Back in April I visited Gemma in Nairobi. It was really good to see her after 4.5 long months. It was also a marathon journey and a real education.
The most ‘direct’ route was via Amsterdam, where I met Mum and Dad and Catherine. It still took over 40 hours and I can’t help thinking that there must be a faster way. Colima is at 17N 103W, Nairobi at 1S 37E yet here are views from the window of the plane of the wastelands of Canada. And Blackpool.
Gemma is an intern for the United Nations Environment Programme, which has its HQ in Nairobi. Her work involves raising awareness amongst Kenyans of environmental and health issues by organising fundraising events, distributing educational books and visiting schools to talk to students. The interns complain that much of the UN-based work gets bogged down in bureaucracy and the inefficiencies of such a large organisation but Gemm is also involved in other really important voluntary projects such as construction of toilet blocks and distribution of sanitary products in the slums. She has settled into an apartment in Nairobi with a group of other interns. It is a strange place to live.
Nairobi
In many ways, the centre of Nairobi resembles any other big city with glass-covered skyscrapers, suit-wearing business people, mobile phone advert-bearing billboards and traffic-filled streets. Gemma’s apartment is a bit further out in an area with lots of high-walled compounds and houses, high rise hotel blocks and tall green trees. Despite being fairly nice, the apartment suffers daily power cuts and occasionally has no water. You have to boil the water before you can drink it. From the window you can see a small slum area.
The bigger slum areas are further out of town. Here the houses are huts or shacks constructed of mud, corrugated iron, old sacs and assorted pieces of wood. There is no electricity and only limited access to shared water and toilet blocks. It is the rainy season just now and the narrow alleyways where children and chickens roam are filled with a Glastonbury-style soup of mud, litter and rotting food. At least the people at Glastonbury go home on the Monday. Surprisingly, many of the people here are kitted out in designer gear. There are stalls selling clothes that have been sent out by charity shops and Gemma has collected herself a nice wardrobe of GAP tops and skirts, mainly bought for less than a pound each. It’s the odd sandals or worn-down football boots that flap open at the front being worn on their feet that ruin the image.
I don’t have any photos of the main slums. Nairobi is the most dangerous city in Africa and both petty crimes such as pickpocketing and more violent ones like mugging and car-jacking are common. The high crime rate takes affects your entire way of life. I took quite a lot of offence at the idea that I couldn’t keep my camera handy at the top of my bag as I normally would because some asshole might steal it. The streets outside the centre have no lights and so (I just about wrote ‘y entonces’ there; the Spanish is surely sinking in) at night they become very dark and walking on them after nightfall is unadvisable. As a result you are effectively under curfew unless you can get a taxi or a lift from door to door.
A message from the Kenyan Tourist Board?
The other major factor in your way of life is that everyone else is black. It seems like an obvious thing to point out but it is a really weird thing to experience. I don’t just mean that there were a lot of black people, like in Brixton for example, I mean that everyone is black. Not just on the streets but on television, on posters, in the newspapers. It takes some getting used to and can create problems because a) people see you coming from a mile away and b) they assume that because you are white you must be rich. You are no longer a person, just a “mzungu”.
Being a tourist in Kenya is therefore like being runner-up on Big Brother. Everyone looks at you and feels the need to approach you despite not really caring who you are, and unfortunately some people are only out to see what they can get from you. Everywhere that you walk you are heckled; ‘taxi’, ‘need a guide’, ‘come and see my shop’. Soon it gets really annoying, which is a real shame because most people are just being friendly and saying hello – ‘Jambo!’.
Futhermore, if you do actually need something then you have to negotiate a price. Everything has to be bargained for, but when the vendors see that you are mzungu the initial asking price can take the piss – sometimes five-times the ‘real’ price. Sometimes, in the really touristy places the worst offenders pull out the sob stories to try and get more cash from you. This sucks: if you pay the extra you feel like a chump for being ripped-off; if you don’t you feel guilty or selfish for not giving them what probably only amounted to a few pennies or a pounds more.
Together, it all adds up to a fairly stressful experience. You can’t even relax properly in your own home – some of the interns have had valuables taken by the cleaners. Gemma is doing really well to live there. It is a lot harder than Mexico. The only solution is to get out of Nairobi. We did this a lot, mainly to go climbing, and it is in the countryside that you get to see the really good things about Kenya. It is there that you find the brightest colours and the most exciting sounds.
Outside Nairobbery
The most common form of public transport in Kenya is the matatu. These are 14-seater minibuses that were originally used as safari vehicles. Each has been customised by its boy-racer owner with bright paint and stickers and fitted with a stereo that pumps out reggae or dancehall beats through worn-out speakers that seem to fart out the baseline. They are very popular and frequent and thus form an efficient transport system. It’s so good that even chickens regularly use it. In the countryside, where the chances of getting stopped are low, the conductors pile in as many people as they can (the busiest one that I was on had 26 people) while they just hang on to the outside. If they did get stopped, for example by one of the AK47-wielding guards at the frequent roadblocks, the bribe would be expensive.
Bribery is a way of life in Kenya. Last year the government abandoned their breathalyser scheme when they found that 63% of drivers caught over the limit would just pay their way out of it. The corruption goes all the way to the top and any Kenyan that you ask will tell you that this is the reason that their country is poor.
The countryside, particularly in the Rift Valley gives an overwhelming impression that it is brimming with life. The daily rainstorms have turned the landscape a lush green colour and in tea plantations and paddy fields woman tend tea and rice. Mud huts and small towns are scattered across the land. It seems like every available piece of land is being used. Goats are tethered to stakes on the verge. Stalls sell fruits and vegetables and rhubarb. Everywhere there are people sitting or standing or lying or walking by the roadside. The clichéd woman in the bright sarong (kanga in Swahili) carrying the huge load on her head is often observed.
The towns are especially thronged with people. Many of the buildings have colourful, if skew-wiff, hand-painted signs advertising AIDS testing clinics, battery charging, kiosks where you can pay to use a mobile phone or that their satellite television is showing the Blackburn game. The Kenyans are mad for the Premiership. All of this, when set to the throbbing soundtrack of the matatus, charges journeys through the country with a really exciting energy.
Most of our excursions involved climbing. A lack of transport, partner and most importantly, time, mean that I haven’t done any since arriving in Mexico, so it was really good to get some done. We visited Naivasha, where we also went out on the lake, and Lukenya which is the local crag to Nairobi and is owned by the Mountain Club of Kenya.
Mount KenyaThe centrepiece of the trip was a visit to Mount Kenya. We went for five days with some other interns and an entourage of porters and guides. Mount Kenya is volcanic, but is not like Kilimanjaro with a crater on the top. It is much older and long since extinct. The peak is a rocky nipple on a 100 km wide, gently-sloping and thicky-vegetated dome. It is made of granite-like rock that represents the solidified remains of the once-molten core of a volcano that could have stood 1000 m taller than the current summits.
The photo shows the individual peaks. The highest are Bation (5199 m) and Nelion (5189 m). Unfortunately we weren’t able to climb these – it was the rainy season with daily storms of rain/hail/snail and our trip wasn’t long enough anyway. We did climb Point Peter (4757 m, on the far right of the image) and walked to the top of Point Lenana (4985 m – although my GPS said 5000 m, on the left of the image). Our moderately-paced two-day trek up to the summit region meant that the altitude wasn’t too much of a problem although I did have a few niggly headaches and steeper climbs were tiring.
Climbing Point Peter was absolutely awesome: 3 pitches of UIAA grade IV and the first alpine-style route that I have done. It was amazing to be surrounded by so much steep rock and ice. The moves were pretty sweet, too. Gemm and I climbed together and Atreyu (a German lad living in Nairobi) climbed with our guide, Gitou. It turned out that Gitou had never climbed Mt Kenya, or even done any mountain routes at all. In the end we guided him up. As I abseiled down I was a bit gutted that we weren’t going to get up Bation or Nelion. The route up them is the same grade, only longer and higher. When the hailstorm hit 30 minutes later I didn’t feel so bad. On a longer trip and in the right season they could definitely be done, however.
The following morning we got up at 02.30 hrs to climb Lenana in the dark in order to catch the sunrise from the top. It was worth it. Some of the scenery on the route back down was fairly spectacular, too. We ended up hiking further than planned when the Land Rover that was sent to meet us got a puncture on the horrendous road up. The snow chains that it used to grip the mud had probably pinched the rubber. When people say on the news that ‘the humanitarian crisis will worsen in the next month when the rains come and the region is cut off’ I now understand what they mean.
The Coast and Safari
Following Mount Kenya we took the nyyiiiiiigght trrraaaaaiiiinnn to Mombasa and then Watamu on the coast. It the beach we swam in the warmest waves that I have ever experienced and scrambled about on some coral islands. Tourists were thin on the ground so we got a lot of annoying attention from the ‘beach boys’, who pester you to buy lame souvenirs or snorkelling trips. Their other line of work is giving good vibrations to ugly middle-age Italian women. It seems crazy that someone would come to country with such a high incidence of AIDS to have sex with the locals. Even if condoms are only 3p each.
Watamu is a small town so we were able to walk to a real pub where real Kenyans drink for dinner one night. When we arrived with was full of men watching the news on the TV. They left when it ended and was replaced by 'How Clean Is Your House: America' punctuated by adverts for skin-bleaching creams. The woman beside us enjoyed it, though.
Back in Nairobi we went on a safari in the Nairobi National Park, just 20 minutes from Gemma’s apartment. Driving slowly through the long grass, scouring the landscape for movement felt a bit like lamping for rabbits. We saw lions, hartebeest, ostrich, rhinos and loads of dudes like this boy.
Just like a localOn my final day in Nairobi I had my hair cut like an African. I went to a barber in the slums and asked him to take a bit off and tidy up the sides. If you’ve ever cut negro hair you will know that the way that it meshes together makes it really hard to get level and tidy. The only way is to make it really short, and the barber applied to the same philosophy to mine. He did a really good job of defining the back with a neatly shaved line, then proceeded to continue round over my ears to do the same to the front, and then even to my eyebrows. I like to call the resulting style 'the Legoman'. He finished by styling my stubble into a neatly defined goatee thing then capped it all by splashing the newly shaved skin with methylated spirits. The beard only lasted about 3 hours as I looked like some idiot cross between Ali G and the short fat one from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Back to Mexico48 hours of travel later I was back in Colima. In all, it was a strange and interesting trip. It was really good to see Gemma and all the places that she tells me about. It is not an easy place to live, far less to work. It’s a brave move and I am proud of her. I do not know if I would like to do it.
Since my return to Colima I have been thrown back into work going to the volcano, helping our volunteer students and planning a geology course to teach. It has taken me three weeks to find time to write this. In the next few weeks my boss’ wife will have a baby and we will have 8 new students arriving. He will be away, they will need showing round and I will be busier than ever. Enjoy the World Cup.
For some reason, the 17-hour bus ride seemed to go by quite quickly.
A small boy takes a liking to Gemma's camping mat.
Bouldering in the Valle de los Hongos (Valley of the Mushrooms), near Creel.
La Cascada de Basaseachi is 250 m tall.
Clipping bolts in the sun.
Click on the panorama to enjoy the view from the top of 'La Buena Vista'.
El Gigante is 885 m tall. Don Fernando, the ranch owner told us that he had partly funded the first ascent. It took three weeks camping at the bottom for the route to be found, and the climb itself involves a couple of overnight stays on ledges/hanging from the wall. It is hard and dangerous (with multiple pitches of hooking A4 or A4+). I was scared just looking at it.
It's not big, it's not clever, and it flooded the engine of the bike.
El Divisadero: it's deeper than the Grand Canyon down there.
