A Wild Trip to Kenya

Last week we traveled to to Kenya visit Dr. Aaron and Sonya J., friends who have just begun a two year stint at a mission hospital in Western Kenya. We hoped to go there to enjoy Christmas with them, to encourage them in their new work, and hopefully to help them adjust to some the of challenges of being new to Africa.

Kenya is close—I can walk there. But that's just the border. These folks are at a fairly remote location 241 miles to the north. 241 miles is much farther in Africa than it is in America. I would not have even undertaken the journey except that: most of the road between here and there is paved and I have a new GPS with Africa maps which would help us find the way. This device was immeasurably helpful. I have used it for 3 weeks now, and I have over and over again been amazed at the small muddy “roads” that are actually in its database. However, none of these roads have real names, and the GPS has no way of predicting the condition of the roads: whether there is impassable mud, whether a huge truck has jack-knifed and blocked the entire road for weeks, or whether the most direct route is in fact three times slower than a more roundabout route. If you have ever been misled by a GPS in America, then take that experience and its annoyances and consternation and multiply that by about a thousand, and then you have the situation that a GPS might lead you into here. After all, they can't think. They carry only data—no knowledge and certainly no wisdom. It would certainly be a mistake to have too much faith in the GPS. That would be a case of the dim-sighted following the blind and overconfident. For example, when you input a destination into the GPS—and yes, we sometimes actually type in coordinates including minutes and even seconds—it confidently displays an arrival time in the lower left hand corner, the same as in America. Here, you might as well triple the driving time and then add three hours. Then assume that you have about a fifty-fifty chance of arriving within three hours of that time. It all depends on things like: how good are your tires and battery? Do you have a spare? Do you have two? Is it raining? Is it a holiday? Who maintains your vehicle? Do you have proper paperwork for the police checks? And on and on. So I just change the settings to display elevation in the lower left hand corner, because that is somewhat interesting and is at least true. We reached as high as 8300 ft on this trip.

It's 241 miles to where our friends are working. We left at 6AM (dawn), hoping for an eight hour driving time (based on data combed from locals): Forty minutes on our dirt road, two hours to Kisii on the blacktop (50 miles), three and a half more hours to Eldoret (120 miles), and then another 2 hours more on dirt to finish the trip.

That's not how it turned out...

At 1030AM, we had only covered 14 miles. Only five miles from City of Hope, our fan belt broke. Ironically, the manager here had told the mechanic to replace it only a few days before, but the mechanic had insisted that it still had plenty of life in it. Fortunately we were able to limp into town. Having got such an early start, we had to wait for the “spares shop” to open. It was December 22, too close to Christmas for it to open on time. Everything gets slow here around holidays. The first shop didn't have the belt. The second one did when it finally opened. My friend helped me locate a mechanic who agreed to replace it for less than four dollars. I could have done it myself, but figured that four dollars was worth it. We still had to go through immigration and customs and do lots of paperwork so I figured I could do that while he fixed the car. I was encouraged in this delusion by how cleverly he removed the other belts from the engine—something I wouldn't have thought of. He jacked up the rear end, put a screwdriver between the pulley and the belt that needed to be removed, and had his accomplice turn the back wheel of the truck with the transmission engaged in fifth gear. The engine crawled forward and the belt popped off—rather than having to remove the power steering pump to get it off. I thought, “That's a good trick. This guy knows what he's doing.” I left the truck in his hands, with my friend there to oversee and report in on the progress, and headed to the immigration office. I'm really not that much of an optimist, but I also didn't really have much choice. It was now about 9AM.

Customs was its own fiasco. I don't even really understand what happened with the paperwork for the truck, but eventually they let me through—really they were just letting the truck through.

Immigration should have been simple. We already had visas, and usually this is a pretty quick process—they have seen me plenty of times before. But on that day the line was LOOOOONG. Hundreds of Tanzanians were cued up to reenter Tanzania for Christmas. They were coming from well paying jobs in Kenya. Or the other way around. This is a small border crossing and one desk serves for entering the country, exiting the country, applying for a visa, or any other purpose. In order to prevent people from cutting in line, the African method of standing in line is often to stand with your chest firmly pressed against the back of the person in front of you—a total stranger. You enjoy the same treatment from an unknown personage standing behind you. Of course there's a fifty percent chance that each of those people will be of the opposite gender. It's a little tough to get used to—especially in the hot sun. I was able to tolerate it for just long enough to survive the line. When I finally reached the front, the haggard official waved us through with hardly a glance at our passports. We were only people in that substantial line that actually had passports as far as I could tell.

Of course the truck, for reasons I didn't even bother to ascertain the details of—something about the first belt not being the right one, was not ready, even though an hour and a half had gone by. I took advantage of the “extra time” to take a risk. My stomach was growling so I was getting grouchy by this time. Accordingly I hazarded to partake of some street food, a not insignificant gastrointestinal gamble when you have an eight hour drive without a single nice bathroom ahead of you, but being hungry is no fun either. So I bought a chapati (flatbread) and hot pinto beans served in a flimsy polyethylene bag with no utensils. I know you are somehow supposed to be able to get the piping hot beans out of the bag (the size of a sandwich bag, but about as sturdy as wet tissue paper) and into your mouth with the flatbread, but not being raised that way, I'm not really capable. It wasn't pretty. By 1030, we were finally underway again.

The next five hours were fairly uneventful. We tried to stop to use the bathroom in sugar cane or corn, both of which are basically tall and dense enough to hide you. Though rural, the area we traversed is fairly well populated and there are people everywhere along the tarmac road. I say it was uneventful. Except for this: If my mother could see the kind of wild passing a driver (OK, me) is basically forced to undertake if he wants to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, she would forbid me to ever drive in Africa. (Yes mom, I know you're reading this, but you're going to have to let me be an adult and make my own decisions on this. When you come visit we will avoid taking any long drives on the “highway” and we will just be satisfied with forever traveling at a tractor's pace—we can even take the tractor to town if you want, but it has zero suspension). The problem is that there are two narrow lanes (barely), one in each direction, and there are all kinds of traffic on them, each with its own pace. I will endeavor to describe the assemblage in order of rate of travel: Cows (a blundering quadruped ran into us twice—I was not moving I promise), sheep, pedestrians, oxen pulling plows tied to a slab of wood as a “trailer,” tractors (usually with six to infinity passengers and pulling a jalopy trailer of some type), 100cc Chinese motorbikes that can only make 25mph with three (or six!) passengers on board or better yet with ridiculous cargoes like 8 sheets of plywood, 30 stackable chairs, three 20 ft. ladders, 80 chickens or even a 55 gallon drum full of gasoline (yikes!), matatus (minivans) with up to 30 people in/on them necessarily with half of them standing on running boards or bumpers or clinging precariously to the roof (you still pay full fare though) also with a bedazzling array of cargo stacked in towering configurations, buses of various sizes (some with goats tied on the roof and some not—the same thrilling loading methodology used for all vehicles—I actually witnessed a stack of mattresses collide with powerlines at 50mph on this trip), “lorries” (which are also insanely overloaded with up to twice the load that an American semi would be allowed to carry) that lumber down the road with absolutely terrifying authority giving quarter to no fellow traveler (SERIOUSLY, you had better yield), and lastly a smattering of private cars all trying to pass one another in the melee. Suffice it to say, I held my own, but I scared myself more than once. It takes vigorous attention and concentration. Not once, but twice (I honestly regret them both, I won't do it again mom), I passed a vehicle by driving on the shoulder (far from paved) on the opposite side of the road, with oncoming traffic passing between me and the vehicle I was overtaking. I apologized to the wife and kids afterward—both times. But please bear with me in grace, bearing in mind that I have to drive on the left while sitting on the right hand side of the truck and a 100yd stretch of road with no potholes is non-existent. There is a reason that nearly all drivers in Africa are professionals. It is not for the unpracticed or feint of heart (or will).

To be continued...