Hmmmmm.
But before the jouney unfolds, let me tidy up a couple of items from Nairobi.
Somewhere, I have tucked away a photo from my first trip to England in the seventies of a grave headstone in the cemetry of Salisbury Cathederal. I'd need to refind the photo for the name of the interned, but the message was clear: 'died of drinking warm beer'. If you don't specify with your order of Tusker in Nairobi, more often than not, you will be asked "cold or warm?". Strewth, are they trying to kill me or something?
Deb continues to receive lovely backhanders. A joker at the Post Office reads her name and informs her that "it sounds like a wrestler's name" !! Don't ask me!
And another in the you-won't-read-this-at-home series: (Daily Nation, 13 July 2007, p.9) 'The government will soon pay higher rates of compensations to families whose members are killed by wild animals.'
Anyway, we're headed for Ethiopia.
Directions for finding the bus are vague. The first warning being why does this bus not leave from the major bus depot in the city where buses to just about everywhere else in Kenya leave? Instead we taxi to a suburb in the northern outskirts, Eastleigh. Its streets are mud and stone; mosques abound, mostley moslem people, some Ethiopians, lots of Somalians. We learn Eastleigh is nicknamed 'Little Mogadishu'. Charming. It's the end of the tourist trail.
We're off. Transport in Kenya has been good on one account. Buses, and matatus, are licensed to carry a certain number. That's it. No jamming to the max. A couple of times when catching a matatu, but not at the route start, we had to wait until one came with two vacant seats. Then, of course, it would have stacks free.
The first leg is Nairobi to Isiolo. And what's more it's a good road - in Kenya! This is through the 'white highlands' - some of Kenya's prime farmland, that blacks were chased from and whites farmed. Big horticulture enterprises still operate.
Whenever Deb and I travel, we always seem to hear on bus stereos or radios that old Toto number Africa. It's become our travel anthem. Heard it two or three times already this trip. In fact, on returning home after one trip we bought the CD for fun. Some of the lyrics make it particularly appropriate for this trip.
I know that I must do what's right
Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
The song is kind of our good omen.
By the time the tape of six or so other crap songs has played four or five times, Toto is wearing thin. Somebody has realised this, and starts the on-board video of Bollywood produced song-and-dance numbers. Our lucky day. How long was this trip?
We rip through to Isiolo. With no fanfare, or photo stop, we cross the Equator yet again. We arrive about 5:30 pm. At journey's end, there's a crowd of wheeler-dealers, all wanting tips to take your bag out of the luggage compartment, to show you to the restaurant just across the road, or to where the next bus leaves from - 25 meters away. They all chew qat, the herbal narcotic. Basically, they are all stoned. Anyway, time to get a beef stew (probably goat) and rice across the street. The bus for Marsabit leaves at seven. We're humming.
But not till 7:45 did the bus start . Revs his engine a few times, proceeds very slowly for a short distance, stops and loads more people. Starts again, revs again. Crawls down the road, to the petrol filling station. Fills ups, starts up, revs up again. This time , crawls across the road to a vacant lot. No lights. We are all off and sit around. Nice stars to look at, the Maggelenic Cloud.
She's coming in twelve-thirty flight
Her moonlight wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation
Lots of clanking and banging underneath. Eventually a joker crawls out with the alternator in hand, and walks off. It's about 11:00 now, Deb and I, like most others get back on the bus, and try for sleep. They are fairly narrow seats, and leg room is tight. To move in sleep requires a wake up, and untangle each other. You can imagine how it was. Cuddling up into the unrolled sleeping bag helped.
I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation
At six next morning, just on daylight, the bus starts up. The decision has been made, daytime trip - won't need lights.
The lovey bitumen road ended there in Isiolo. Immediately the corrugations begin. And the dust. But no big potholes, so the bus scoots along at a fair clip. Just shaking the daylights out of us. And the rattle! Mi dios!
Twenty minutes in - KABOOM! Puncture. All off. 45 minutes and we're back on the road. It's becoming very arid. We fang past the famous Archer's Post - it marks desert start/end, depending upon your direction.
After a couple of hours, out of nowhere appears Serevidu. A nothing village.
We stop, again. The driver and on-board mechanic want to repar the puncture. We are there for about four hours! One story was : 'don't drive middle of day - too hot', but another, and supported by the heavy banging underneat, was: 'had to straighten springs'. Don't ask me.
But what a stop. Deb and I had a good old chat, some chaptis and chai with a small roadside stall owner. A nice chap. But we also experienced our first Semburu people here. Colourful beads over the men's heads,bare chested, togas, bucket loads of necklaces around the women's necks all across their shoulders. The 'Nairobi Kenyans' on board treat them with some distain. The men all carry menacing looking , sharp, steel, blade-like, tiped spears. They have macheetes (pangas) in scabbards on the hip, and a couple carry what looks like old 303s strapped across their shoulders.
Our stall owner tells us that there has been rain, but no rainy season for three years.
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had
We're off, again. After some time we stop at a town that is not on either of our maps. No, no - not two, it's just that we have reached the cross over of our two maps and this is the overlap strip. Apparently, it's Laisamis.
Despite the earlier stop, this is the designated meal stop. Hey, it's the rules. But we have just arrived in a National Geogaphic photo shoot. This is full on Semburu country. Bare-breasted women covered in colourful necklaces. More older jokers, rifles over shoulders. Moran, young men who have just completed initiation rituals wear distinctive mauve togas. This is no tourist trick. This is for real. These people steadfastedly, pig-headedly, refuse to accept modern ways. Just picture their dwellings. They will have lived this ways for ... yonks. But tradition doesn't preclude some using the bus, complete with old rifles.
The murmed concern now is that we might not reach Marsabit by dark. And we have no lights. Ah well. The landscape is turning magnificantly, stunningly, harsh and brutal.
Good-bye the game animals of the south, this is camel country.
We arrive in Marsabit at dusk. A football game is finishing up in a paddock. The Jeyjey guesthouse has written across the front: 'Good Food. Accommodation with showers'. Beauty. We're covered in dust, little do we know. There's more.
Showers? Sorry, no showers - water restriction. But two big tubs of lovely warm water are produced for a good old, Asian style, dip-dip. We're happy.
It's predominently a Moslem town, but we find the Mountain Bar, complete with pool table. Shithole is the expression, I believe. We order two, COLD, Tuskers and take a seat, off to the side. Apart from having to say 'hello' to each new entrant, we are pretty much left alone. After one beer, it's eight o'clock and we're ready for bed. Catch BBC World: AllBlacks have beaten the Srinkboks. Good show. Jeyjey's beds are comfy ...
The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company
Morning Marsabit. An end of the world, desolate place. Dust squalls blow down the empty space used as main strret, the highway. Plastic bags, rubbish, tumbleweed along. Crows peck at a pile of trash off to the side. Woman with decrepit wheelburrows with water containers trundle past on their way to the well pump (lucky! Most we've seen sling them across their foreheads or strap to back - in remote areas away from wells, they use donkey trains.) Herds of cattle and goats use the street as route to grazing - on what?
And guess what? There's no bus to Moyale. It's cattle trucks or the off chance of hitching a ride with a 4WD. We found out that even the Isiolo-Marsabit Hawad Bus Service has only been running a week. And already has broken down before.
We begin the wait. The lorry convoy will come '10 to 11 o'clock', 'two o'clock', 'early afternoon', 'late afternoon', 'this evening from Nairobi', 'not today is Sunday'. Who knows. The consensus is that the 'convoy' will leave at 4:00pm.
I flag down a couple of 4WDs, they all stop but they are just local driving. A Catholic priest and a nun drive up in a large 4WD, but strangly find some invisible object out in the paddock, that passed as a football pitch, to stare at and therefore able to ignore me. They drive on through and out of town.
We speak with a quietly spoken, gorgeously accented Scots men ( didn't think there was such a speciman) named Andrew - of course, in the same situation, but going the other way. We tell him of the bus we came up on. We exchange tales, experiences.
To either: have a cup of tea; have lunch, seek shade, or all of these, we seek the shelter of Mum's Kitchen. Which involves many 'converstaions'. One joker shared our table and proceeded to read a newspaper. I'm not sure if he actually read or put on a performannce for our benefit. Always keen for a bit of news I glanced at the date, expecting it to be one from the day we left Nairobi. Brace yourself: November 10, 2005!!!!! I kid you not. He didn't quite understand my decline when he offered it to me. He he.
Four o'clock arrives. The convoy gathers. Trucks had been arriving the past hour. These are cattle trucks, but used for all purpose transport. One I saw being cleaned out earlier had undoubtedly been used to carry cattle. Are you with me? But some are loaded to the tops , and then passengers sit on top. The one we were 'loaded' into had only a bit of a load, guys up top riding the rails, and about a doazen 'downstairs' in the back of the truck, where we were directed, taking up positions comfortably sitting on our packs.
One thousand shillings (NZ$20) each, asks the man. You're joking, bucko. I haven't spent all day in Marsabit without learning a thing or two. Here's 400 shillings each - keep the change.
And then on hopped the two armed soldiers. They sat opposite us. I can't tell you how nervous I was when one of the machine guns lay on the truck tray, with forthcoming corrugations, pointed directly up my crotch.
From our position we could only see through some narrow slats, up towards the cabin. Our section was tarpaulined over. But all there appeared to be was sand, dirt, and rocks. The occasional stunted flat-topped acacia, thorn trees. And camels.
And talk about rough. My jawbone socket ached with the shaking, shuddering of corrugations and monster bumps.
Lucky we were prepared: hats pulled own to ears, sunglasses on (even when it turned dark), bandanna up over mouth and nose, long sleeved shirt rolled down. The colour of our clothing quickly became indistinguishable. I don't think I've seen dust like it.
We ploughed our way across the Chulbie Desert, arriving an hour and a half after dark at Turbic, our night stop. I had been mistaken: Marsabit had looked like Las Vegas.
We climbed down from the truck (an operation that first takes climbing up and over the high rails. And there's your pack.) and walked straight into our hotel room. Hard to notice the differance: acroos the sand into our sand floor room, mud walls, unlined corrugated iron roof, and a whole punched into the back wall for a window. That's what you get for 200 shillings (NZ$4) double. Ain't no other choice.
A cup of chai over a candle in the 'restaurant', talking with a male district nurse who was called away for a childbirth. Then to a young guy who told us all the gorie details of the Borena (over from Ethiopia) massacre of the local Gebras. It was the second (yes!) anniversary only three days earlier. 80 people were killed, mostly the elderly and children. Some pregnant women were cut open. Our man, maybe 17, had been woken by screaming and fled into the bush. Oh boy.
No chance of a wash here. It was a three-wet-wipes clean of the forehead - the only exposed bit.
Morning. 5:00 am. Time for a change. We want to see some of the landscape. We grab positions up on the rails, above and behind the cabin. There's a change of guard as well, we only have one soldier this time, sitting up top near us, riding 'shotgun' position. I think last night's two were transport to the army camp - literally, half a dozen tents - at Turbic.
The convoy, five trucks, awaits clearance at the army gate. When cleared, our boy whizzes to the front - best position, no dust from front trucks. We still get covered. Off we head across the Kaisut Desert, all part of the greater Dila Galgula. Chai stop at Sololo - god knows what makes people live in places like this, 10 mud huts in the desert. When we restart, our soldier decides to ride with his mate on another truck.
Our driver takes up front running. As we come across a rise, and onto the downhill slope, our driver hits the brakes. I cannot begin to describe the sinking feeling in my stomach.
There in the next dip, lined across the road were six men. 100 meters up the road, on the next crest, were five more.
Everything became still framed.
The other men riding up top all ducked down. A commotion broke out. The people down, in the back, who couldn't see all went into panic. There was just one word Deb and I could understand.
Shifta! Shifta! Shifta!
A shifta is a nototious Somalian bandit, with a history of raiding this route. But not recently.
I grasped Deb's hand.
It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
In what seemed like a split second, our truck was doing a multi-point reverse turn, high tailing it out of there. Rear ambush was all I could think.Where was our soldier now?
Back at the top of the rise, the next truck arrived. It stopped alongside. The two soldiers (one was ours!) checked things out through binoculars. Next thing, the other truck gunned it, all passengers down, soldiers up with guns at the ready. They sped straight at the men who lept from the road.
Turning, we followed. As we passed, I caught sight of men waving spears and machetes. A couple had rifles, but none raised. We sped through. Nobody on the truck could explain who they were, and we obviously did not stop to inquire. Sometimes the English as a second language only goes so far, not easy at times like this.
Got to tell you, Deb and I were rather reflective for the last hour or so. We travel with valuables well hidden, but... As an ice breaker, everybody was pretty quiet, one joker says to Deb in jilted English: "I understand (no he doesn't, can't, probably never will) is your tradition this man get you for free. No dowry." "No dowry?", splutters the joker next to him. "For free?!!" chokes I.
Passing through large herds of camels, we arrived at the surpringly large, sprawling twin town - Moyale, both sides of the Kenyan-Ethiopian border. In a billowing cloud of dust we stomp into immigration.
We had expected three days to complete this leg. But it took four. 749 kilometers. Only four days: and hell, I've gone and made it sound like an adventure. Funny that.
Truth is, I feel like I've only scratched the surface. What an experience. The intensity of the interactions, the Orthodox Christian with the wierdest hat I've seen who climbed on the truck at a village, the conversations in Mum's Kitchen, the toughness of the travel, the uncertainties on so many fronts. A bit of a shakedown after the comforts of Nairobi.
I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies
He turned to me as if to say: "Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you"
We now continue to Addis Ababa ... in a bus, on smooth bitumen highway, all the way.
I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that I've become
Max
aka Mad
PS: you've got the technology. The band is Toto, the song Africa. Download.
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