The Exodus group had vanished during the
night, like those other things that vanish in the night, so even rising at
5.15am to pack up felt like a lie-in. We had our last breakfast – omelettes –
and, hooray, my last instant coffee-Milo drink, loaded up and were away by
6.45am as a rainbow signalled a less than sunny morning ahead.
Wet and misty, and also early on Sunday
morning, there wasn’t for a while much to see of the roadshow, but gradually
the shutters came down, and people appeared on the verge with food to sell –
watching the woman clutching three cabbages rushing to our windows and then,
when rejected, running along to the next stopped truck made me feel very
privileged, despite my whingeing about discomforts on this trip. Men with
loaded donkeys walked along by the road – no lead rope needed, they were a team – women
piled up their pyramids of potatoes, some men were hacking away at the stumps
of a cleared forest, and another man grabbed several chickens
that were standing amongst an unsuspecting flock on a grassy bit of verge (that
wasn’t going to end well).
Watching the road ahead, I saw several
instances of dodgy overtaking – and then, sure enough, passed the recent wreck
of a car, stove-in at the front, with people gathered around it. We’ve come
across so many dramatic-looking road accidents on this trip (and heard one
actually happen right behind us) – at least six in the fortnight, which is
exponentially more than I’ve seen anywhere else. Something to consider, people,
if you’re tempted to do a self-drive here.
On a guided tour like this one, though,
there is little of that sort of responsibility; instead, there’s lots of time
to observe and to think. Like, if your job is to watch over a little herd of cows
or goats or sheep all day as they graze along road verges and tracks and on
bits of apparently common land, what do you think about? All day long? How old are you when you’re first sent to the pump to
bring back a jerry-can of water? How old when you can’t do that any more? And
what happens to you then? How much skill does it take to pile up a two-metre
stack of firewood on the back of your bike? And how much strength to wheel it to where it has to go? How much competition is there
amongst the women waiting by the road to sell their fruit and vegetables to
passing truckies? How often do those welders and grinders and wielders of
machetes have industrial accidents? And how much pure talent is squandered by
there being no alternative to spending your life performing these menial tasks?
And then you see something that distracts
you: like a bunch of women down in a riverbed busily doing their washing in
water that’s opaque orange. Or a young woman dressed to the nines in bright
red, picking her way through the mud in her fancy shoes. Or people being scanned
for explosives by a security guard before going into a supermarket. Or four men
on the back of a motorbike carrying a long metal stake. Or a shop called ‘God
Cares Auto Spares’. Or a man ushering a herd of goats along the roadside, a
single donkey in the middle of them. Or smiling at the iPod when it suddenly throws up Toto’s ‘Africa’.
Finally, we approached Nairobi again,
getting swept up in city traffic, the cars and people both looking much smarter. There were
avenues, skyscrapers, traffic lights and, at last, our hotel again and the
usual messy dispersal of the group with no ceremony whatsoever.
Upstairs was a spacious room with a bed, a
shower, lights, and privacy, all now a welcome novelty. I ventured out to the
Stanley Hotel, an important part of Nairobi’s history, especially the railway
bit – they paused here to summon up the strength to tackle the Great
Rift Valley – and famous for its Thorn Tree Café, of Lonely Planet fame. To be
honest, it’s pretty sanitised now, onto its third thorn tree and the
travellers’ notes these days pinned to a bulletin board instead of its trunk – not very
interesting notes, either. But the coffee was good, and I appreciated the
civilised niceties I’ve been without for the last fortnight.
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