A Wild Trip to Kenya Continued

Written by Ty

The view from our final destination.

Also bear in mind that it turns out that little W gets car sick easily. She's never had this problem in America, but she has had it here before. Come to think of it, I get carsick pretty easily here if I'm not sitting in the front. Anyway, she puked the whole way there and the whole way back. J moved into the back to try to catch it in a pitcher, but only rarely actually managed to contain it. Fortunately, W was a good sport about it. Despite the fact that she was vomiting, she wasn't crying. She mostly just slept. Then she woke up for five minutes, asked for a snack, didn't get anything, puked again, and then went back to sleep with her head on mommy's lap.

As I reported above, the next five hours to Eldoret were “fairly uneventful.” We stopped and bought “lunch” though it was 3PM. It was actually “pizza.”  Unfortunately my expectations were too high because I had been told by an American friend that the pizza there was “not bad.” I think he was just really hungry and roadworn the day he made that assessment. The sauce was Kenyan “ketchup” which I don't like in the first place. I would probably have left it on the table and gone somewhere else had I been in America, but I was starving and short on time and mostly having any cheese whatsoever was such a treat that I ate it pretty happily. We picked up another amazing treat—real butter—at a grocery store (our friends have a fridge and it was Christmas after all) and got back on the road by 4PM, hoping to arrive well before dark at 7PM.

Another part of the agenda that didn't go as planned...

I bought diesel and at the station inquired as to the road to Iten, which I assumed was a small village along a dirt road to our friends' town. The attendant assured me (in good English) that it was the next blacktopped left turn off the main road. I took that turn, but just to be sure, I asked two other people along the road if this was in fact the road to Iten. Both said yes. At least at the time I thought they said yes. Those conversations were in Swahili.

I learned two lessons over the next two hours wandering over bumpy unmarked dirt roads. Both of them I knew already, but things had been going so well that perhaps I had a false self assuredness. The lessons are: 1) Remember when asking directions of random people along the road, that they almost certainly do not drive—hardly anyone in Africa owns their own car. So if they don't drive a car, they probably don't think in a way that helps to give directions to a car 2) I know just enough Swahili to be dangerous...

I could tell by the sun we were headed due north—the right direction, which only added to my self assuredness. The “next turn” indicator at the top of the GPS screen said “continue to unpaved road,” which is pretty much what it always says. But after an hour, it seemed something was wrong. The road was getting narrower and less well traveled and there were forks in the road that my directions said nothing about. I started asking directions again and discovered that we were definitely on the wrong road. After talking to four or five different parties, I got directions that I thought would probably actually take me to Iten, but we still had a ways to go after that. My new directions led me to a paved road—the right road to Iten. It turns out the road it Iten is paved, and that we could have been there in 20 minutes if we had taken the right turn. Furthermore, when I reached the road to Iten, I was back to within 3 miles of where I had made my original wrong turn. We had driven two hours on a bad road in a big circle! The map below shows a track taken from our GPS data which reveals the details of our wayward detour.

 We arrived in Iten after 20 minutes. It was now 630 and getting dark. Iten, by the way, is situated at 7000ft and is located in the area occupied by the Kalenjin tribe of Kenya. Iten is home to a high altitude training camp for marathon runners who come from all over the world. It is strange to see Europeans, Asians, many Africans, and others—mostly in skimpy running shorts, which you don't see in Africa—loping alongside the road in this small African town. When you enter the town, a banner over the road proclaims “the home of champions.” This is because while Kenyan's have dominated distance running worldwide for five decades, winning more medals at major events than any other country, over 40% of the Kenyan runners who have won these honors have been from the Kalenjin tribe. The are sometimes called “the running tribe.”

We still had 2 hours on the dirt, which we were not enthusiastic about at this part. Except that I drove it a little on the fast side just because we all wanted to get there so badly and this lead to perhaps a bit more spitting up than we would have otherwise had to tolerate, this passed without further difficulty. We arrived well after dark, but we were safe, happy and delighted to be with our friends.