There was something delightfully tedious about Kenya's election day. We spent it in Kisumu in the far west of the country, at the city's biggest sports grounds, where thousands of voters queued in scorching heat to cast their ballot.

When we arrived soon after the polls opened at 6:00am local time, the people at the front of the lines said they had turned up at 1.30am and sat through the night. It turned out to be a smart move '" latecomers (and by that I mean those who were lazy enough to arrive by 5:00am) had to wait up to nine hours to get to the ballot boxes. And throughout the day, as the lines inched their way across the hot, dusty fields, it was spectacularly routine.

People chatted, enterprising businessmen sold water and ice creams, and occasionally, when someone tried to jump the queue, the crowd shouted and jeered.

Read Peter Greste's full blog on Al Jazeera