The Road to Iten

So then I headed off back along the nice paved highway Id ridden North on... and then I turned off onto a smaller paved road that went for an hour or so... and then there was another turn off onto an unpaved but well groomed dirt road... My GPS seemed to know where all the roads were and how to get to the destination I wanted, but still Im always cautious and use my judgement as to weather to follow the suggested directions... In this case the road seemed pretty good so I followed along :)

The road turned to dirt but was still pretty good... to start with!

 

And so by slow degrees things deteriorated... but never to the obvious point that I should not proceed (My guide line on that is that I am prepared to continue along the path as long as I feel that I could turn the bike around at any point and ride back the way Id come in... I learned this the hard way on my first ride through Mexico :)  )

 

Anyway, after an hour or so of the slow degradation I found myself cautiously making my way along a rather steep and very rough and rocky mountain "donkey track" at about walking pace...

 

 

And that continued (up hill and down dale) for about another hour and a half,,, with things getting slightly better and then worse again, but never serious enough for me to turn back.

And then the mountain track finally ended and I found myself on an improving packed earth track in the valley bottom... But I was not out of the woods yet (literally)...

 

I came to a bridge over a small river and there were a couple of local motorbike riders on their little 150cc bikes with big loads of cargo coming up out of the river bed onto the road way, and they said I should turn off the road there because it was washed out a bit further along...

 

So, off the road and back onto a muddy/sandy "gout track" through the river bed and the thickets etc... It lasted another half hour before I made it back to a decent dirt road and then 10 more minutes to get back to pavement... Pheeeew! :)



Past the locals houses... mud and thatch huts.

A big (50cm long) tortoise that had been harassed by the local kids and had a damaged shell... he was trying to cross the paved road, so as usual I stopped and helped him across to safety/

 

But ahhh what a nice paved road it was... It climbed back up into the hills with all sorts of lovely twists and turns, and nary a pothole or obstruction on the way and hardly even any traffic in either direction. 

But the light was fading so I stopped short of my intended destination and found another crappy hotel in a mid-sized town for the night... My motorbike got to spend the night indoors too.

 

 

The next morning I continued on to my destination of Iten... The road was fantastic for the remaining hour :) I was told later that some big politician came from the area and the road work was as a result of that... Makes sense because there was no way that it should have been of theat high a quality with the amount of traffic it got (it was a non arterial road)... Anyway, the road was the best motorbike enjoyable road Ive been on in Africa so far :))

A Quick Ride Around Kenya

Next I decided to ride northward and see yet another national park... Samburu NP

This area is also very arid much like the Mara region.

I rode North from Nairobi through the highlands via the sizable town of Thika (Flame Trees very apparent along the main street) and things were pretty cool and green for a few hours.

 

 

 Then I dropped down of the high country and the land very quickly became semi-desert which lasted for a few more hours before I got to the edge of the park...

I have the same challenge as usual here in that I cant ride my bike in the park... So I spent the night in a crappy little hotel room in the nearby town and then early next morning I rode out to the park entrance and waited around to see if I could get a ride with other tourists... But this time my luck was not very good and I ddint get a ride!

Id waited for about 3 hours but my real problem is that the park is small and not that popular, and this year is a really bad one for tourists in Kenya... I saw a dozen vehicles with tourists leaving the park (camps inside the park) but only a single vehicle entering the park (unfortunately fully loaded). And so I gave up and rode off to an area a few hours away called the Laikipia Plateau.

 



Dust Devil in the desert

Interesting multi-headed palms in the Samburu NP area

Traditional Samburu hut... The Samburu tribe are very closely related to the Massai with very similar lifestyles and values (they value cattle as wealth) and language.


The Laikipia plateau is an area of privately owned land that is not a National park but that is a very good game viewing region... the local land owners mostly earn their money from game park activities rather than cropping or livestock... But the good thing about the area for me is that I can drive around the roads that run between the various properties and do my own game viewing :))

A Reticulated Giraffe ... quite a different skin pattern than the Massai giraffes from earlier posts!

A couple of British ecologists and a helper studying local flower pollination by the side of the road... (Looking for co evolved anatomical adaptations in the pollens and the insects)


I also saw some Grevies zebras which are quite different to the Plains zebras that Ive mostly been seeing but I didn't get any pictures.

After that little ride I decide to head over to a little town called Iten which the owner of the overlander place that Ive been staying at in Nairobi said Id enjoy.... Not sure why, but what the heck, I may as well go see :)

Slow Train to Mombasa

Next I decided to go down to the coast and have a look at Mombasa...

I took the train down to the coast which was a bit of an experience Id have to say... Its a very old train line and is "narrow gage" which means that the track rails are only about 60cm apart and that is a pretty narrow footing for a very heavy piece of travelling machinery. And though the line has been moderately maintained, its definitely not that smooth, so the result is that the train rocks around a lot and that means that it has to go very slowly over a lot of the journeys length... And that means that a 600Km trip takes about 19 hours to complete!  But its much nicer than traveling in a cramped bus because you can walk around and sleep in a pretty reasonable bed while you travel...
But the down side is again that the train is very old. I got a "first class" ticket for about $60 (which is just about the same as it would have cost me in fuel to ride my motorbike down to the coast) but you need to have a very liberal view of what "first class" means... hint - Its a "relative" rather than absolute term :)

Where to start?,
Well, Ive said that the train line is old... So is the train... and it shows... everywhere!
I don't think there was a single fitting or fixture or window or door or hinge or latch on the entire train that was still working in its original form... Anything that was working (certainly not any of the lights or fans or any other electrical gadget) was only working because it had been jerry-rigged back together in terribly rough fashion using some randomly located and poorly applied hardware to replace the original part that had gone missing years ago.
And the "service" quality was pretty run down too... It wasn't only that the meals (which again is a bit of a liberal term) were rudimentary and served by staff that seemed to be "less than passionate" about their job (and really who could blame them), but the train and track seemed to conspire against them in that with all the lurching and bumping and rattling, it was pretty much impossible to do a descent job of filling a cup of tea even if the staff had been "feeling passionate" about it... More than one passenger got a bit of a spill :)

Its a bit of a shame that the experience isn't up to many travelers expectation though because it isn't actually a bad experience and in my opinion it is still way better than taking the bus... which I did on the way back just to compare.... yep buses are cramped and uncomfortable when they have vinyl covered seats, no air conditioning and take 10-12 hours to get to their destinations in the tropics :)

No pictures of the train trip but I did take a few in Mombasa...

And what is there to see and do in Mombasa??... Not a lot!
It was a bit of a let down for me... There are some nice white sandy beaches but I would hardly call them idyllic... And there is an "old town" with lots of 2-3 storie buildings on windy little streets, but Id hardly call that a romantic or particularly interesting region. And there is an old Portuguese fort... But its very dilapidated (not that you should use that word for anything other than a fur coat or skin rug really) and I didn't find it that interesting... Other than that it seems like its a fairly thriving little African city with lots of modern buildings and Western shopping malls etc... No doubt a great place for the modern and upwardly mobile Kenyan to live... And actually there is a pretty high percentage of residents and tourists from India in Mombasa,,, I think they were historically the money people here in old British East Africa (got a ride over with the British in the colonial days and stayed on to make their own "place" so to speak.)... and I get the feeling that "they" are not that well liked by the rest of the "Africans" in Kenya... But that's just the impression I got and it hardly seems that big a differentiator with all the other "tribalism" motivated biases there seem to be here...

... prepare for minor Rant!....

And on that note I guess Id say that "we" in the developed world seem to think that we are "so much more civilized" etc, and that Africa is being constantly "held back" and good efforts are constantly frustrated by this primitive "tribalism" problem... But as far as I can see "we" are barely any different at all... It seems to me that "Nationalism" is just a tiny step further on from Tribalism and that the "developed" nations are just as hopelessly ensnared in the same problems writ just slightly larger!
Look at the behavior of any nations residents/fans/expats/exported descendants  with regard to the recent world-cup Soccer competition... win, loose, or draw... Why on earth does anyone get some sort of personal reward from the performance of a bunch of highly paid athletes who are essentially bought to play for a particular nations football team... and then peoples behaviors when "their" team wins or looses...so disappointing!!
Oh yes, we are soooo civilized and superior in the "developed world"!!!
Nepotism, Tribalism, Nationalism... They are all "attitudes for children" as far as Im concerned and for my part I wish that we would all just Grow Up!  :))

hmmm enough of a rant... Mombasa not so special, but not bad either... on to something else...

Half Wait There

Im in limbo at the moment.

I sent my passport back to Canada with all the appropriate documentation for an Ethiopian visa. about 10 days ago and when I checked the tracking number this morning I can see that the passport has started its return journey to me from the embassy :)... I wont know if Im continuing my trip Northward or having to turn around and head back South for a few days yet (till it gets to my home in Vancouver and someone actually looks inside to see if they granted me a visa ... which I expect they did)... And I expect it will be another 10 days or s before the passport makes its way back to me here in Nairobi.
But even then I still have to apply for a Sudan visa which will take still more time (all the paperwork is ready to take to the Nairobi embassy as soon as I get the passport back).
So, it seems I am really "half way there"... Half way from CapeTown to Cairo (16000Km ridden so far), Half way through the waiting time while I get visas. Halfway through the planned duration of the trip, and half way through getting the 2 visas that I need.

And I have to admit that all this "waiting" is rather accentuating my feelings of "time pressure"... I was roughly planning to take about 6 months for the ride but I allowed myself about 3 extra weeks for the "unknowns" of getting the one visa I thought I had to get and also for dealing with the unknown "exit" details of shipping or selling the motorbike at the Northern end of the trip. But Ive had this unexpected 3 week delay here in the middle of the trip and its used up pretty much all of my "buffer" time... There is nothing I can do about it of course but at the moment it does make me feel slightly anxious about the schedule... All I can really do is to start trying to get more "exit" details as soon as I have got the second visa rather than waiting till I get further North.

In the mean-time though, while Ive been "waiting", Ive been trying to use the time to see some of Kenya (since I cant see any other countries without my passport). First, as mentioned earlier, I went off to Massai Mara and saw the animals... which was good but only took about three days.

... more to come while I wait for the visa...

The Mara

There were of course plenty of other animals to see in Massai Mara...

Close up of the eye of an Elan

 Elan are the largest antelope and the males weigh easily over 1000Kg!

This Hyena has just eaten... very fat tummy :)

Lion cub at a recent kill... I didn't get to see the hunt at all.

 

 Lots of flies all over the place... They follow the Gnu herds.

Tourist vehicles are everywhere and you can generally tell where there are predators by the clustering of safari wagons... Mostly the cats seem to ignore them or treat them with disdain, but sometimes you can see that the cats just get fed up with being constantly watched :)

Got to see a Cheetah mom and her cub as they strolled along looking for something to hunt... All the vehicles following them made it rather hard for her... She had to eventually head into some scrub country to "loose the tail".

 The "entourage"

Disappearing in the long grass... as predators do!

Vulture on the carcass of a drowned Wildebeest from one of the crossings.

Two young male lions just starting their own pride... Just one lioness with them at present.

Lion sex is pretty brief but does involve some roaring :)

That's it for my visit to the Mara... On with the tour... Maybe Mombasa next??