Kenya......Mombasa To Garissa

   I will be posting a blog about Nairobi (Nairobbery as it is often called) at a later date. For this post I will take you east to Mombasa and if I have time to places north that are very dangerous.

  One morning I set out on the bus from Nairobi for the 400 km trip east to Mombasa and the Indian Ocean; I was glad to get out of the capital city. The highway was very busy and with only one lane each way it was easy to see how this stretch of road got the reputation for being a dangerous route. I noticed and thought many things as I gazed out the window, such as the 100 men digging a ditch with pick and shovels; oh how a loader would put them out of a days work with 2 or 3 scoops. Just after the digging men was an overturned tractor trailer; what if the accident happened right at the spot where the men were working?

                        

Some baboons lined the highway and many zebras were on the horizon, as the road seemed to worsen.

   I arrived in Mombasa and checked into the "Excellent Hotel" only to switch to the "Gloria" the next morning because there was too much noise at the Excellent. After checking into the Gloria I walked around to familiarize myself with the city. I felt a little pull on my backpack and turned quickly to see that a guy had already opened the zipper on my pack and was trying to rip me off (oh so common). I headed south of Mombasa to the beautiful Diani Beach on the Indian Ocean; I walked for hours on that beach, there were only a couple of locals dotted along the entire stretch. There are several long exotic beaches north and south of Mombasa, a sharp contrast to the dangerous and poverty stricken Nairobi


                           


  Heading back to the city of 700,000 occupants I again boarded the Likoni Ferry which was very crowded with locals. As soon as I would zip up my pack another person would try to unzip it to take something; even though my money was in my money belt and my camera was in a belly pack, I started to get annoyed. When I got off the ferry with the crowd a guy struck my elbow with the mirror of his motorcycle; by this time I was growing tired of Mombasa and decided to move on the next day to Malindi.

                        

       After 3 nights in Mombasa I stood on the road waiting to flag down a northbound bus when a very dirty woman with 3 kids, 2 on her back, came up trying to get Shillings from me. As soon as I gave her some money others started approaching me, at the same time buses heading north were passing me. I finally got on a crowded bus and made it to the touristy Malindi. There are two parts of Malindi, the old Swahili area and the new area built up for tourists because of the nice beaches and scuba diving. International influence both here and up the coast at Lamu makes one wonder about a society that has so many people living in poverty having to share space with rich Europeans.


                             


  Once I had enough of the nice beaches around Malindi I decided it was time to head north/west, I questioned my decision to steer towards Garissa (some 300 kms away), especially when there are warnings about risks to safety. I was the white passenger in one van and wanted to get off for a transfer to a van going to Garsen and the driver told me it was not safe to drop me off because of bandits. We went to a small village and I loaded in a van that would take me to Garsen, we waited in the heat while guys loaded the roof with rice and containers of fluid, only to decide it was too expensive so they unloaded it. The appearance of the locals was starting to change with the influence of Somalia and Ethiopia to the north. In Garsen I loaded an already overloaded bus (supplies) going to Hola and the road changed from paved to dirt.

                         The bus before people and more supplies were loaded on top.


The dust was very thick and the bus filled very quickly with the fine dirt. We passed through many villages that had simple dwellings made of sticks and plastic. Where the bus stopped people would surround it and there was a lot of yelling as more people tried to jam onto the bus; on the outside people were trying to sell camels milk in jugs. When people spotted me in the bus they were calling out and many sellers headed to my window. I ended up buying a jug of the milk off a young girl, I took one taste and then handed it back to her out of the window.

  I was amazed at what I was witnessing as the bus maneuvered through rutted open fields that are impassable in the rainy season.We stopped several times to wait for trucks that were stuck in a hole but we made it into Hola which took so many hours.

                           

 Hola was like the wild west of Kenya, it had one main street, again people were shocked to see me. There was one hotel owned by a very nice couple and the rooms were concrete block with a piece of plywood on legs for a bed. The owners used a generator for power so I thought between that noise (turned off at 12am), the mosquito's, and the heat that it would be a night from hell....and it was. I could not sleep so I climbed over the locked gate and walked around this small desert town, I still find that sight incredible, very hard to put into words.

     When I waited for the only bus of the day that heads out of town I had a crowd of locals around me; the hotel owner told me a foreigner had never stayed overnight in that town. I loaded yet another packed (and colourful) bus and off we went. The bus stopped about an hour or so later in a small place called Beru (not on the map) and we all had to get off the bus; the driver supposedly told the passengers, "just wait a few minutes" as he left with the bus. There were many women with small children and the heat was unbearable so we could not stay there. I communicated with a guy that we should look for this bus...well we found it, on the other side of town parked behind a building. It turned out that the driver found out on his radio that there were inspections on the road and the bus would not pass it so he was just going to leave everyone sitting there for hours. I got a partial refund from the driver and walked back to the highway (this part of the highway was now paved) to see if I could flag down any vehicle; two passengers who were policeman accompanied me and we stood there for several hours, not one vehicle.

                               

    At about 4pm the bus pulled back onto the highway from the town (seems inspections were done) and the driver was not going to stop. The one policeman waved to the driver and yelled something so the driver stopped; he turned to me and said "he will give us a ride, I am a policeman." The other passengers looked so exhausted, they were sitting in the sun for so many hours. The driver charged me 200 Shillings when he refunded me only 150; not that there was any choice for me.

   Once we got to the turnoff for Garissa the bus driver stopped and told us we had to walk( instead of driving us like he was supposed to), "it was right there" he said, pointing in an easterly direction. About 10 of us got off the bus, the other passengers were yelling at the driver; I guess they knew that Garissa was about 7kms down that barren road. The temperature was about 40 degrees and my pack seemed heavier than usual; it was such a long trek but finally I made it to the dirty little town, out in the middle of nowhere.


                               

  For most of the trip from Malindi to Garissa the bus went "the back route" which give me a chance to see a more typical lifestyle of many impoverished Kenyan's. Some of the scenes were astonishing, especially when I came to fully realize that this is the reality for these people. As I passed the small villages I often wondered how these people could survive. The continuation of my trip to Mado Gashi would prove to take a twist that I was not expecting.