Whereas last time I wrote what could probably be considered a short story about Ethiopia in the restaurant of a hotel that was so ridden with bed bugs that I am still scratching 4 days after leaving, in a town that had one computer with access to the internet that could only be used if you successfully coaxed the owners nephew from his umpteenth consecutive FIFA 98 game, I find myself writing this piece in a rather different setting: On the couch of a lodge tucked away in a forest at the foothills of Mount Kenya, a mere 10km south of the equator – which we crossed yesterday - after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and potato fritters made for us by the Lodge manager, Roby.
Having cooked up a storm including chipati – the Kenyan starch staple which is essentially a savoury pancake – and beef stew the night before, we negotiated our way through the awkwardness of not knowing if the meal she was cooking was for us or herself and her two friends, Daddy and Alacoque, who all work in various forms of theatre with the owner of the lodge, Keith Pearson. Supper was followed by a read on the outside porch in front of a roaring fire, keeping us warm from the crisp evening air. All the initial luxuries of our indefinite stay in Karichota Lodge, 15km south of Nanyuki, may seem somewhat out of character with the adventure we’re on and may even raise some eyebrows of those thinking of our trip as a year of roughing it, but I couldn’t care less, particularly in the light of the circumstances that landed us here from the Ethio-Kenya border town of Moyale.
Having crossed the border not long before the closing time of 6pm, Frank Alice Adams continued a little ritual of refusing to budge an inch every time he touched down on a new country’s soil. With Tom forced to push Frank with the help of ten locals at a time all laying a finger on Frank in an effort to claim a reward that Tom made perfectly clear he was not dishing out having not asked for nor needed the help, we found our way to a cheap hotel on the battered and excessively eroded dirt roads with the guidance of our self-appointed fixer, Alex – whose help we had also not requested let alone hinted at.
On the Ethiopian side of the border, prior to our in-the-nick-of-time crossing, we met Alex, a German cyclist a year out of high school who was cycling from Egypt to South Africa via a layover in Malawi to visit his girlfriend working on a school aid project (www.AidAndTravel.de). The five of us checked into a cheap hotel compound costing 300 shillings a person – a shilling having one-tenth the value of a rand -, rinsed ourselves off in a bucket shower and headed out in search of Kenya’s famous Tusker beer after warding off the mandatory attempt to rip us off by charging us for the unused bed in a 3 man room that we got placed into, despite the availability of a 2 man room a few rooms down. When it comes to dealings with the white man – Mzungu in Swahili as opposed to the previously loathed Ferengi in Amharic – locals are predictable in their attempts to wring us like a soaked towel of every last cent.
The next day we rose early, having to commandeer ourselves a truck after yet another failed attempt to grant us one at extortionate prices on the Ethiopian side the evening before to take us to the town of Isiolo, 560km south of Moyale, as the roads were all but impassable by bicycle and even more so by the fragile, beaten-to-shit Frank who was as mobile and useful as an 80-year-old man post heart-attack, stroke and triple bypass and one bout of flu away from being wheelchair bound for the rest of his existence. Add to the dilapidated roads the threat of bandits –shifters – fabled to patrol the roads, we decided it prudent to jump on the back of the lorry that parked outside our hotel just after 6 the next morning thanks to the fixer Alex, whose services we had dismissed the night before and his co-fixer, DJ Lia Lia dot com who we had chatted to the previous night, albeit somewhat circumspectly after we discovered a swastika scar that had been engraved into his skin on his upper arm – “young, stupid and drunk” was his excuse. The Lorry was already packed 6 bags of 90kg red kidney beans high and covered with a tarpaulin protecting it from the rain that had been coming down all morning.
We loaded our bicycle, bags and, with great effort, Frank onto the pile of beans hastily so as to allow the truck to negotiate the horrendous side-roads leading to our hotel in what had turned into driving rain. Having done so successfully, we were dropped off at a little café and treated ourselves to baked beans and chipati for breakfast as well as a cup of tea and coffee, both drinks severely lacking in quality compared to their Ethiopian counterparts. We had negotiated a price of 1500KES per person for the trip south, the same price for each bike and somewhat of a premium for Frank, who had to make the trip all the way to Nairobi for a standard patch up job.
Being the first ones on the back of the lorry, getting on an hour before our 10:30am departure, we found ourselves the most comfortable spots we could muster before locals started climbing the ladder and entering our little tarpaulin-covered cabin. The rain ceased as we took off in what we expected was a convoy of trucks, with the company of about 8 other people under the tarpaulin, 6 or so on top of it and about 5 crammed into the front of the lorry.
Although the border town of Moyale had a significant Ethiopian influence, the first two noticeable differences we encountered with the Kenyan people were the rounder cheeks and English proficiency, two traits that are in all likelihood after-effects of Kenya’s years as a British colony. Our fellow cabin-dwellers, mostly women, took to us somewhat after we started bouncing off Swahili words we had been learning. Despite the attempts at learning, picking up anything from conversations was futile as they were either too fast or not actually in Swahili but rather the language of the north, something starting with a ‘b’ – I’m no encyclopaedia, look it up yourself.
After a few bumps that gave us all a bit of airtime, no more so than Matt, Tom and Frank who were all placed directly above the rear axle of the 6-wheeler, and a moment where it seemed the truck was a touch away from toppling over onto its side, one particularly aggressive bump that would have led you to swear the driver had a career in motocross brought the truck to a halt as masses of dust entered the tarpaulin and settled amongst us, our bags and the bikes. Not surprisingly, the suspension had taken a serious knock, but seemingly not enough that the driver and his crew of 3 couldn’t beat back into working order after a delay of nearly an hour. Having peered above the tarpaulin for the first time in the trip we discovered that we were not, as previously suspected, in a convoy at all. We were just a lone, old, suspension-less truck trudging along barely recognisable roads at what couldn’t have been more than 30km/hour.
Not too long after we set off again – although time was somewhat of a mystery in the back of the truck that gave off the aura of a cargo hold in an old pirate ship with frayed ropes bearing a stark resemblance to Chen’s dreadlocks hanging down from metal beams – we heard the loud bang of the tyre bursting. The reactions of Tom and Alex were too much for the locals, who packed out laughing seemingly unperturbed by the fact that another delay was on the cards. The process of changing the tyre and tube was not a simple matter of chucking on the spares as it turned out that every spare tube was far from puncture-free and none in current working condition. Having tried, failed and tried again at fixing a number of the spare tubes with glue and pieces of rubber cut from the most unsalvageable of tubes we were once again mobile… some 3 hours later.
Day turned to night and our hopes of being in Isiolo on the evening of our departure had long since faded. It was midnight by the time we got to our halfway stop of Marsabit, where most of our fellow travellers jumped out. Without warning, the driver and his crew took off to a hotel for the night and left us trying desperately to find comfort and warmth amongst the bags of beans, bodies of travellers and accumulation of dust. The dust had gathered as much on our bodies and in our hair as it did on the bags and bikes and our filth was hardly a consideration amongst the largely failed attempts at coaxing ourselves into a slumber.
After repeated stops at checkpoints where friendly army and police officials requested the ID’s of passengers and the passports of Mzungu’s – unless you put on a sad face and said your passport was buried in the pile of bags under the cover – we clocked up our 24th hour in the back of the truck, documenting the moment in mock achievement in between two more breakdowns, one involving some form of engine failure and the other a broken bearing in the drive shaft that condemned us to the use of only the first 3 gears for the rest of the trip.
Having decided to write off the prospect of cycling the 100km distance between our initial destination of Isiolo and Karichota Lodge, near Nanyuki, we managed to get the driver – who happened not to be the man who had claimed to be the owner and driver in Moyale and with whom we had negotiated our journey – to agree to drop us off later on in his journey to Nairobi through a mixture of hand signals, broken English and the offering of a lukewarm Coke.
After dropping off the rest of the passengers in Isiolo, we were joined in our cabin by the 3 chaps forming the crew of the lorry and a 19 year old fellow on his way to work with his brother in Nairobi who had a relatively good grasp of the English language and explained how he had worked for his brother-in-law’s wholesaler for 3 years but didn’t receive a cent for his efforts after he had asked his sister’s husband to accumulate the money for him and pay him out at a later date. A camaraderie of sorts developed between the 9 of us as we shared the food we had been eating along the way – plain rolls, mini-vetkoeks, biscuits and a few bit-sized pieces of fudge. Our tarpaulins, spare jackets and a mat that I had used as a mattress the night before all became makeshift blankets for our new friends as our second truck-bound evening brought with it a chilly breeze.
Come 9 o’clock that evening, we finally pulled over on the side of the road in Nanyuki, the town which represented the end of our dusty, uncomfortable and most definitely unforgettable 36 hour experience having covered a mere 650km – a trip that would normally take a 6th of the time under normal circumstances back home. Jim, Alex and I said a temporary farewell to Tom and Matt - who had decided to leave his bike with us and go on to Nairobi to offer Tom some company and moral support – and pushed the four bicycles off into the crisp night air to find ourselves a bed for the night. After asking a few locals who were at an initial loss for words as to why the 3 of us were pushing around 4 bikes after 9 at night we were pointed in the direction of a hotel that allowed us to crash in a two man room at the standard price - 900KES for the room. Unbelievably, the hotel had a hot shower - which I flatly refused to believe after being told as much by one of the staff – as well as a little restaurant with four televisions showing DSTV.
The next morning, after a fantastic nights rest and an even better shower, we ventured into the city for a walk which included a visit to an internet café – the first one with a functioning connection since Addis – and a Spar-sized supermarket situated in amongst quaint and colourful shops offering a variety of goods and services, clean streets and overlooked by the snow-capped peak of Mount Kenya. With a week – give or take – at a mountainside retreat, I am in absolutely no rush to leave Kenya!
Having cooked up a storm including chipati – the Kenyan starch staple which is essentially a savoury pancake – and beef stew the night before, we negotiated our way through the awkwardness of not knowing if the meal she was cooking was for us or herself and her two friends, Daddy and Alacoque, who all work in various forms of theatre with the owner of the lodge, Keith Pearson. Supper was followed by a read on the outside porch in front of a roaring fire, keeping us warm from the crisp evening air. All the initial luxuries of our indefinite stay in Karichota Lodge, 15km south of Nanyuki, may seem somewhat out of character with the adventure we’re on and may even raise some eyebrows of those thinking of our trip as a year of roughing it, but I couldn’t care less, particularly in the light of the circumstances that landed us here from the Ethio-Kenya border town of Moyale.
Having crossed the border not long before the closing time of 6pm, Frank Alice Adams continued a little ritual of refusing to budge an inch every time he touched down on a new country’s soil. With Tom forced to push Frank with the help of ten locals at a time all laying a finger on Frank in an effort to claim a reward that Tom made perfectly clear he was not dishing out having not asked for nor needed the help, we found our way to a cheap hotel on the battered and excessively eroded dirt roads with the guidance of our self-appointed fixer, Alex – whose help we had also not requested let alone hinted at.
On the Ethiopian side of the border, prior to our in-the-nick-of-time crossing, we met Alex, a German cyclist a year out of high school who was cycling from Egypt to South Africa via a layover in Malawi to visit his girlfriend working on a school aid project (www.AidAndTravel.de). The five of us checked into a cheap hotel compound costing 300 shillings a person – a shilling having one-tenth the value of a rand -, rinsed ourselves off in a bucket shower and headed out in search of Kenya’s famous Tusker beer after warding off the mandatory attempt to rip us off by charging us for the unused bed in a 3 man room that we got placed into, despite the availability of a 2 man room a few rooms down. When it comes to dealings with the white man – Mzungu in Swahili as opposed to the previously loathed Ferengi in Amharic – locals are predictable in their attempts to wring us like a soaked towel of every last cent.
The next day we rose early, having to commandeer ourselves a truck after yet another failed attempt to grant us one at extortionate prices on the Ethiopian side the evening before to take us to the town of Isiolo, 560km south of Moyale, as the roads were all but impassable by bicycle and even more so by the fragile, beaten-to-shit Frank who was as mobile and useful as an 80-year-old man post heart-attack, stroke and triple bypass and one bout of flu away from being wheelchair bound for the rest of his existence. Add to the dilapidated roads the threat of bandits –shifters – fabled to patrol the roads, we decided it prudent to jump on the back of the lorry that parked outside our hotel just after 6 the next morning thanks to the fixer Alex, whose services we had dismissed the night before and his co-fixer, DJ Lia Lia dot com who we had chatted to the previous night, albeit somewhat circumspectly after we discovered a swastika scar that had been engraved into his skin on his upper arm – “young, stupid and drunk” was his excuse. The Lorry was already packed 6 bags of 90kg red kidney beans high and covered with a tarpaulin protecting it from the rain that had been coming down all morning.
We loaded our bicycle, bags and, with great effort, Frank onto the pile of beans hastily so as to allow the truck to negotiate the horrendous side-roads leading to our hotel in what had turned into driving rain. Having done so successfully, we were dropped off at a little café and treated ourselves to baked beans and chipati for breakfast as well as a cup of tea and coffee, both drinks severely lacking in quality compared to their Ethiopian counterparts. We had negotiated a price of 1500KES per person for the trip south, the same price for each bike and somewhat of a premium for Frank, who had to make the trip all the way to Nairobi for a standard patch up job.
Being the first ones on the back of the lorry, getting on an hour before our 10:30am departure, we found ourselves the most comfortable spots we could muster before locals started climbing the ladder and entering our little tarpaulin-covered cabin. The rain ceased as we took off in what we expected was a convoy of trucks, with the company of about 8 other people under the tarpaulin, 6 or so on top of it and about 5 crammed into the front of the lorry.
Although the border town of Moyale had a significant Ethiopian influence, the first two noticeable differences we encountered with the Kenyan people were the rounder cheeks and English proficiency, two traits that are in all likelihood after-effects of Kenya’s years as a British colony. Our fellow cabin-dwellers, mostly women, took to us somewhat after we started bouncing off Swahili words we had been learning. Despite the attempts at learning, picking up anything from conversations was futile as they were either too fast or not actually in Swahili but rather the language of the north, something starting with a ‘b’ – I’m no encyclopaedia, look it up yourself.
After a few bumps that gave us all a bit of airtime, no more so than Matt, Tom and Frank who were all placed directly above the rear axle of the 6-wheeler, and a moment where it seemed the truck was a touch away from toppling over onto its side, one particularly aggressive bump that would have led you to swear the driver had a career in motocross brought the truck to a halt as masses of dust entered the tarpaulin and settled amongst us, our bags and the bikes. Not surprisingly, the suspension had taken a serious knock, but seemingly not enough that the driver and his crew of 3 couldn’t beat back into working order after a delay of nearly an hour. Having peered above the tarpaulin for the first time in the trip we discovered that we were not, as previously suspected, in a convoy at all. We were just a lone, old, suspension-less truck trudging along barely recognisable roads at what couldn’t have been more than 30km/hour.
Not too long after we set off again – although time was somewhat of a mystery in the back of the truck that gave off the aura of a cargo hold in an old pirate ship with frayed ropes bearing a stark resemblance to Chen’s dreadlocks hanging down from metal beams – we heard the loud bang of the tyre bursting. The reactions of Tom and Alex were too much for the locals, who packed out laughing seemingly unperturbed by the fact that another delay was on the cards. The process of changing the tyre and tube was not a simple matter of chucking on the spares as it turned out that every spare tube was far from puncture-free and none in current working condition. Having tried, failed and tried again at fixing a number of the spare tubes with glue and pieces of rubber cut from the most unsalvageable of tubes we were once again mobile… some 3 hours later.
Day turned to night and our hopes of being in Isiolo on the evening of our departure had long since faded. It was midnight by the time we got to our halfway stop of Marsabit, where most of our fellow travellers jumped out. Without warning, the driver and his crew took off to a hotel for the night and left us trying desperately to find comfort and warmth amongst the bags of beans, bodies of travellers and accumulation of dust. The dust had gathered as much on our bodies and in our hair as it did on the bags and bikes and our filth was hardly a consideration amongst the largely failed attempts at coaxing ourselves into a slumber.
After repeated stops at checkpoints where friendly army and police officials requested the ID’s of passengers and the passports of Mzungu’s – unless you put on a sad face and said your passport was buried in the pile of bags under the cover – we clocked up our 24th hour in the back of the truck, documenting the moment in mock achievement in between two more breakdowns, one involving some form of engine failure and the other a broken bearing in the drive shaft that condemned us to the use of only the first 3 gears for the rest of the trip.
Having decided to write off the prospect of cycling the 100km distance between our initial destination of Isiolo and Karichota Lodge, near Nanyuki, we managed to get the driver – who happened not to be the man who had claimed to be the owner and driver in Moyale and with whom we had negotiated our journey – to agree to drop us off later on in his journey to Nairobi through a mixture of hand signals, broken English and the offering of a lukewarm Coke.
After dropping off the rest of the passengers in Isiolo, we were joined in our cabin by the 3 chaps forming the crew of the lorry and a 19 year old fellow on his way to work with his brother in Nairobi who had a relatively good grasp of the English language and explained how he had worked for his brother-in-law’s wholesaler for 3 years but didn’t receive a cent for his efforts after he had asked his sister’s husband to accumulate the money for him and pay him out at a later date. A camaraderie of sorts developed between the 9 of us as we shared the food we had been eating along the way – plain rolls, mini-vetkoeks, biscuits and a few bit-sized pieces of fudge. Our tarpaulins, spare jackets and a mat that I had used as a mattress the night before all became makeshift blankets for our new friends as our second truck-bound evening brought with it a chilly breeze.
Come 9 o’clock that evening, we finally pulled over on the side of the road in Nanyuki, the town which represented the end of our dusty, uncomfortable and most definitely unforgettable 36 hour experience having covered a mere 650km – a trip that would normally take a 6th of the time under normal circumstances back home. Jim, Alex and I said a temporary farewell to Tom and Matt - who had decided to leave his bike with us and go on to Nairobi to offer Tom some company and moral support – and pushed the four bicycles off into the crisp night air to find ourselves a bed for the night. After asking a few locals who were at an initial loss for words as to why the 3 of us were pushing around 4 bikes after 9 at night we were pointed in the direction of a hotel that allowed us to crash in a two man room at the standard price - 900KES for the room. Unbelievably, the hotel had a hot shower - which I flatly refused to believe after being told as much by one of the staff – as well as a little restaurant with four televisions showing DSTV.
The next morning, after a fantastic nights rest and an even better shower, we ventured into the city for a walk which included a visit to an internet café – the first one with a functioning connection since Addis – and a Spar-sized supermarket situated in amongst quaint and colourful shops offering a variety of goods and services, clean streets and overlooked by the snow-capped peak of Mount Kenya. With a week – give or take – at a mountainside retreat, I am in absolutely no rush to leave Kenya!
