We chose to travel direct from Garissa to Mombasa, rather than to Mombasa through Nairobi. We thought doing this would save us valuable daylight hours, man-hours and money (it costs half as much). See, Mombasa is just about six hours from Garissa.
Well, theoretically anyway.
In reality, it took us twice that amount of time to reach. The bus made stopovers at about ten different towns in between, standing for up to an hour. In each of these stops, the bus collected passengers, piling them -nay, stacking them- over each other’s heads in the aisles. Even getting off the bus for a bathroom break was impossible; there would be twenty people fighting at the door, tearing at each other to have your seat.
Garissa is in the north of Kenya, while Mombasa is in the south eastern part of the country. The desert shrubbery along the way is scenic, and what you will love best is the tacit transition from cacti to palm trees.
Frankly, you will probably love everything about the journey; the beady-eyed chicken tucked between bus seats, the ridiculous cacophony that is the bus honk, the sleepy towns tucked and folded on the sides of the road, the diluted Lucky Dip packaged into plastic bottles and passed off for Fanta, the camels trotting in the bushes.
This is Africa, you think again and again. It is such a filling feeling, a beauty and satiety and cheery pride. These are your people, with all their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities and strange smells.
A few days later, we drive from Mombasa in the same bus; the Tana River Express. The driver is obsessed with his ridiculous honk. He even honks at flies in the bus window. It has been raining for a couple of days. The road is terrible. It takes us fifteen hours to drive a distance that should have taken five. We get stuck in the mud multiple times, get off and push, dig sand from the ground and hurl it at the tyres. We walk barefoot because the mud clutches at the sandals and cuts the straps. Thorns burst our soles and we limp. We are terrified at one point because the situation plummets, the bus careens. The truckers on the sides of the road are not willing to help; they just got attacked by bandits, lost everything, had their limbs clubbed. Those doomsday preachers; they tell us that the bandits will be back for us.
It doesn’t help that my friends are Germans. Wazungu. People tend to focus on the novelty of their skin colour rather than the sticky -no pun intended- situation we are in.
Everyone is exhausted and flabbergasted. Passengers swear that when they get home, they shall box the first person that asks them if they had a good trip.
Regardless, I love everything about it, even the moments of terror when it seemed likely that the bus would topple, the way strangers became friends, the way we held hands and swore and moved away from the windows so the glass wouldn’t shatter in our eyes.
Photo Courtesy:kathryngironimi.theworldrace.org
