Overlanding Kenya… in Bone Rattler
What it’s really like to take a road trip to Maasai Mara
I have road tripped Central America, through the roller coaster of the Sierra Madre with a puking child.
I have driven the length of Borneo, in the dark, in the rain, through palm oil plantations, and Brunei.
We have spent six months in a camper van leaving no corner of New Zealand unturned. And we have driven and camped our way straight up through the Red Center of Australia, camping along the way.
I’ve criss-crossed North America through every state in the USA and all of the provinces of Canada. And survived not only the Hana Highway, but the dirt track that runs around the other side of Maui, the one you’re not supposed to drive your rental car on, without incident.
I weathered a nine hour trip, that should have been four, to Honduras and back. I thought, until now, that the road from the Lao-Bao border crossing between Vietnam and Pakse, Laos, to be the worst road in the world.
I was wrong.
It would be an understatement to say that the Maasai Mara is hard to get to. I suppose some person (or thousands) who are smarter than I am fly in to somewhere quite nearby and save themselves the charming and intimate acquaintance with the outer provinces and an overland drive. But then, they’d have missed bad tea in the middle of nowhere, accompanied by excellent ebony carvings, and the whirling dervish dust devils that paint the wide spaces between acacia trees, to say nothing of the the parade of Masai children and their goats, queuing up to wave at us as we passed.
Our first clue should have been Nicholas smiling as he said, “So… you aren’t staying where you actually arranged to tonight… there has been… a small problem…. sawa-sawa…. but don’t worry, I am taking you to a camp. An excellent camp. Very nice. Very near the Mara.”
Mom and I exchanged worried glances. One way to view the relationship we have with Nicholas is that he is our benevolent and doting guide. Another way is that we are his prisoners and at his complete mercy.
“Sawa-sawa! We go!”
He was not kidding. Nicholas does nothing by halves, it seems, and that includes careening across the country with dust in his wake. We were three hours in when we turned off of the paved road on to “the secondary highway” which is not, I might add, actually a highway yet. By any definition. It is under construction (by hand), and in the meantime, the cars, trucks, vans, donkey carts, bicycles, and all manner of four footed creatures share the dirt margins.
In any country I’ve been to, including those that are sketchy around the edges, drivers would creep along and get there eventually, a long, painful journey, but manageable. Not so in Kenya. Driving at what we would consider highway speeds in Canada, we positively crashed across the countryside, mother shrieking every so often. Lifting off the seat a minimum of ten times in any given minute, I was quite sure the wheels were about to come off.
Just when I was convinced we must almost be there, we turned off of the secondary road and onto the “bad road.”
I would not have called it a bad road.
For to have the qualifier of good, bad, or otherwise, there must be a thing in the first place, and this was not a road.
I truly have no idea how Nicholas navigated the wild countryside except by braille, but he did so with brazen confidence and a lead foot. It is not, in the least, an exaggeration to say that we scattered sheep, goats, cattle, and Maasai boys with equal zeal. But it was fording the small river that brought real excitement, as mom leaned her body towards the interior of the vehicle, instinctively, and I leaned out to take the, “You’re not going to believe this!” picture.
Maasai warriors, complete with spears, in the middle of absolute nowhere shouted and waved, hopping up and down and tossing their braided hair as we passed. To temper their enthusiasm, only two of the herdsmen in the subsequent group offered a half hearted wave, the third one flipped us the bird with a sneer. A reminder that the Maasai, met the colonizing forces with haughty contempt and apparently there are those who have not modified their opinions of foreign invaders.
This part of Kenya feels like the wild west. Dusty towns built haphazardly, with more of an eye for the animal population than the human. Small mud huts with thatched roofs, arranged in a ring within a pile of bramble, some planted, some heaped, to contain the goats and sheep on the interior and prevent the predators from easy access to a midnight meal. The same prickly barriers used to hang laundry.
Children roll tires for toys in the street. Schools are very few and very far between, but missionary shacks are a dime for two dozen. From what I can tell the holy roller version of protestantism seems to have the upper hand. Mechanic shops line what passes for road ways, and it appears that the approach to having your undercarriage worked on includes driving your vehicle such that it straddles a handy ditch or washed out patch of the “road” and then the mechanic skinnies into the hollow beneath your car to have a look.
As we saddled up for the three hour drive out of Maasai Mara, I climbed into the front seat with Nicholas so I could clarify his particular approach:
“You know, Nicholas, when we encounter roads like this in North America, we drive on them much more slowly than you do here… like, 30 km an hour, max.”
His head snapped towards me with a look of surprise before he focused back on the obstacle course before us.
“What? No, no, that’s the wrong way! You’ll never get anywhere! And besides, when you go very fast it stabilizes the vehicle, and makes the bumps less noticeable. It’s better. For the car, and for the passengers.”
I interrupted him to check on my mom, who had yelped from her strategic positioning on the open bench seat in the very back of the van.
“Tell your mother she must move up. In the center of the van is best, you can’t feel a thing there…”
I relayed the message. My mother gave her signature, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” face in response and stayed where she was (having tried the middle seat already.)
“You know we call these roads the ‘free African massage,’ right?” Nicholas laughed as we shook past a motorbike loaded with three men and two five gallon water containers, drowning them in the dust.
“If you have to stop to pee, that’s okay, you just tell me that you need to ‘check the tires,’ and I’ll stop…. but if you think you need to CHANGE a tire… well, give me some warning for that one and I’ll find a toilet.”
We did need to stop and check a tire, but thankfully no tires required changing. Literally or figuratively.
The one thing we should have packed for overland travel in Kenya, we neglected to bring. Here’s my mom’s sage advice:
