The Shifta Road South
Trip Start
Feb 20, 2007
1
7
38
Trip End
Jun 2007
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Isiolo,
Kenya
Friday, March 9, 2007
When talking to people in Southern Ethiopia and in Moyale they all assured me that the road was much safer, and that because of an increased police presence in the area the passage had been trouble free for the past year or so. As I have a perhaps foolish desire to make my way to Cape Town completely overland I decided to take my chances and brave the three day journey south. The idea of hopping with planes when traveling is not one that appeals to me, there is a certain artificiality of being deposited in a new place by flying there, by traveling overland you get to see cultures and people blend into one another, the only barriers are artificially created borders which rarely even manage to dissect Africa successfully. These straight lines were drawn arbitrarily by colonists, more often than not dividing tribes into two countries officially. In Africa, however, it seems people still consider themselves to be of a certain tribe primarily, their "nationality" is an artificial description of who they are, which is secondary to their ancestral identity.
So we crossed early into Kenyan Moyale and learned that there was no bus to carry us South.
A Dusty Yann in the Truck
We were soon approached by truck drivers making the trip to Marsabit, some 250km away. They offered us a seat in the front of their trucks for 1000 Kenyan Shillings, about $15, or a seat in the back with the cargo for half that. Naturally, we chose the latter. So up we climbed into the back, which measured about 7 x 2.5m, and had a bed of sand which made sitting down more comfortable and also served to somewhat absorb the shocks caused by driving on an unsurfaced, rocky, bumpy road. I found myself a seat on a spare tire, shared with a woman and baby and two old men. The back of the truck filled with about forty people, as well as a cargo of tables, sacks of grain, boxes, tires, cases of empty coke bottle and God knows what else. Once the driver deemed that the truck was sufficiently packed full we finally set off, and any notions I had of having found a comfortable position soon evaporated as I found myself being violently thrown about because of the jerking and bouncing of the truck as it crawled along the terrible road, never going faster than about 30km per hour.The scenery was similar to that of Southern Ethiopia at first, dry, arid, golden land with low grey-brown bush. The homes of the people were also the same, low, circular huts with thatched conical roofs, although the thatching was not done with the same Abyssinian pride of those across the border and looked untidy. Unfortunately I could not enjoy the scenery that much as a combination of a hot sun beating down on us with swirls of red dust enveloping all in the truck forced me to keep my head down, with my hands firmly grasping the legs of an upturned table next to me to stop me from being thrown off my seat.
Inside the truck
To keep the dust out and the sun off I ended up wrapping my head entirely in a turban, leaving only my eyes exposed, which I covered with sunglasses which had to be wiped clean every half hour as they became covered in a layer of dust. I must have looked quite the sight.Difficult conditions aside, I was blissfully happy, this was the best travel I have ever done, none of your buses or trains (or planes!), this was as close as I could get to "the real thing", only cycling or walking across this land would have been better. The sense of danger was soon forgotten, and only in my mind when I looked upon the guard on top of the truck's roof who had a gun pointed watchfully ay the surrounding bush. We descended gradually so that by the afternoon we were passing through semi-desert, where the reddish yellow sand bore little shrubbery, here and there a defiant grey leafless tree stood, under which cows and goats of the nomadic desert people huddled for shade. The sun was hot and as the day went on my enthusiasm for the mode of travel somewhat faded. We stopped in a tiny town on the way for food and rest, but I was so hot I had no appetite and didn't eat, something I later regretted as it meant that by the evening when the sun went down I was weak with hunger, and thoroughly exhausted from the hours of bouncing around. My hands and arms were dry and caked thick with dust, and despite my having wrapped my head up well my throat was ticklish and my eyes stinging.
Our arrival in Marsabit was delayed by numerous breakdowns and blown tires, so it was not until about half nine when we finally rolled into this dirty, dusty town, after eleven hours of travel.
Into Kenya!
I climbed down from the truck grinning from ear to ear and felt like hugging Yann, never before had I been so glad to arrive into civilization. We quickly made our way to a nearby hotel, almost booked full because of the presence of a group of twenty or so Dutch and Belgian cyclists. We got a room and had a welcome hot shower, from a bucket, where one splashes or pours water over oneself with the aid of a smaller bucket. Equally refreshing, but difficult to wash ones arms (my dirtiest part) as one hand is needed for washing the other arm, but that hand holds the bucket from which the water is poured! A small inconvenience, and not one that was going to dampen my spirits.After a night of six hours of deep, deep sleep we rose at half five the next morning, had a quick breakfast and went out to find a truck for Isiolo, our next stop. To my surprise the pre-dawn light was shrouded in a thick fog, allowing one see no further than about 100m, even after the sun rose. We were told we'd have to wait a few hours for a truck to leave, and because no other passengers were going we'd have to make a four hour detour to another town to try and collect cargo and passengers. Four hours plus the expected ten to twelve usually needed to get to Isiolo equaled too much for us so we shopped around for another truck. We found one which was going directly to Isiolo, but the only drawback was that its cargo area was full with goats, actually two layers of them so that when you peered down you saw the ones on top were walking on the backs of ones beneath.
Our transport South
This meant we would have to sit on the top of the truck, just behind the driver's booth, which would be uncomfortable and crowded. We waited for about an hour in what had become a cold, rainy day on top of the truck as the driver sought a permit to move the goats, a process which he originally assured us would only take a few minutes. At ten we decided without dispute that today was not to be our day, the weather was horrible, we were wet, the truck would be a disaster and it was so late that it could well be nearly midnight by the time we arrived in Isiolo if we broke down a lot.So this day was dedicated to rest, I read, slept, ate two meals of the hotel restaurant's special (and only) dish of beans and rice. I spent the afternoon on a computer catching up with this blog, and a little while wandering around Marsabit. It is a dusty, filthy, smelly town with rubbish strewn on its red-brown dirt-track streets. The "houses" were mainly tin shacks, with the occasional concrete building here and there. We were slightly higher up than the near-desert we had seen yesterday, so thankfully it was not too hot here.
The next day we had much better luck with the truck, and found one that left at half seven, only carrying ten people and filled with sacks of coffee beans. These sacks actually provided quite a comfortable bed to lie on, and using my backpack as a headrest I managed to find a comfortable bed in the back. Everything inside the truck was already covered in a few millimetres of red dust which quickly soiled my already filthy clothes. By the end of the day my shirt, once whitish-blue, had become red-brown in colour all over. Today's journey was far easier than the last, for starters I had rested and was more psychologically prepared for the length of the trip.
The landscape was beautiful, first desert like after descending from Marsabit's plateau, with occasional volcanic cinder cones, looking a little like pyramids in the hazy distance. At one stage I noticed with much surprise that we were passing through tribal areas. The men walked with spears and sometimes bows and arrows, usually with no top and a longyi-style long, colourful skirt. They wore upright feathers in their hair, and had their ears pierced with holes of two inches or more in circumference, from which they hung a sort of weighted metal earring which served to elongate the hole. The women were dresses that were red with green and orange, and wore wide necklaces made up of rows of beads which stretched from the neck down to cover the shoulders. Whenever we stopped they didn't harass us like many of the tribes of Southern Ethiopia, but instead just looked at us somewhat curiously, clearly they haven't been corrupted by the easy money of tourism as their Abyssinian neighbours have.
Later in the day we rose a little higher again and the vegetation became denser, with grey-brown bush covering the gently rolling land. Later again small mountains rose out of the land, green-brown with giant grey rock face looking back at me like huge, curious eyes. As the sun started to go down I climbed up on the top of the truck so that I might enjoy the scenery in the softening golden-red evening light without feeling the hot, near equatorial sun on my head. On the horizon blue mountains melted into the sky, which itself was being painted a wonderful blend of yellow, orange and ochre by the sinking sun. Just before the sun disappeared my thoughts turned to shifta, as I reflected on how the journey had been safe and without incident. Then I noticed a green car ahead, with men milling around it, and the thought crossed my mind that these might be shifta, although I doubted it. As we passed them there was a sudden, deafening BANG! And I nearly fell off my perch with fright, thinking we had been shot at. Thankfully it was just a blown tire, which had exploded so badly that the entire outside was ripped to shreds and had to be thrown away.
So, the usual procedure of replacing a tire went ahead, usually taking an hour as they don't just replace it as we would back home, but rather take out the inner tube, find the hole, and glue a patch on it, just as you would repair a bicycle puncture. I sat a little down the road, admiring the wonderfully bright and starry African night sky until a man angrily scolded me for being so foolish. He told me a lion could come and attack me if I stayed near the bush in the dark - my first instinct was to laugh, thinking he was joking, but the tone of his voice caused me to quickly scuttle back to the light by the truck.
Finally we arrived into Isiolo, at about ten, having traveled for about thirteen hours today. The last few hours had been the worst on the trip to Isiolo, but today I kept myself in good spirits with the company of some good techno from my MP3 player. In Isiolo we found a pleasant, cheap room before going out to eat a meal of greasy chips and sausages (now that we're in Kenya they will have some good, fatty British food). Walking back to the hotel we were accosted by 13-16 year old street boys, begging for food or money. They were much more aggressive in their nature than any other beggars I have met, so much so that I readied myself mentally in case they got physical with us. They cursed loudly and obscenely after us as we went into the security of our hotel, using words I cannot imagine how or where they learned. I noticed a few of them were sniffing bottles of glue, which would explain their situation, I have rarely seen beggars of their age.
