Down the Trans-African Highway

“There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine,” a line from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, aptly described my thoughts the next few days after leaving Lake Turkana. After two nights at the Lake, we set out northeast across the vast Chalbi desert, first making our way to North Horr where we stopped to stretch and buy cold drinks as the entire village watched. Just when I thought it could not get any hotter, dustier or more isolated…we arrived at North Horr, near the Ethiopian border. The northeast of Kenya is an area where drought conditions have persisted since 1996 and the people looked gaunt, and somewhat hostile, staring at us but rarely smiling.

The largest group in northeast Kenya consist of the Boran tribe, pastoral people whose existence began near the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia before they migrated south to northern Kenya. Another group in the northeast, the Gabbra, are also from Ethiopia and have become largely assimilated with the Boran. The Boran and Gabbra have adopted Somali styles in dress and culture, but they do not necessarily practice Islam, as many have been converted to Christianity by the missions in the area. We were told by our drivers not to attempt to take any pictures, as they would throw rocks at the car. And at one point during the drive across the desert, we saw a group of Gabbra men with a herd of camels coming towards our car from the distant horizon. Our drivers, visibly worried, pulled out their machetes from under the seats as we passed the group of men. Again, all stares, no smiles or friendly gestures. Living in such harsh conditions, though, I could not blame them.

By late afternoon, we arrived in Kalacha where we would stay the night at a campsite run by a local Christian mission – the only one there. Kalacha, home mostly to Gabbra people, is considered the “neatest” village in Africa - I guess because its sandy and dusty streets have been defined by meticulously placed rows of white stones. At this point in our trip, we were back to pitching tents, which we all did crowded underneath the only shade tree in the campsite. Afterwards, we immediately headed for the pool set up on top of an irrigation tank, with its water pumped in by a windmill. Yes, this is definitely where I will get cholera, I thought, but its way too damn hot to worry about that now. We soon had other things to worry about…

While we were sitting in the irrigation tank, we heard a lot of noise across the neat little road, then saw smoke and the missionary women, with scarves and skirts flying, all running across the road with buckets of water. A young Gabbra child had tipped over a burning pot in his mother’s kitchen and the hut was on fire. Immediately, we all hopped out of the tank and started grabbing buckets – pans – tins, whatever we had in the camp and, along with the missionaries, ran across the street to put out the fire. We grabbed shovels and helped throw dirt on the fire. We continued running back and forth with water buckets, working side by side with the Gabbra and the missionaries for an hour. In the end, though, the small hut that contained the kitchen burned to the ground, but we were able to save most of the separate hut where the family slept. They lost most of their valuable foodstuffs, so the next morning our group all gave the family money to buy more. In this area of the world, a few bags of maize can mean the difference between life and death.

The next morning after leaving Kalacha we joined up with the Trans-African Highway. This is a road that theoretically should run from Cairo to Cape Town, but does not. Although broken into patches, altogether it still forms the longest road in Africa. The section we hit after leaving Kalacha, which runs from the Ethiopian border down to Nairobi, is thought to be the emptiest and most dangerous part of the road because of Somali refugees in the area, the inter-tribal fighting and the armed bandits that have been known to attack tourists. Paul Theroux in his book Dark Star Safari traveled down this road and described it as “waterless desert and rutted roads and quarrelsome tribes, and a border dispute among the gun-toting Boran, and worst of all the troops of roaming heavily armed Somalis known as ‘shifta.’ Just dropping the word shifta into a proposed itinerary was enough to make traveling Africans go in the opposite direction.”

We encountered no problems, however, and that night stayed in Marsabit – an oasis –hilly town with a mist-covered, forested mountain in the backdrop. Marsabit has an eclectic mix of cultures: Gabbra herdsmen with their goats and cattle, Boran women with Somali-styled printed shawls and wraps, and Rendille boys with skins and ochre-colored braided hair. We drove through the Marsabit forest in the late afternoon and after dinner, sat around a campfire. I was overjoyed that it was cool enough for a campfire and looked forward to a good nights sleep. Not this night though. Our time around the campfire was soon interrupted by a roaming pack of hyenas that had decided to join our camp, sending us to our tents. That alone was enough to keep me up all night, but we had the added pleasure of having pitched our tents under a canopy of trees that served as the home to a group of baboons. All night long the baboons swung from branch to branch above us and fought with each other, howling and wailing as they attacked. Nicole and I sat awake all night, wondering when one of them would land on top of our tent by accident, or decide to attack us on purpose.

Glad to leave the next morning, we continued down the Trans-African Highway, finally hit tarmac road again and spent the next two nights at the Samburu National Park, close to Mt. Kenya. After 8 days, and other than a lot of dust and heat, we made it back to Nairobi – surprisingly, we had very little car trouble, did not encounter any armed bandits, did not have any rocks hurled at us, did not get bit by any scorpions and all made it back with a trip full of a experiences and laughs.

(Pictured: Boran children in North Horr; Fire in Kalacha; Gabbra men walking across the Chalbi desert)