Overall, Kenya is much more developed that Ethiopia. The buildings (at least in appearance) are sturdier. There’s more cars. There’s more western products available for consumption. I’ve seen very few donkey carts and many more mzungus (white people). The travel experience is much more comfortable here. Tasty drinks like Bitter lemon soda and Stoney (a heavily spiced ginger soda) line the roadside stands. If you ever get tired of driving through the pot-hole-riddled roads, you can stop at a roadside café for chai. The chai here isn’t quite as spiceful as the Starbucks version, but it’s delicious nonetheless. The Kenyans drink it at least three or four times a day, so I’ve had quite a fill of the stuff.
Our first week in Kenya was spent in the middle of nowhere. David and I drove up to the Pokot region in the north with Art and Mariellen Davis, a couple who have lived and worked in the region for over thirty years!! They’re house, which they lived in a tent while they built it, is about seventy miles from the nearest developed town. That distance is tied together by a road of rocks and brush. Along this road, every few miles, you might encounter a cluster of mud huts or a herd of sheep tended by a single young boy. Pedestrians are few and far between—but when you do pass, you see women decked out in elaborate colored beads, lugging huge burdens on their backs. These are the Pokot. A tribespeople who have existed in the region for hundreds if not thousands of years. Their lifestyle has changed very little in that time. Their main industry is herding cattle and goats. There’s no electricity in their mud huts. They sleep on benches constructed out of sticks.
It’s a whole different world.
While Art and Mariellen went around reconnecting and talking with their neighbors, David and I took some time to soak in the wilderness we were in. The Pokot region of Kenya is much more like Ethiopia in that it’s arid and dusty. The lushness of Nairobi doesn’t translate to the lower part of the Great Rift Valley. The only vegetation is acacia trees and shrubs covered in fierce, snagging thorns. We hiked up a nearby hill, (not always effectively) dodging the whipping, thorny branches and loose piles of rocks, to a spectacularly grand view. When we got to the top, we could see absolutely no signs of civilization, as far as the eye could see. Only miles and miles of African bushland. In the distance were mountains of cindercone and beyond those, more bush. We sat on top of the mountain just admiring the remoteness of the place.
The next day we got to experience just how vast that remoteness was. Art was going to drive thirty-five miles out further into the bush to check on a well he’d helped drill a while back. David and I got to ride the whole distance on top of his Land Cruiser. The experience was so exhilarating. Zooming through miles and miles of dusty acacia trees, dodging dangerously thorny branches and hanging on for dear life in the more rocky areas of the “road.” Unfortunately we did get stuck with thorns a few times. My Rainbow sandals have more than a few acacia thorns stuck in them from my feeble attempts to shield myself. Overall we got to ride about sixty miles on top of the Land Cruiser. In the end we were filthy, covered head to toe in red dust. But it was totally worth it.
Pokot stars. It’s funny how you can just sit for hours and hours staring at the stars, especially when there are so many of them. At night, a few hours after the sun went down, we would take cups of hot chai outside and sit back to watch the celestial show. Since there was no electricity for miles, the view was unhindered by pollution. The Milky Way was a clear white band streaking across the sky. The only signs of civilization were the satellites and airplanes which occasionally streaked across the horizon. Even more frequent were the shooting stars that plummeted from the black every few minutes. It really was a sight. We soaked in as much as we could.
Now we’re back in Nairobi, in the land of diesel-spewing cars and frequent gunshots, waiting out the few days until we go on our safari to Masai Mara. To tell the truth, I'm a little nervous in Kenya's capital city. When our taxi driver picked us up from the airport he launched straight into a story about how he'd been robbed at gunpoint the week before. The robbers took him to an ATM and told him that if he gave them the wrong PIN they would shoot him. They emptied his account for all it was worth, stole his cell phone and his laptop. The taxi driver was happy that they didn't kill him. Not a great story to open up our Kenyan experience with! I'm not too worried, I know that our lives and possessions are in God's hands. Still, I'll breathe a nice sigh of relief once I'm on that airplane back to the states!
Crossing the equator!
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