Borderline

I make it a point to travel through borders: we/them, this/that, here/there.  Crossing through, hard rules tumble.  In theory, approaching a middle lifts away the filters of life but then vantage points also provide clarity. Either compels the journey.

It is a perfectly straight border between Kenya and Tanzania from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean except for a sweeping curve around Mount Kilimanjaro ceding it to Tanzania. Yesterday, I could have back-tracked from Amboseli to the Mombassa Road to get to my next stay in Kilifi on the Indian Ocean or cross in to Tanzania for a better view of Kilimanjaro.  My Land Crusier rental contract forbid me to go to Tanzania from Kenya. So there you have it. I went.

Headed there I saw wonderful vistas of the three snow-capped volcanic cones of Kilimanjaro: Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira. Kibo is the classic view. I took good photos of a giraffe framed by acacia trees with Kibo looming.  But, I lack a computer to upload images from my Canon digital.  So for now you must settle for words.  Wait, I'll post a GoPro of the same giraffe minus Kibo.

I am also posting a selfie with the man who appointed me as his client on the border crossing in to Tanzania.  It is good that he did. You see, I had just spent my last shillings on petrol, had no visa, no recent covid test, and no approval for my vehicle.  Border security had no concern for my luggage.  This checkpoint exactly matched my notions of what it should be: a long corridor with gates to be lifted flanked by worn out offices, staffed by an unknown heirarchy of smartly dressed bureaucrats, and guarded by a few disinterested soldiers with guns.  Tanzania accepted my week old covid test.  I was allowed to drive to a bank in Rongai, Tanzania to pay for the visa. My vehicle entry was approved. In about an hour, with Twenty-five Dollars in the pocket of my agent for his services, I was granted transit.  Except none of this describes how cheerful and friendly everyone was.  Without going in to the middle I would not have known this or the eighty kilometer drive through Tanzania to the crossing back in to Kenya at Taveta.  

The best views of Kilimanjaro had been in Kenya since the higher ground canopy of trees along this segment obscured all views.  Culturally, many things were different.  I could see brick homes being well-built from clay dug, shaped, and fired on site.  Streets and frontages were orderly. There was more room for pedestrians and motor bikes along the highway shoulders. Better stores.

And soon enough I was at the modern border crossing in Taveta.  Tanzania cared not that I was leaving.  Kenya had many obstacles to my entry: a rapid covid test, paper work carefully read, a return to Tanzania for an exit stamp for my Land Crusier which Tanzania would not provide, and finally the pretense of a search of my luggage and vehicle from the by-the-book Kenyan border agent. This crossing also took an hour.

It was not until I arrived at my beach resort in Kalifi that I read how strained relations are between Tanzania and Kenya.  Kenya markets Kilimanjaro as if it were hers.  Tanzania is horrified. Other grudges have been nursed.  Border protests over semi-truck shipping embargos are common.

So that vantage point provides clarity too.

The Pursuit of Failure

Nairobi exists soley for the British folly of constructing a railroad from Mombassa on the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, to thwart the French. Swampy Nairobi was a logistical choice. Its workers came from British India. Karen is a suburb of Nairobi named for Karen Blixen who wrote "Out of Africa."  It was her famous farm that was subdivided.  Her house there remains as a museum. In a few days I visit West Tsavo National Reserve where Robert Redford crashed his Gypsy Moth plane leaving Meryl Streep quite sad. West Tsavo is also famous for two lions that one hundred and twenty years ago devoured some thirty-five Indian railroad workers over a nine month period halting railroad construction. I hope to see hippos, rhinos, and elephants in West Tsavo while eating good food.

Just south of Karen is Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa. Kibera is what you see along the chinese funded Nairobi Southern Bypass Highway - end to end rusted corragated tin shacks, tumbling down scrawny hillsides, for a quarter million souls. The Chinese also funded rebuilding of the Mombassa - Lake Victoria railroad.  In her time, Danish Blixen spoke against English colonialism.  China is now the world's banker.  Hakuna Matata. 

Ernest Hemingway first arrived in Africa in Mombassa on December 8, 1933.  I will be in Mobassa on December 8th as well.  I just finished his "Green Hills of Africa." Its Part III of IV is "Pursuit of Failure."  It is a non-fiction book about people in unacknowledged conflict.  Hemingway tells us readers who he hates, including himself, on a Tanzanian safari.  It was not a critical success. He drank more.  Part of writing is that you get to tell a homily, a soap box to stand on for an interested audience. Here is Hemingway's homily in "Green Hills of Africa:"

"A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can’t reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia."

The last few days the resort I am at within the Amboseli National Reserve has hosted groups from the World Health Organization and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.  One boring blow hard spoke forty minutes before his own camera crew about the good he was doing oblivous to contributions of other attendees.  It is easy to point out problems. Much harder to fix them.

Amboseli

It must have been ninth grade with Mr. Foxlow that I first read Hemingway.  God bless you, Mr. Foxlow. Those short stories stay with me. Here are three of many: "Three Day Blow," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."  It is why I am in Amboseli, Kenya.  "Three Day Blow" is about getting really drunk in Michigan. Until then I did not know you could read about that in a short story, let alone recomended by a high school teacher.

By the way, if you enjoy reading about drunks read "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry.  Today the only Spanish I know is a phrase from that book: "te gusta este jardin?" Do you like this garden?  It was made in to a movie,  It is Joyce's "Ulysses" but with a muttering drunk in Mexico.  It is why I first wanted to travel to Mexico.

The other two short stories take place near Amboseli.  Not one hundred yards from me and my gin and tonic sipped slowly on a terrace overlooking a salty dust plain sit three water buffalo.  In one Hemingway short story a water buffalo charges at cowardly Francis.  He redeems himself by standing his ground.  Nearby his conflicted wife, Margot, takes aim and shoots Francis in the back of the head.  Francis is never happier.

They say bad luck runs in threes.  Driving in Kenya involves a lot of passing of semis and avoiding oncoming traffic.  Today, a white four door sedan was particularly adept at this challenge. I finally caught up with the sedan crumbled against an oncoming semi.  Not ten minutes later I was slowed by two police officers.  About ten people were gathered along the road. I realized a pedestrian had been hit by a passing vehicle.  The body lie face down along the highway.

A third bad never occurred.  I did stop for petrol and a toilet just outside of Nairobi in what to this Hoosier appeared to be third world chaos.  The public toilet was closed.  I headed back to the Land Cruiser but two men waived me across the street.  There a young boy handed me a key to another toilet.  On my way out he gestured for a pack of matches to light a cigarette.  Having none I reached in to my pocket found two coins worth fifty shilllings, about fifty cents, to present him.  He was ecstatic.

Anthony Bourdain's love for to travel is often traced to movies he watched.  His quest, which he shared with the world, was to find those places.  For me it has been books.

The Masai

My Land Cruiser plates are Ugandan. It provides me with a nice false backstory driving through ramshakle towns and splendid camp entrance gates.  Animals on the Kenyan plain can see so far that they have confidence and feed very differently from browsing animals' long staring vigilence in the woods.

My countenance made no difference to the Masai at the Ololainutiek Village, sixteen hundred meters above the Indiana Ocean and some five hundred kilometers west, but lifetimes of tradition away from my experiences.  This enk'ang village, a collection of huts fashioned from cow dung and mud surrounded by a strong and tight thorn bush, rests in a flat saucer of trampled soil rising into a timbered bowl-like valley with a small stream down the middle.

Three hundred and fifty nomadic Masai, in red Shuka, all bothers and sisters and aunts and uncles live here as men take wives from distant enk'ang by payment of cattle - sacred to the Masai as the god Enkai gave all cattle in the world to the Masai.  Masai are nourished by the blood and milk of cattle.

Without pretense the Mesai demonstrate ceremonial and warrior dance, invite me into their huts, and finally parade me before endless stalls of crafted merchandise to select.  I resist feebly as each joyful artist stands behind me.  I find I do like many pieces and am invited to negotiate price. One man speaks for all and etches the lot price with a soft stone on his arm. Too high. He hands me the stone to mark his arm. Too low.  He marks, still too high, and my counter too low. I propose taking some selections off the table but am refused as there is a system of sharing this revenue among the artist's family and the village. We strike a price for the lot.

I had a long career where a successful negotiation is said to make no one happy.  I'm happy I paid too much and now have a ready supply of gifts for later this December

Escarpment

 I found Julian at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport by spotting my name on his placard.  Youthful, cheerful, and the back of his hands scarred and burned he said he was headed to Uganda right after. He led me out to my Toyota Land Cruiser Prado 4x4 for the week, took the wheel, and drove us into heavily congested Narobi.  Inching along, after several kilometers we spotted a petrol station for a fill up.  Once back on the highway he pulled over, hopped out, and started walking.  Toward Uganda.

Luckily with Google Navigation I knew I could get to the Mara Duma Bush Camp at the Masai Mara National Reserve some five hours south at just about sundown.  Nairobi is on the equator so the sun rises and sets at 6:30 every day.  Driving at night in Kenya is highly discouraged. Traffic thinned as I drove the left hand side of the highway along with semi-trucks, school buses, and excursion vehicles.

Just west of Nairobi is the Great Rift, extending from below the Serengeti in Tanzania on north into Ethiopia and Djibouti, a spreading of tectonic plates and the ancestral home of humans. Google maps found me a vantage point at the town of Escarpment, so named after rock debris fallen to the valley floor as the Great Rift separated, providing a commanding view along a highway turnout. Google also selected a shorter route for me, not to Escarpment, but one with a police traffic stop.  The trucks were being waived on but travelers like me made to stop.

I was worried. I'd read about bribery to get away from an arbitrary police stop. Hakuna matata.  Turned out a semi truck had crashed and blocked all traffic.  Semis waited as large trucks could not negotiate alternate routes. Thus Google gave me a second chance at Escarpment while also insisting I was off route headed there.  At the overlook there were dozens of trinkets shops.  I pressed on watching the sun head further west when I realized I could get off the highway, descend into Escarpment, and get back on route to Masai Mara.

Early December is the end of the short rain season.  It had rained on and off the last week leaving ruts, rocks, and pools in the deep ochre Kenyan soil.  The Prado was up for it as we descended switchbacks past schools, police stations, vendor stands, and churches as well as many parades of happy school children with plaid uniforms walking towards homes along this muddy trek. Several entrepreneurial shops were failing in this remote area. I guessed that locals wanting to escape that life first sold trinkets at the Great Rift overlook then in despair headed to Nairobi.

I feared it was too dark to get down the hill, across the valley, and up the narrow slope of the mountainside to the south and still get to my lodging for the night. I slogged, bobbed, and slid my way down, across, and up with a very big smile feeling it the perfect way to start this leg of the journey. In the town of Escarpment all sorts of semis were backed up coming into the traffic mess from the other direction. I realized I could turn off the road through gullys, then dirt lots, and finally on a frontage path of vendor stalls to make it to the road south.

And so I arrived at the closed Sekenani gate of the national reserve a half hour after sunset and lowered my window to the uniformed guards.  Fortunately via WhatsApp my lodging had let me know what to say and in short order I was in my luxury tent for the night ready for adventure tomorrow.