26th-28th January – Days 119-121 – Moyale to Nairobi, Kenya


Another day, another adventure. In a by now familiar action, we woke up earlier than we really would have wanted and tottered down to the large dusty area where the trucks congregate, got an appalling rate for the Ethiopian Birr that we had left, and ended up being approached by the usual bus station hangers-on. In a new country, somewhere without any buses, we felt more inclined to follow this guy and he wrote us a ticket to Nairobi in exchange for 2000 shillings. He took us to a truck and that was that. Or was it...? He came back a few minutes later. “There's a problem with this one – no more space left in the cab. You'll have to sit on the top.” Normally this would have been alright but we'd hardly slept in 4 nights and “on the top” in this case meant balancing ourselves on small metal bars, tottering above the truck's shipment of longhorn cows headed for Nairobi slaughterhouses. Images of ourselves falling asleep, falling off the bars and impaling ourselves on the horns of angry bovines led us to turn down this ride and ask if there was anything else. “There's this one” the guy said. “It goes through Wajir and Garissa though”. This large empty slab which comprised Northeastern Kenya was one we knew absolutely nothing about aside from that it was absolutely infested with bandits. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was a determination not to spend another night in Moyale or maybe it was simply the second manifestation of a magnetic attraction to Somalia, but we agreed, and hopped on.

"Meet the neighbours!"

Smooth, isn't it?

We shared the truck (taking a shipment of 200 sacks of beans) with several interesting and friendly characters – Abdirazak, who didn't speak a word of English but tried to communicate with us anyway, was the driver. He was a skinny, softly spoken guy, the complete opposite of everything you would expect of a trans-African trucker, and hopped into the cab at Moyale with an anti-breast-cancer shirt proclaiming “SUPPORT MY RACK” in bright pink lettering. A good start. In the back of the truck was a guy who always did his running around but whose identity we never managed to determine. A secondary school kid heading to Nairobi, Jabar, shared the cab with us as did another guy who claimed to be South African but also claimed to be the driver's nephew. We never found out which was more accurate or, as we realised afterwards, what his name was. In any case, he was friendly and talkative, spoke near-fluent English and was our main point of communication to translate to the others. Despite communication being slow and occasionally not very smooth it was a fun ride in a friendly atmosphere.

The termite mounds give us the finger

As we set off from Moyale though, we had no idea what was coming to us. We were told by Jabar that the bandits weren't in this area any more, but this was the first time we'd heard that. In any case, by the time we'd started really thinking about it, it was too late – we were going to enjoy this trip! The landscape was greener than I'd expected, the pace was slow but steady, the truck's radio blasted out pop songs in Borana, a Kenyan language related to Oromo in Ethiopia. The truck quickly started feeling like home and we knew we would have to make it that – no one could tell us how long the trip would be, but a quick look at the map, the rugged roads and the rickety truck made it seem obvious that we would be there for more than a few hours. Our Lonely Planet book quickly became hot property as anyone who saw it would grab it and read it – including Abdirazak, who would read it while he was driving. Jabar eventually got hold of it, saw the giraffes on the front cover and told us that we could see some around Wajir. A surprise for us, but our eyes were open for them nonetheless. As the cheery and catchy Borana pop played, the sun went down, and a couple of giraffe silhouettes appeared in the bushes by the road, the first M had seen in the wild and an exciting moment for her.

Is it a Rothschilds? Is it a Maasai? No, it's a Reticulated!

Traffic was pretty light on the road – the odd truck would come the other way at the same snail's pace as us, kicking up dust that would fly in through our windows, caking our clothes and hair with that now familiar feeling. The drivers would beep their horns excitedly, wave out the window and drive on. Around 10pm, our momentum was broken as a truck coming the other way had broken down between two trees, and our path was blocked. The driver's guy in the back hopped off and gesticulated with his torch as we reversed, and then tried to go through the sand and bushes onto an adjacent track. The first attempt led us straight towards a tree and we reversed to try again. M wasn't impressed as she looked out - “look at that sand, it's far too deep... we'll never get through!” and so it proved. The next hour and a half were spent shovelling sand out from under the tyres and ripping branches off trees to use as ladders. After countless unsuccessful efforts and with a big cheer, we finally got out, onto the other path, and continued on our way. A few more giraffes and an aardwolf crossed our path, M and I started being able to sing along to the Borana pop.

Nightlife, northeastern Kenya

Wajir, our first “major” town (meaning our first one with permanent buildings) came into view at around midnight, and we hopped out to buy some welcome cold drinks and snacks. It was a pretty unremarkable town aside from its seemingly high ratio of people who, in most other countries, would be in asylums. They walked around, proclaiming things loudly to no one in particular and muttering to themselves. In the middle of it all, the woman who ran the shop where we picked up some biscuits told us that she was active in UNIFEM and had been to New York for conferences. She wasn't exactly the kind of person I expected to find in Wajir. Having stacked up, we charged on, and sleep came over us. Abdirazak had munched miraa (the Kenyan word for qat) all day although by 3am he decided that it was enough and pulled over in a small village. I was already half asleep and spent the night curled up in the truck's passenger seat as M snoozed on the bed behind me.

Abdirazak checks up which National Park he should visit next

A few hours later we were up and off again – the sun was up but it was a typical winter desert morning, and I shivered against the cold. As the sun rose and the air warmed, I started hoping that we wouldn't arrive in Nairobi that day. Not that I wasn't excited by getting there, but the landscapes were beautiful and stimulating, the atmosphere was good, there were enough animals to keep our eyes scanning the horizon and we felt ever more comfortable on “our” truck.

Red dust!

We stopped at 7am for breakfast in Habasweyne but sleep was a more tempting option for me and I didn't get off, while M was still asleep in her bed. We trundled on again through small villages, making small talk sometimes, joking with Abdirazak about his lack of miraa and trying (and generally succeeding) to joke with the police at checkpoints at each town or village. As time went on it became obvious we would be spending another night on the truck and we settled in and made ourselves comfortable. Sometime mid-afternoon we got to an intersection – to the left was wilderness, Liboi and Mogadishu. To the right, the tarmac road to Garissa. A few jokes went up about taking us to Mogadishu and, after 30 hours rattling along corrugated roads and bouncing through dry mud potholes, the truck hauled itself onto the tarmac. The effect of the new flatness and quietness was quite strange.

From here on the trip wasn't quite as wild as it had been before we hit the tarmac but we finally saw a populated part of Kenya – Garissa was a reasonably big town and we stopped there for lunch, and such features as rivers and bridges suddenly appeared. Truck stops with other trucks in it also appeared and as darkness fell we stopped at one of those, and met some of the other truckers. One of them was spending the night there as he felt there was too much of a threat on the road ahead that his shipment of goats would get hijacked at night. We were invited for a cup of tea and as we stood up to pay, we were told that someone had already paid for us. We never found out who it was. Another 7 hours on the truck, and we pulled over at a petrol station near Thika for 3 hours of sleep. How Abdirazak managed this amazing pace with so little sleep (and miraa only on the first day!) I don't know, but he managed it without any problems. Dawn came and we pulled on into a warehouse in Thika where our shipment of beans was unloaded. After waiting for a few hours for the truck's new instructions, we pushed on to Nairobi where the guys would pick up a new shipment and leave immediately for Mombasa. Amazing...

The cargo is unloaded

After 51 hours of sitting, having a rest is a tempting option

Kenya so far seems a beautiful, dynamic country, and different in many many ways from Ethiopia. It also seems more easy going and relaxed and, despite Nairobi's terrible reputation for crime, it seems as though we're almost anonymous here in Kenya compared with the incessant attention and demands for money in Ethiopia. What is also different is the raging corruption we've seen on the way down – we didn't see anything of the sort in Ethiopia although the police checkpoints after Garissa seemed set up only to collect some cash for those manning it. Some would try to invent reasons for the fines they were dishing out but many also just opened the door and stared at Abdirazak, their demands obvious enough. I asked his nephew why he paid up so easily. “If he doesn't, they will take him to the police station, things will be more difficult and he will have to pay anyway” was the reply. They weren't happy with the situation but seems resigned to the situation and played along with it.

It was long and bumpy but it was also eye opening, beautiful and a great introduction to Kenya and I'd have loved to be back in Moyale to do it all again. There was no time to think about that though – we were now suddenly in one of Africa's big cities, one of the economic centres of the continent and suddenly somewhere very new and different.