Northern Kenya Day Four

Soleil means "sun" in French, but it was also the name of a French cyclist I met in the desert.

He was deeply tanned with a grizzly beard, a grungy sleeveless undershirt and brown trousers which had a broken zipper.

We exchanged pleasantries. We cursed at the road. He asked if it improved later on and I assured him that it was terrible for the next 50 km.

Then he tried to bum cash off me so he could buy a visa into Ethiopia. It turned out that he had had to spend $6 to repair the ball bearings on his bottom bracket and was now utterly penniless.

He had had a business in South Africa but it had run into problems so he decided to buy a used Rockhopper for $100 and cycle back to France. He was sleeping out in the open at night. I don't know what he was eating.

I worried that he didn't seem to have enough water for the desert. He wasn't carrying a lot of gear. On the front of his bike he had some rock climbing shoes and a coil of rope and on the back he had a guitar.

It is the duty of cyclists who meet in the desert to help each other so I gave him $20. I have since heard that you can't buy visas at that border post, you have to do that in Nairobi. Maybe you can talk your way through. I hope he made it home.

Northen Kenya Day Three

You know in July how the weather man from Channel 9 fries an egg on the sidewalk? Your brain is made of essentially the same stuff as egg. The only thing keeping you alive in the summer time is perspiration.

In the movies people sometimes get lost in the desert and go for days without water and they see mirages. Ha ha ha. There are exceptions, but in real life, it's far more common for people to die of heat stroke on the first day. If you don't move you could survive for two days but normally people try walking to safety and die within hours.

That's why it's so important to drink lots of fluids. When I was in the desert, I used to drink ten liters of water per day. I normally would keep a water bottle wedged next to my handle bar bag so I didn't have to reach down all the time. And I was always super careful to carry enough water and an extra four liters of reserve water.

Anyway, after camping a night in the desert I was down my reserve water bag. Obviously that's when I found out that my reserve water bag has sprung a leak and I only had half a liter of water left.

There is very little traffic on that road but even before I got on my bike, a truck came by. I was going to ask the driver for water but instead I asked him how far it was to the next village. This is a 100% true account of our conversation:

Driver: The next village is really close. You see the bend in the road? The next village is just around that corner.
Me (squinting): I don't see a village.
Driver: No no. You can't see it because it's just around the bend.

This was surprising and happy news to me, because I had thought it was 20 km to the next village. I thanked him heartily.

Every word I know is insufficient to describe the rest of that day. It was 32 km to the next village. I know that doesn't sound like a long way, but it was. That road was indescribably bad. And so was the headwind. I've had windy days in Egypt and I rode against the wind in South Africa which blew over trucks and blocked the mountain passes, but I have never seen anything like the wind in northern Kenya. At the end, I was too exhausted to ride and could only push my bike. It was 1:30 in the afternoon when I finally arrived.

Really it was a stupid thing. If I had just waited, there are cars that pass by. I sort of lost track of time actually and didn't realize it was afternoon. Plus there were places with trees and I thought maybe someone lived there. I kept on expecting the village to be around the corner.

As soon as I arrived, I ordered two of those one liter bottles of water and a coke.

Northen Kenya Day Two

Here is a picture of the only tree for miles and miles and miles.

In northern Kenya there is a village about every 50 km where you can get food and water. My plan was to eat lunch at village number one and sleep at village number two. I started late because of a flat tire but I made good time until lunch.

From there the landscape turned into a rocky, moon-like desert and the road got gnarly. It was getting dark, and I still had 20 km to the next village when I decided to pitch camp for the night.

If you have watched "The Long Way Down," this is the part where they had a police escort. Apparently the road to Marsabit is infested with Somali bandits. People assured me the bandits planned their robberies carefully and wouldn't hi-jack a random tourist on a bike. Still it would have been nice to have some bushes or hills to hide my tent.

There was a herd of antelope grazing in the distance. I admired them for a minute. I wished I knew whether there were lions in the area.

First Day in Northern Kenya

There was a time I stood on the ridge of a mountain and I looked out for miles and miles and I wondered if my eyes would ever get filled up. If after seeing so many glorious things, my eyes would not be able to take in another sunrise. But I've found that it is my memory which has been filled. I look at the picture above and I don't remember those mountains. It's not a great picture but it moves me and I feel a sort of wistfulness.

There were tons of dik-dik in that scrub. They are curious timid kind of antelope as tall as your knee. They like to stand in the road and watch you cycling. Then when you get close they hop daintily into the scrub. Once I saw one hop through a flock of pheasant without disturbing them. Another time it made me laugh to see two dik-dik getting chased across the road by a squirrel.

Ethiopia wrap up

Addis Ababa

Adis Ababa is the saddest city I have seen. Every Ethiopian beggar imagines that life is better in Addis Ababa.

The city does wrong things to your heart. After a while, I'd see a beggar, missing both legs and an arm, drag himself inch by inch across the street and I'd think, "Come on, buddy. We all know you have a wheel chair hiding in the alley."

Plus Addis smells like someone peed on it. I know that it's just thousands of people taking little pees everywhere, but sometimes it amuses me to imagine a giant Ethiopian Paul Bunyan waking up in the night.

I had the worst diarrhea of my life in Addis. It was a gas diarrhea combo. The first night my stomach bloated up so badly with gas that I puked. For three days, I just lay incapacitated on my bed burping and farting as fast as I could.

Gondar

Gondar is a mountain town with an ancient castle in the middle. The locals are wealthy and take enormous pride in their heritage.

Restaurant #1: This place had live music and traditional dancing. Henok almost got into a fight with one of the performers who hit another female performer. It turned out they were married. I didn't see it.

Restaurant #2: The owner had been inspired by a visit to France and had created a funky club themed restaurant. The cooks got into an argument with the waiter about killing a chicken. "We're women! It's a man's job!" "No way. I'm not killing it. It's against Jesus!"

Restaurant #3: The musicians ask your name and sing a song about you in Amharic. "This is Dan. He seems nice. Sort of quiet."

Bahir Dar

Bahir Dar was my favorite Ethiopian city. On the banks of Lake Tana. Drenched in rain and mosquitoes. Muddy and bohemian.

Henok and I stayed in a poorer part of town. The ladies there sell tea for 5 cents a cup from their living rooms. As you sipped your tea, you could admire their doilies and pictures of their family. At other homes you could buy local beer for 3 cents. And some of the women probably sold their bodies. Life is hard and everyone has to eat.

Bahir Dar is a cycling town. The weekend I was there, one of the main streets was shut down for bicycle races. Men, women, children, everyone on bicycles.

Conversations on the Bus

I recently had the opportunity to spend many days on the bus. The batteries on my music player soon went flat but I was fortunate to sit next to interesting people.

In Zambia I talked to a retired banker. He had took an early retirement right before the bank was dissolved so he was one of the last few to receive a pension. Even though he worked as a banker, his education was in agriculture and he used his severance package to buy a farm. Now he was the head of the local farmers union.

The government tries to encourage farmer cooperatives in Zambia. If you want subsidized fertilizer you have to join. Most of them are a waste of time.

But this guy was was quite enthusiastic about organizing people. He'd help new farmers estimate how much food a field would produce. He'd tell them how much food to keep and how much to sell. He kept records if a chicken died in order to track the spread of diseases. He knew ahead of time if people were going to run out of food because of poor rains. In Zambia, farmers are supposed to sell to authorized millers and the price of maize is fixed. He petitioned the government so his farmers could sell to a local mill and save money on transport. Also they charged a higher than official price.

One thing he was quite proud of was that he was able to secure loans for his farmers to buy fertilizer. Originally the lenders wanted to charge 100% interest but he was able to negotiate a loan for just 50% interest. Only one farmer wasn't able to repay the loan and the other farmers each had to chip in to cover the loss. The next year he took out a mortgage loan against his own property for an even lower rate.

I asked him if he wasn't worried that he would lose his farm if the rains were poor, but it turns out he used part of the loan to insure the crops. I didn't know small scale Zambian farmers could do that.

Sometimes people make me all kinds of optimistic.

Random Lagu Story

I wasn't able to visit Sudan on this cycling trip, but I have been there in the past, to visit my brother. At the time, he was working for Samaritan's Purse setting up schools. While I was there I shared a tukal (room) with Lagu, the famous Sudanese mountain climber.

Anyway, Lagu is in Uganda these days. It was good to see him. This picture was taken on Christmas last year. This is a story that he told me.

There is a stream near the Samaritan's Purse compound in Sudan. When I was there it was dry, but during the rainy season it has a couple feet of water.

Once during the rains, a truck arrived at the banks of the stream. The driver had his assistant get out and test the water. They decided it wasn't too deep. Unfortunately, the thing they didn't consider was that the bottom of the stream was just drifting sand. They were soon very stuck.

They worked all afternoon but couldn't move. In the evening, they decided to give up for the night and use the Samaritan's Purse/Community tractor to pull them out in the morning.

The next day Lagu happened to pass by the stream in the course of his morning activities. The truck had fallen on its side and sunk into the sand. Only little bit was sticking out above the water.

The tractor crew tended to sleep late and by the time they got out of bed and down to the stream, the truck was completely submerged. It took them a while to find it.