time!” I could tell by the look on her face that I had pretty much ruined any chance at friendship with Nuru at this point. But on the plus side, Lameck gave me his phone number and told me to give him a call if I wanted to hang out over the weekend, so, as I drifted off to sleep a short while later, I decided to call my first night in Kenya a draw.

I woke early the next morning and headed out of the hotel in search of breakfast. Along the way, a man offered to shine my running shoes. I politely declined while admiring his can-do attitude. I also spotted a guy in a Toronto Maple Leafs T-shirt, which felt like a good omen despite what I would later learn about Kenyans in hockey gear, before eventually stumbling into a café. There, I ordered something called a “Kenyan breakfast,” which consisted of eggs, sweet potatoes, and some sort of boiled root that was light pink in color. It was delicious, and I especially liked the idea of eating only traditional Kenyan food during my visit.

“This will give me the strength I need to dominate the Kenya Ice Lions on Sunday,” I thought, “even though I have technically never played roller hockey in my life.”

After breakfast, I jumped in a cab to somewhere I’d read about called Village Market, where I could supposedly load up on Kenyan trinkets to shower my loved ones with upon my return home from this beautiful country. As we drove past immaculately landscaped embassies and estates on our way out of the city, my driver began to tell me about various places in the area I could go to see wild animals.

“You meet crocodiles, you meet ostriches,” he explained. “You can even meet giraffes and lions.”

I like that he said I could “meet” the animals, instead of just see. It made it sound more like the animals and I might sit down to lunch and perhaps a bit of delightful conversation. Potential maiming aside, it was the kind of world I wanted to live in.

We arrived at Village Market a few minutes later, where I was disappointed to find tourists as far as the eye could see, as it shatters the illusion that I’m the only one visiting from out of town. Still, I soldiered on, eventually gravitating toward a parking garage where a bunch of vendors were selling various Kenyan trinkets. I had heard that the vendors here could be aggressive, but when a woman in her sixties selling painted wooden giraffes began following me around while saying I “insult her business” after failing to actually buy one, it was more than I could handle on this sunny afternoon, so I quickly made my escape, grateful to be giraffeless.

I returned to Nairobi proper and began wandering the city some more, stopping off for a lunch of fried chicken and rice before being drawn toward the sounds of a live band playing upstairs in a building down the street from the restaurant. I entered a stairwell and climbed a few flights to find a band consisting of drums, keyboards, bass, and trumpet backing not one but two preachers alternately singing and speaking sweet nothings to the Lord in both English and Swahili in a makeshift chapel inside what otherwise appeared to be an apartment building.

Since there were only three people in the congregation, it was impossible for me to slip in undetected, so I instead just smiled and waved at everybody before taking a seat myself and doing my best to appear as worked up about things as everyone else. It was unclear whether I was witnessing a church service or merely a band practice in anticipation of an upcoming church service, which is why, after I spotted a Gibson Les Paul sitting quietly on a guitar stand in the corner, I considered asking if I could sit in with them and maybe rip a few solos, as is my wont. But I quickly lost my nerve and instead just prayed I might be at least half as good at roller hockey as I’d been hoping when it came time to play with the Ice Lions on Sunday.

I had made plans to meet Ali a short while later, so after I’d either had enough of the Lord or perhaps the other way around, I headed back outside and immediately happened upon Jeevanjee Gardens, a park in the center of the city where there were two separate groups of about forty men each, huddled together while engaging in what appeared to be a heated debate in Swahili.

“What are they talking about?” I asked a young man seated on a bench nearby.

“Politics—there is an election coming,” he explained. “Are you visiting Kenya?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I’m here to play hockey with the Kenya Ice Lions.”

“Hockey?” the man asked.

“Yes, hockey, with the Kenya Ice Lions,” I told him. “Do you know them?”

“No.”“They are the greatest ice hockey team in all of Kenya.”I didn’t have the heart to tell him they were also the only ice hockey team in all of Kenya. And since it was about time to meet Ali, I decided to just smile awkwardly at him for slightly too long before heading off.

A few minutes later, I met Ali in front of the Nation Centre, a futuristic building that looks straight out of The Jetsons and is home to one of Kenya’s main newspapers, the Nation. One of the nice things about being a pale Irish guy from Cleveland in Nairobi is that I’m hard to miss, so Ali started waving at me from about fifty yards away as I approached. We exchanged greetings and headed to a nearby café for coffee and samosas.

“So, how did you get into hockey?” I asked him as soon as we sat down.

“Before the internet, I used to learn about a lot of stuff from whatever American magazines we could get over here,” Ali told me. “One day I was flipping through an issue of the Source and they had a picture of a hockey game and I thought, ‘What is this?!’”

I loved the idea that a hip-hop magazine was responsible for turning a kid on the other side of the world on to ice hockey, a simple reminder that the world can be magic if you just pay attention.

At 43, Ali is the elder statesman of the team and a mentor to many of the younger players, especially those on the Kenya Ice Cubs, an offshoot of the Ice Lions made up of teenagers just learning the game. Ali got the chance to finally play hockey himself while working as an employee at the Panari Hotel, where, of course, what is now the Ice Lions’ home rink is located.

“Some people started playing pickup hockey games there, guys from Canada and stuff like that,” Ali explained. “And the Kenya Ice Lions came a few years later, in 2016.”

As I was packing for my trip to Nairobi, it occurred to me that maybe I could just buy a new stick when I got into town rather than dragging one all the way from my apartment in New York City, but Ali quickly set me straight.

“They don’t sell hockey equipment here,” he laughed. “Everything we have comes from the United States or Canada.” Another big help has been former NHL player Johnny Oduya, who is Swedish born but half Kenyan.“Johnny has been great to us,” Ali explained. “He’s given us a bunch of equipment and even custom jerseys.”

After finishing up at the café, Ali and I jumped into a cab to go have that “polite drink” he promised me at an open-air bar called the Rabbit Hole a couple miles away, where DJs played old-school hip-hop and R&B at pummeling volumes and a crowd ranging in age from twenties to fifties eased into the weekend.

“We’ll have two beers,” Ali yelled to our waiter as soon as we grabbed a table.

Our waiter returned a couple minutes later with not two but four bottles of beer and set them down in front of us. As I would soon learn over the course of the evening, and indeed the rest of my visit to Nairobi, ordering “a beer” at a local bar actually means two beers unless you look the waiter in the eye and practically beg him to bring just one beer, not that I’m complaining.

As Ali and I began to bond over drinks and our mutual love of hockey, I decided to ask what he had meant by a “polite drink,” as, given my nagging insecurities, I assumed it was a euphemism for “a hopefully brief drink with this nutjob who came here all the way from America just to play hockey.”

“You see that table over there?” Ali said, pointing to a couple of men seated next to us with an entire bottle of Johnnie Walker between them. “That is the opposite of a polite drink.”

I was relieved and even a bit flattered to learn that Ali simply meant that he didn’t want me to spend the night puking in the back of a Nairobi cab, as thrilling as that sounds on some level. Still, hoping to land somewhere just shy of that, we moved on from the Rabbit Hole to another open-air bar located farther out of town called Numero 5, owned by Ali’s childhood friend Larry.

The crowd at Numero 5 was a bit younger, but the blaring old-school hip-hop and R&B was the same, which was just fine by me, as those are my jams. Ali spotted Larry holding things down at the end of the bar and walked me over to introduce me.

“This is Dave,” Ali said to Larry, a burly man in his forties wearing a baseball hat and tracksuit. “He came here from New York to play hockey.”

Larry shook my hand and nodded at me with the bemused look that everyone I’d talked to in Nairobi so far—besides Ali— seemed to get on their faces when the word hockey was mentioned. As I regarded Larry’s confusion, I imagined a time in the hopefully not-too-distant future when, if you told someone you came to Nairobi to play hockey, they’d give you a look that said, “Of course—it would be weird if you came to Nairobi and didn’t play hockey.”

Ali seems to be into that idea, too.

“We’re not quite ready to join the International Ice Hockey Federation,” he said of the sport’s worldwide governing body over another double round of beers, “but we will be soon.”

After narrowly dodging a young man relieving himself of the contents of his stomach onto the sidewalk on my way back from the restrooms a short while later, Ali and I figured we’d wrung just about all the fun we could out of the night and grabbed a cab back into town.

We met up the following morning at the hotel and walked to a nearby restaurant for an outdoor breakfast of fish and rice, during which he told me about Tim Hortons bringing the Kenya Ice Lions to play in Toronto in 2018.

“That was awesome,” Ali said, beaming.

As it turned out, only 12 of the Kenya Ice Lions—which is, of course, to say two full lines—made the trip, as some of the players on the team lacked passports or even the birth certificates necessary to get a passport in the first place.

“Tim Hortons gave us all brand new equipment when we got there,” Ali continued. “And we got a private tour of the Hockey Hall of Fame after it closed.”

As someone who has been to the Hockey Hall of Fame at least four times that I can remember, I was a little jealous. Don’t even get me started on the fact that Tim Hortons gave gift cards to all the players, thus allowing them to eat complimentary Timbits throughout their visit. The only thing missing to make this the most Canadian experience ever, in my estimation, was if Geddy Lee himself had picked them up at the airport.

“We played hockey for over three hours,” Ali continued. “They had to kick us out of the rink!”

As we finished our meal, Ali pointed at a tall building in the distance.

“That’s the KICC building,” he said. “The man who designed that building said it was inspired by a donkey penis.”

I wondered if Ali might be messing with me. But now I’m talking about a donkey penis in this book, so the joke is on him. Or, actually, maybe the joke is still on me, the more I think about it. In any case, the KICC, or Kenyatta International Convention Centre for long, does indeed look like a donkey penis, at least as far as buildings go, anyway.

“The parking lot where we’ll play roller hockey tomorrow is not far from the KICC building,” Ali told me as soon as I stopped giggling about the whole donkey penis thing.

“You mean the donkey penis building?” I asked.

“Yes, but we don’t call it the donkey penis building,” Ali corrected me.

“You might not,” I told him, “but I will only be referring to it as the donkey penis building moving forward.”

If you are growing annoyed at how many times I have used the phrase “donkey penis” in the last few paragraphs, imagine how Ali felt hanging out with me throughout the remainder of my visit, a period of time in which I worked the phrase into conversation so much, you would have sworn I was the world’s preeminent equine urologist.

After breakfast, Ali walked me over to the parking lot where we’d be skating the next day.

“All these cars will be gone,” he told me. “The whole parking lot is reserved for skating on Sundays.”

As he spoke, I surveyed the parking lot while looking forward to completely dominating anyone else on skates who dared to show up the next day. It felt good.

From the parking lot, Ali and I moved on to a souvenir shop, where I purchased my lone tchotchke of the trip: a small elephant head carved out of wood that I was certain would annoy my girlfriend just the right amount when I hung it on our already crowded living room wall upon my return.

My elephant head in hand, I walked with Ali to a small department store, where he picked up some school supplies for a couple of the Kenya Ice Cubs players.

“They have exams coming up,” he explained. “We try to help them out any way we can.”

From the department store, I followed Ali through the crowded streets of downtown Nairobi, where cars, buses, motorcycles, and people moved in all directions, regardless of any street signs or traffic signals, which, as best I could tell, were merely suggestions one can take or leave depending on one’s mood and not something anyone strictly follows in Nairobi.

“It’s organized chaos,” Ali said with a smile as a motorcycle passed in front of us, just narrowly missing our feet. “In a good way!”

Given my penchant for jaywalking and living outside the law in general, I loved it, even if it meant Ali had to save me from getting hit by various vehicles at least a dozen times throughout the day.

With all the people and traffic, downtown Nairobi can already be a bit of a sensory overload, but nothing could have prepared me for what immediately became my favorite thing about Nairobi (and, arguably, Planet Earth as of this writing) as soon as I laid eyes on them: Nairobi’s legendary matatus. The matatus are a form of public transportation in the city featuring elaborately decorated vans and buses that usually blast reggae, hip-hop, or R&B throughout the trip. Matatu motifs include anything from religious iconography and NBA basketball teams to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and at least one I spotted dedicated entirely to Soul Plane, the highly underrated Snoop Dogg theatrical vehicle in which the rapper plays a pilot with a fear of heights and little regard for commercial air travel norms.

When Ali took me to a parking lot full of matatus, I assumed it was just so I could get a closer look at these magnificent contraptions, but when he told me we’d be hopping on one so we could deliver the school supplies he’d just bought, I was downright giddy. And even though the matatu we ended up riding on was a Premier League soccer–themed one that wasn’t playing any music onboard for reasons I’ll never understand in a million years, I was still thrilled to be going for a spin aboard one.

We rode for about ten minutes before jumping off the matatu in a neighborhood that consisted mostly of small shacks made out of wood or corrugated steel. On the main drag were produce stands, hair salons, and assorted tiny convenience stores, most of which had the word Mamma in their name.

“That means the owner is mother to a girl named Anna,” Ali said of a shop called Mamma Anna that, it’s worth noting, had a couple old hockey jerseys for sale.

As Ali and I walked, we passed a man sitting behind a table covered in small piles of bright green leaves.

“Have you ever had khat?” Ali asked me.

“No!” I replied, excited to presumably try a local delicacy. “What’s that?”

“It’s a bit like cocaine,” Ali explained, “except you chew on it.”

I figured I was annoying Ali enough with my frequent references to donkey genitalia by this point, so I decided against getting a khat habit started on this particular visit. Still, it was nice to learn something new.

Ali and I moved along before running smack-dab into a motorcycle that had been decorated entirely in decals promoting The Boss Baby, the animated film in which Alec Baldwin plays an infant with rare leadership qualities, which just goes to show you can fly to the ends of the earth, but you will never, ever escape Alec Baldwin, no matter how hard you try.

A couple minutes later, after wending our way down an alley through playing children and the occasional stray dog, we entered a small shack that is one of two that are home to Calvin and Brian, two of the Kenya Ice Cub players, and their family, so Ali could drop off the school supplies he had bought for them.

As Ali and Calvin got to chatting about his upcoming exams and tinkering with the wheels on his Rollerblades, I sat near the door as neighborhood kids took turns craning their necks inside the doorway to get a glimpse of the guy from Cleveland.

“Hi, I’m Dave,” I’d say with a wave to each of them before they giggled and disappeared, only to be replaced by another curious kid a second later.

“We met a lot of the younger kids after they’d come to watch us play roller hockey,” Ali explained on our way back into town on a matatu bus that was blasting reggae, much to my delight. “Then we encouraged them to learn to skate and play hockey—it’s a good way to keep them occupied and away from getting involved with gangs, becoming pickpockets and stuff like that.”

Ali and I returned to my hotel a short while later, where we were met by Benja.

“He’s gonna go with you to your show,” Ali told me.

I figured as long as I was coming all this way, I might as well try to get on stage while I was here, so I’d found an English-language comedy show taking place at a café located in Nairobi National Park that was kind enough to add me to the bill. I’d performed comedy, music, or both in about twenty different countries so far, and I saw no reason to spare Kenya as long as I was already there.

On the cab ride out to the show, I was excited to spot the occasional troop of baboons on the side of the road. And I was even more excited to see a couple guys in tribal attire walking along the side of the road as we pulled up to the park.

“Who are they?” I asked Benja.“They are Maasai warriors,” Benja told me. As I would soon learn, the Maasai are an ethnic group inhabiting parts of Kenya and Tanzania. They dress in brightly colored robes and jewelry and carry cool sticks with them, even though I bet there is another name for those. I wanted to become friends with them immediately.

“This guy Dave seems different from all the other tourists,” I imagined the Maasai saying to each other once we had a chance to really get to know each other. “I am so, so glad he is hanging out with us.”

But before I could become besties with the Maasai people, I had a show to do, so Benja and I continued on to Nairobi National Park.

As we pulled up to the café inside the park where the show was taking place, I noticed there was a family of what I assumed were wild boars milling about. I figure it was at this point that I would be mauled to death, like a scene out of the critically acclaimed eighties television miniseries The Thorn Birds. But then Benja explained that the animals in question were not wild boars but warthogs, the kinder, gentler cousins to the boar, and that—much to my relief—my odds of being mauled to death weren’t very good at all.

Between the warthogs, the Maasai, and the baboons, I was pretty excited by the time Benja and I settled at a table to watch the show until it was my time to perform. Before things started, we got to talking about hockey.

“How long have you been playing?” I asked Benja.“About two years,” he said.“That’s great,” I replied while quietly taking comfort in the fact that I had decades of hockey experience over him and would likely be completely dominating him and everyone at the roller hockey game the following afternoon. As I would soon learn, however, doing well at roller hockey wasn’t the only thing I was overly confident about on this particular evening.

“Our next comedian is here all the way from New York City,” the very funny host for the evening, Ciku Waithaka, said from the stage. “Please welcome Dave Hill.”

In my seventeen years of performing comedy, it’s only on a handful of occasions that I’ve said to myself, “This will go well,” before hitting the stage. And on every single one of those occasions, I’ve bombed horribly. But tonight, I was feeling good. I was on the other side of the world just to play hockey, I’d seen baboons just hanging out on the side of the road, and now I was about to do an impromptu comedy set on a delightful Saturday evening in Kenya. So I went ahead and thought, “Yeah, this will go well,” as I approached the stage.

And it sure didn’t. Fortunately for me, though, I prefer an extreme reaction. So, if the crowd doesn’t love me, hate will do just fine. And while I can’t say that they definitely hated me, I can confirm that the only big laugh I got on stage that night was after I joked that my set was only going to last “another forty-five minutes or so.”

Emboldened by my inaugural, if pitiful, Kenyan comedy performance, Benja and I headed off into the night, where, after stopping so I could get a photo with an armed Kenya Defence Forces soldier in which I think both the soldier and I thought we were both going to look much cooler than the photo turned out, we grabbed another cab to a massive open-air nightclub called 1824.

Just like at the other two clubs I’d already been to during my visit, the DJ at 1824 was cranking tunes at skull-vibrating volume and the place was crowded with people of all ages. Since the downstairs area was already packed, a waiter showed us to a table in the upstairs bar overlooking the dance floor, where we were quickly joined at our table by four beautiful young women. I figured these ladies must have gravitated toward us because of the undeniable “We’re hockey players” vibe I’d like to think we were giving off, but it turned out they only sat at our table because the seats were the only ones left in the place. Still, that didn’t stop Benja and me from having an excellent evening in which we danced, sang, and had way too many double rounds of Tusker lager, considering I was supposed to be playing roller hockey for the first time the next day.

I awoke the following morning feeling hungover yet alive, dammit, for today I would finally be playing hockey in Kenya. In hopes of sweating out the beers from the night before, I went to the hotel gym to run a few miles on the treadmill.

“This way, I’ll be totally warmed up when it comes time to destroy the Kenya Ice Lions at roller hockey later today,” I thought as I carefully stepped onto the machine. “These clowns won’t know what hit ’em.”

After a post-workout breakfast near the hotel, I grabbed my hockey equipment and began marching confidently over to the parking lot Ali had shown me the day before. The plan was for me to show up at 2 p.m., when the Kenya Ice Cubs were playing, and meet—while also presumably intimidating—everybody before skating with the Ice Lions at 3 p.m.

As I approached the parking lot, I was surprised to see not just hockey players but at least a few dozen Rollerbladers skating laps around the parking lot as onlookers sat along the stone wall surrounding the park, sipping sodas, eating ice cream, smoking cigarettes, or—in at least one instance I managed to witness—all three at once. I spotted Ali with a few kids pulling on their equipment and headed in their direction.

“This is Mama Hockey,” Ali said, gesturing toward a forty-something woman in a hijab sitting among all the hockey players as they got ready.

Mama Hockey, as her name hints, helps out with the Kenya Ice Cubs, seeing to it that they get the equipment they need and even making sure the players have been fed. She is also the mother of Hanan, a 19-year-old girl who plays for the Ice Lions.

A short while later, Tim Colby, a fiftyish Canadian expat and former minor league hockey coach who started coaching the Ice Lions in 2016, arrived with a pile of new sticks for the players— and, much to my delight, a few Kenya Ice Lions jerseys available for purchase. I snagged one for myself and pulled it on immediately as, had I not spotted it on the internet a couple months earlier, I probably wouldn’t be standing in some parking lot in Kenya about to play hockey right now in the first place.

“Are you gonna skate today?” I asked Tim.

“Nah, I don’t play roller hockey,” he said. “I just stopped by to check in on everybody.”

Ali wouldn’t be suiting up today, either. Like a few of the other Ice Lions players, he and Tim are purists who save their energy for the ice.

Since I didn’t have that option on this particular trip, I threw on my equipment and joined the rest of the Ice Lions on the parking lot “rink” as soon as the Ice Cubs were done playing. For roller hockey, the Ice Lions play three on three with no goalies, instead shooting the puck into tiny street hockey nets no bigger than a microwave. And on the face of things, the players make for a motley crew, as some are suited up in full equipment, complete with face masks, while others wear just skates, gloves, and bicycle helmets.

“I should probably go easy on these guys at first,” I thought as I rolled toward the center of the parking lot for the opening face-off.

Seconds later, the action was underway and I became instantly aware of how different roller hockey is from ice hockey.

For starters, there’s that pesky orange ball used in place of a puck, which bounces all over the place and is much harder to control. Next, I wasn’t used to stopping and starting quickly on Rollerblades, which made it hard for me to keep up with the other players or—perhaps more importantly—look even remotely cool as I attempted to play roller hockey for the first time. Add to that the fact that I was roughly twice the age of most of the other players and had been out drinking until 2 a.m. the night before, and it was safe to say I wasn’t dominating the Ice Lions nearly as much as I had initially intended when I booked my plane ticket.

“How you doing, Dave?” Trevor, a 19-year-old Ice Lion who, despite having only started playing a few months earlier, is already a solid player, asked me.

“I’m g-great,” I said while gasping for air.

After about two minutes, I began skating toward the wall where the rest of the Ice Lions players sat waiting to take a shift. “Who wants to go in for me?” I asked them, collapsing onto the wall.“You’re tired already?” Benja asked me.“Of course not,” I lied. “I just like to take short shifts. You know, like they do in the pros.”

Among the hazards of playing roller hockey in a parking lot in Kenya on a Sunday afternoon are, of course, potholes, a large drainage ditch that manages to swallow the ball every few minutes, an ice cream man who has no hang-ups whatsoever about pushing his cart right through the middle of play, and—perhaps most concerning, given that I was finally wearing a brand new Kenya Ice Lions jersey on my back—what appeared to be hawks* that circled above us almost constantly as we played.

“They like to poop on us,” Trevor warned me.

Indeed, most of the area had already been spackled with bird droppings. Still, I wasn’t gonna let that stop me from giving it my all out there that day. So, after catching my breath, I headed out for another shift. It didn’t go much better, though I did make a mental note to at least try to look like I wasn’t about to keel over whenever Ali pointed his camera at me.

As the afternoon wore on, my breaks in between shifts became longer and longer. And I marveled at how skilled the Ice Lions players were at this sport most of them had only started playing a few short years earlier.

“I would love for there to one day be someone from Nairobi playing in the NHL,” Ali told me as I sat guzzling water in between shifts.

“Well, I’ll do my best to share everything I know about the sport with you guys so that one day that might happen,” I told him as I tripped over my own stick and practically fell on my face while trying to stand up a moment later.

I assumed we’d play roller hockey for a couple hours, tops, but the Ice Lions showed no signs whatsoever of slowing down when 5 p.m. rolled around.

“How long do you guys normally play?” I asked Benja, trying to sound more curious than tired.

“Until we can’t see the ball anymore,” he told me before peeling off on his skates.

I wanted to cry when I heard this. And, were this game taking place near my apartment instead of thousands of miles away on another continent, I would have slowly rolled away without explanation at this point. But since I’d traveled over seven thousand miles to be here, I was determined to go the distance with the Ice Lions on this particular day, so I reluctantly accepted another shift, even though by this point I was mostly just skating big loops around the parking lot while trying to stay upright as the rest of the players managed to actually play the great sport of hockey. Adding insult to injury, at one point a handful of the Ice Cubs joined in the game, so instead of having just guys in their twenties skate circles around me, I was now being humiliated by teenagers, including 15-year-old Calvin, who’d seemed like such a nice kid when I’d visited him in his home just the day before, but was now proving to be an absolutely ruthless opponent who openly laughed at me as he skated around me with the ball.

The sun mercifully set sometime around 7 p.m., and I collapsed on a nearby wall to take off my equipment and join the other players in a few rounds of mango juice with mabuyu, a local treat consisting of baobab tree seeds covered in sugar and spices.

“Are you coming back next Sunday?” 21-year-old Gideon, one of the Ice Lions, asked me as I said my goodbyes a short while later.

“Not next Sunday,” I told him before slinking off into the night with Benja and Ali in the direction of my hotel. “But I’ll be back.”

I was exhausted at this point, but Ali said there was a reggae night happening at a club called Taurus a few miles outside town, and I figured if I couldn’t get it together to go to a reggae night in Kenya on a Sunday night, then what was I even doing with my life? So, after a quick rinse, I hopped in a cab with them to reggae night.

Along the way, I was surprised to see a handful of fires on the side of the road.

“They’re just burning trash,” Ali told me.

It’s maybe not how I might go about trash disposal, but at the time I kind of liked it, as it gave our drive a fun sort of Mad Max vibe.

A short while later, the club appeared on the side of the road, like an oasis in the middle of nowhere. After turning down offers of barbecued intestines from a man standing behind a grill in the parking lot, we headed inside, where the music was absolutely booming—and was so loud, in fact, that conversation was next to impossible. So, Ali, Benja, and I just sat back and enjoyed the music over a few beers while Ali passed his phone around to share hockey videos on Instagram. And as the air slowly filled with the kind of scents normally associated with reggae night, I felt as if I might very well be high on hockey after my long day of playing with the Ice Lions.

I woke the following morning impossibly sore but gratefully intact and, after yet another Kenyan breakfast, limped a couple miles to Kenyatta Market, where local women got their hair done and I had a few confusing conversations with shop owners who couldn’t make sense of my Cleveland accent.

Later that day, I met up with Ali, and much to my delight, we hopped on another matatu to an area north of the city called Highbridge, where we ate chicken tikka and a fried potato dish called bhaji, washed back with insanely good sugar cane and ginger drinks.

One of my biggest takeaways from the last few days with Ali and the hockey players was that it was as much about community and taking care of each other, especially the younger Ice Cubs, as it was about playing this sport most people don’t necessarily think of just yet when they think about Kenya.

“We try to bring them as close to us as we can,” Ali says of the Ice Cubs.

As part of the deal, the Ice Cubs have to do their part by staying in school and being good sports in the parking lot on Sundays.

“We won’t take away their skates,” Ali says of the young players who occasionally fail to hold up their end of the deal. “But we won’t give them new wheels.”

Of course, I couldn’t come all the way to Kenya without at least trying to see a few lions, tigers, and other local four-legged types. So, on my last day in Nairobi, I returned to the scene of the crime—aka the abominable comedy set on Saturday night— grabbing a cab back out to Nairobi National Park, where they also offer safaris and have an animal orphanage. The safari turned out to be three hours long, which felt like an unfair amount of time to subject wild animals to me, so I instead just took a stroll through the animal orphanage, where young animals who aren’t able to survive on their own in the wild are taken care of by the park. There, I met Jared, a park employee kind of enough to show me around and even let me pet a lioness in heat, which sounds like a metaphor for something but actually involved me petting a horny female lion through a chain-link fence.

“She won’t bite you,” Jared assured me.

I hoped he was right. And if he wasn’t, I figured, just think of the story!

Jared also showed me a lion named Dave, something I took as a good omen until he also mentioned that Dave had been neutered, at which point I felt Jared might somehow be openly mocking me for my less-than-stellar roller hockey performance with the Ice Lions.

“How could he possibly know?” I wondered before quickly dismissing the whole thing as cruel coincidence.

On my way out of the orphanage, I was thrilled to see a few of the Maasai warriors hanging out by the gift shop. As soon as we made eye contact, one of them waved me over.

“Give me your phone,” one of the warriors said as a couple of the others put a Maasai robe on me and a walking stick in my hand as soon as I approached.

Next thing I knew, the Maasai warriors were all jumping impossibly high into the air and making high-pitched noises while the guy with my phone captured the whole thing. I did my best to imitate them, but I mostly just thought about what kind of crazy stuff can happen after you go innocently looking for cool hockey jerseys late at night on the internet.

“Let me give you something,” I said once it was all over, fishing my wallet out of my pocket to hand one of the guys the last bit of cash I had on me, the equivalent of about twenty bucks in Kenyan shillings.

“It’s normally fifty dollars,” the guy still holding my phone said.

“Ohhhh,” I replied while slowly backing away after grabbing my phone from him. “Let me see if I can find an ATM nearby and I’ll come back.”

We both knew I was lying. And since the last thing I needed on my last day in Nairobi was to have a bunch of Maasai warriors on my ass, I quickly disappeared into the café where the comedy show had taken place to drink an espresso while trying to plot my escape.

“You’re back,” the very same waitress who’d waited on Benja and me on Saturday said as I settled into a table.

“Yeah,” I replied. Normally, I’d hope for a compliment at this point, but after my performance at the show on Saturday, I knew it wasn’t coming. I downed my espresso, paid my tab and slunk outside into the afternoon sun, where I was delighted to see a group of about fifty schoolchildren who looked to be about six years old, all in matching light blue uniforms seated on a grassy hill in front of the café as what I assume were their teachers set about preparing a picnic for them. It was an adorable sight that at least momentarily made me forget that a handful of Maasai warriors might very well have been looking to exact revenge for my unsatisfactory tip at that very moment. Still, just when I thought my trip to Nairobi couldn’t get any more exhilarating, a baboon suddenly appeared and began making his way toward the schoolchildren.

“Oh no!” I thought, assuming I was about to witness something that might very well make the local news.

Then, just as quickly as he’d approached, the baboon snatched a loaf of bread from one of the schoolteachers and quickly made his retreat as all the little schoolchildren and one grown man visiting from New York City began squealing with delight. When I was their age, the most exciting thing that ever happened in school was that they added tater tots to the lunch menu. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit jealous.

I returned to the city a short while later, after a quick detour to go feed some giraffes at the aptly named Giraffe Center. My flight back to New York was leaving later that night, so with the little time I had left in Nairobi, I decided to walk over to where all the matatus waited to take commuters back home after work near my hotel. Part of the fun, aside from admiring all the cool paint jobs on the buses and vans, was having all the matatu conductors try to talk me into climbing aboard if I so much as looked in their direction, as if part of their job was to talk people who weren’t planning on going for a ride into hopping aboard anyway.

“And that’s how I ended up living in the suburbs of Nairobi,” I imagined saying one day had any of them succeeded. And hopefully, there would be a Kenya Ice Lions–themed matatu by then, too.

After the matatu ogling, I met up with Ali and Trevor from the Ice Lions for a quick dinner at a place called Manhattan Chicken, which felt appropriate, as that’s exactly where I’d be by the same time tomorrow.

“Thanks again for letting me play with the team on Sunday,” I told them over plates of fried chicken and french fries. “It’s too bad we couldn’t play ice hockey, though, since I’m not nearly as good at roller hockey.”

“Yeah, you kind of sucked, Dave,” Ali smiled.“Yeah, you sucked, Dave,” Trevor agreed with a laugh. Maybe they were joking. Or maybe they weren’t. But either way, as I boarded the plane for New York a few hours later, I made a promise to myself that I would definitely return to Nairobi to play ice hockey with the Kenya Ice Lions one day very soon.

And when that day comes, I will absolutely destroy them!

This excerpt from The Awesome Game by Dave Hill is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books.