THE TRAVELLER'S TALE

Nairobi, 10 March 2002

Travelling is a lonely business, you armchair adventurers reading this may suspect, and so it sometimes is, but more often than not the loneliness descends after bidding farewell to people you've met along the way, in lulls between the perils, dangerous animals (kamikaze doves aiming to destroy your vehicle!), roads that have seen better decades and getting "disorientated" (lost! Did I really need to spell that out?).
The hardships of the road aren't as difficult as leaving a rest spot where we've met other travellers and locals who've made us feel welcome and part of that global fraternity of travellers - it doesn't quite have a secret handshake but it does have a definite sense of belonging.
We've met hordes (literally) of great people along the road.

Nairobberi's perils
Driving out of Nairobberi was the hardest farewell (and out here that word really is said with the original meaning in mind) we've bade so far. Not that the city is that splendid or spectacular a place - it does, though, have the best infrastructure and services we've seen since leaving Namibia.
Despite starting Wag 'n Bietjie (referred to lately, in periods of stress, by the less endearing term "You fat slug!") 36 hours after we'd planned to leave town, we still received numerous offers of bribes, ranging from "I'll buy you a beer" (that worked the day before and resulted in both Lisa and myself facing the current round of bargaining with severe hangovers) to the more unusual and, for both of us, more tempting "I'll give Robb a haircut". Lisa hates the manual clippers - like some Charles Atlas acolyte doing his handcrunching exercises - while I hate having hair, so the offer was r-e-a-l-l-y hard to resist.
But it was time to move on - we have to meet someone in Addis Ababa - and so we trundled through the Sunday afternoon-quiet streets of Nairobberi and headed north through Thika, skirting the base of Mt Kenya before finding a bed for the night in Isiolo, a dusty little frontier town that gives one the impression you're about to head into the badlands where few sane people venture.

Settling Inn
For most of the afternoon and evening - leaving, as we did, well after lunch - we both wondered why we'd left, driving ever farther from friends we'd grown very fond of over the past 10 days.
The time we'd spent at Upper Hill Campsite, 30 minutes walk from the centre of Nairobberi, was the longest we've spent in any one place since starting this journey, as waited for a new camera to be sent up from Seffrica.
Even if we hadn't been waiting for the camera to arrive, we would still have overstayed our time in Kenya's capital due to the company. In our 11 days in the city we met so many interesting travellers, all with glorious tales of woe/joy/tear-bringing mixtures of both, that it felt like home. The stream of "unvehicled" travellers who passed through were only punctuated by a few people with whom we struck up friendships, two of them cyclists who made me realise our trip is a doddle compared to their travels.
One is a Peruvian who has ridden and railed his bike from Cape Town to Nairobi and plans to continue to Cairo. The other is a Polish guy heading south from Cairo - he's taken three months to travel down Egypt, through Sudan and Ethiopia and reach Nairobberi, traversing some of the most "awkward" sections of the continent. He was considering stopping Kenya but has decided to push on to the southern tip.
Both of them are travelling on really tight budgets, with bicycles any of us could afford, but their spirit puts them, I think, in the same league as the most adventurous of the famous explorers.
The other independent travellers - as the guidebooks term them - who stood out were American Steve and Swedish Camilla, who made an odd-looking couple from far but a far from odd couple. Camilla fits the bill for Scandinavians: blond, tanned, tall, gorgeous, and aspiring to be Hollywood's next bombshell (Go, girl! Knock 'em dead!) while Steve is not tall, has thick glasses and isn't the Adonis you'd expect to find beside the Camillas of the world. He does have a well-developed sense of humour and a ready laugh and a great brain.
But looks are deceiving and after getting to know them it would seem stranger if they weren't together.

Upper Creek Campsite
Groups with their own vehicles tend to have more in common and so stick together - sharing horror stories about breakdowns or roads lends a common interest.
Upper Hill Campsite, during our stay, hosted a variety of travellers. I suspect that sharing the same trench of sticky red clay, which turned into a morass when it rained and clung to everything had something to do with us sticking together.
Climbing out of Wag 'n B on arrival we met Gill and Paul, the old hands of the campsite. They left the UK somewhere around 1996 and, after several years travelling around Africa and some more time managing a camp in the Okavango Swamps, were waiting to hear about a job in the Mara.
They managed to make the rest of us look like utter amateurs, never getting to much clay stuck anywhere, always having dinner ready and eaten before dark and having everything they needed in a Land Rover that looked almost empty. One day, when we're big adventurers, we want to be as organised and serene as they are.
Paul also has the mechanical touch, making it all look so easy. He was always willing to help us less able souls.
The other couple whose vehicle was completely organised were Eve and Peter from Johannesburg, although Peter's perfectionism was a little scary - every piece of available space on their Land Rover 90 was put to optimum use and was so logically and practically worked out. I'd struggle to remember where everything went to fit it all back in. They were on a short trip and, waving goodbye after two days, we had a definite feeling that they'd stayed not long enough.

The Mule
The longest "residents" were Orfa and Yael, a young Israeli couple who'd bought a Land Cruiser they called The Mule, due to its stubborn, otherwise nature. They'd been in Nairobberi about a month and when we left they were preparing to tackle another round of repairs, this time to the radiator.
They'd already spent copious amounts of time and money on the beast, sorting out the exhaust, spare wheel bracket, engine and carburettor (it now only guzzles 20 litres of petrol every 100 kilometres) and some of the leaks - an onboard shower is all very well but most of us want a tap with it!. Every time they sorted one thing out and took a short trip, another problem crawled out of the bodywork.
So the trip to Lake Turkana revealed gearbox problems with The Mule refusing to stay in 5th gear, while the trip to Amboseli ended with them limping back to Nairobberi with a ruptured radiator spewing water as fast as they could pour it in.
While their sense of humour hadn't failed them, they did have an air of "will this ever end" - they really are going to enjoy the trip when they get to it.
Peter and Sophie were also having "fun" with their radiator, having it recored in Nairobberi as the next chapter in their attempts to stop their Land Rover from overheating on long climbs. Naturally, the reconditioned radiator didn't fit back in the engine bay and they had to cart half the vehicle's front end into town to have it "squeezed" into place.
The pair of aid workers have also had their share of problems since landing in Djibouti, getting stuck in the tidal sands of Eritrea for 70 hours and watching as three Eritrean Army trucks got stuck trying to tow them out.
They then proceeded to drive a rock through the front differential. Peter says he was admiring a bird when a small rock decided to metamorphose into something diff-eating.

Onno Problems
Onno and Josef, on the other hand, seemed to have no worries beyond applying for jobs with the UN and anyone else who might be hiring - they both want to stay in Africa
Onno is another of those European travellers who spent two years driving south and decided to stay. His trip back up to Kenya was in the company of Josef, the German social worker who spent a while working in Namibia and fell in love with the continent.
The US embassy was looking for temporary staff when we were in Nairobberi and Josef was keen so Peter and I spent an evening helping Josef type up his letter of application in bureaucratic English, poring over what to include and which catch phrases to use.
At one stage the dining room of the main house looked like the business lounge at a European airport - there were three laptops docked near the various power outlets, each with attendant acolytes fawning over them.
Onno has "laid back" down to a fine art and was usually to be found at the centre of any group lounging in the sun outside the house.

DAFt Ideas
There were three other self-propelled parties but they fell into a much bigger category - two people travelling in a bloody great DAF 4x4 truck with a container-sized home on the back qualifies for its own league.
Dutch Wim and Monique are travelling with their two dogs and have kitted their truck out in real comfort - the breakfast nook folds into a full-size double bed while the fitted kitchen shelves and cupboards host a fridge, 4-burner gas stove, sink, microwave oven, enough electrical outlets to power the coffee machine and anything else you can think of.
The shower cubicle gets hot water from a 400 litre water tank. Given the truck's size, Wim fitted a 900 litre fuel tank, filling up wherever fuel is cheap and having a 3 000 km range, while the larder includes 150 kg of dog food and a general dealership worth of luxuries and supplies.
Pier has a similar vehicle, although the rear unit doesn't have quite as high a ceiling!
The ultimate in one-upmanship had to be the behemoth which struggled through the gates one afternoon, doing a 25 point turn in its efforts to negotiate the entrance without knocking over the gateposts and flattening vehicles and structures in the vicinity.
The 8-wheel drive, 4-wheel-steered truck, nicknamed "Bush Baby", was originally designed to haul some army's missiles around but has now been relegated to the ignominious task of being used, certainly while in Nairobi, primarily as a bordello.

Hotel California
As Onno described it, Upper Hill Campsite was like The Eagles' Hotel California: "You can check out anytime but you can never leave". The night before we were scheduled to leave, we had an impromptu party and at 11 pm everyone decided to go clubbing.
Fortunately, stick in the mud that I am, I was relieved of this onerous task by having to babysit Tigger, who'd just had another rabies shot and two stitches after a fight with the campsite owner's neurotic dog.
I'd also had several too many by that stage and, with Lisa coming home at about 4 am, we decided late the next morning to postpone leaving for another day (so did Pier and Wim, for similar reasons!). It didn't help much as that night followed the same pattern, albeit without the club option.
We were finally in a state to leave by 2 pm, 36 hours later than expected.
Our stay in Nairobberi, including trips to the movies, book shopping, buying spare parts and supplies and wandering around like the goggle-eyed tourists we are, was rejuvenating. Pity we had to leave!