Goat truck
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Nanyuki,
Kenya
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Another very dusty 7-hour ride to Isiolo, this time on a mid-sized truck packed with goats, then a wait and a 90-minute ride in a matatu (minivan) ending at dusk at Nanyuki in the shadow of Mount Kenya. We passed some Samburu villages, said to be one of only two Kenyan groups (with the Masai) who still wear traditional clothing. (Typing this in Nairobi: is there any city in the world with a higher incidence of men wearing sports jackets?)
The following incident pinpoints for me the difference between Ethiopia and Kenya (then I'll give Ethiopia a rest, promise). On the goat truck, the upper frame consisted of a grid of 4-cm pipes with spaces about two feet square between them. You'd have to balance and hang on for 7 hours to avoid joining the goats 3 m below, but for the aging muzungu one of the touts thoughtfully (and enterprisingly) wove a rope lattice to form a chair in one of the gaps. The money-collector asked me for 500 shillings ($8 CAD) which was at least 100 above normal, but I eventually agreed on condition that "400 for you and 100 for the man who made the chair," because I recognized the chair as a lurking issue, and it was worth 100, fair enough. Later the chair-man returned as expected, asking for money. But my travel-mates, who had witnessed everything, now spoke up for me in Swahili: "He already paid, 400 + 100," and eventually the general consensus forced the money-collector to settle with the chair-man.
My point is that this could never happen in Ethiopia. It is inconceivable. There the consensus is always, "Take the faranji for whatever you can get."
