February, 2022

The morning we leave Summerland, after we gather the other passengers, the Japanese couple who have been traveling together for nineteen months, another Japanese woman traveling on her own for the last nine months in South and Central America who says a Maasai offered ten cows for her, and the No Way girls, who have softened considerably and are on a fifteen week post college graduation round the world tour.  Titus is moving at a good clip, as all the drivers seem to do, dancing around pot holes, passing on the inside of the road, missing sheep, goats, gazelles, and dogs by inches.  One of the No Way girls asks Titus if he has ever killed anything in the roadway and he says righteously, “Never.”

We cross the equator line from the southern into the northern hemisphere on our way to visit Lake Bogoria, home of the famed pink flamingos who line the shores like a Christo wrapping and who fly off as we approach them like windblown fabric torn into thousands of flapping pink pieces.  We also stop at a hot spring where the water is so hot it is literally boiling, steam rising from the surface, so we can drop in a dozen eggs in a plastic bag tied to the end of a pole and ten minutes later we are peeling and eating hard-boiled eggs.  

On the way back from the lake to Nairobi I tell Titus I’d like to stop to buy some of the local honey that women are selling at the side of the road, where I can see hives made of hollowed out branches about two feet long and the diameter of a big man’s upper arm, hanging in the trees with holes drilled into them that apparently invite local bees to gather within.  And then I’m asleep.

I am awaked by the sound of a loud impact, as I see the van pulling hard to the right off the road.  When the van stops one of the No Way girls says we hit a cow and, when I climb out of the severely dented passenger door, laying off the road on its side is an already very dead, very big, brown and white cow who breathed its last and is leaking.

The van is quite smashed up, the front left grill collapsed in, the left headlight shattered, the door caved in, but all in all still useable.  A crowd gathers quickly.  The focus of conversation is about who is responsible, the driver of the van or the boy guarding the cow as it grazed and who has himself run away.  Did someone say tort lawyer?  I’m on it.  Clearly the pedestrian has the benefit of a rebuttable presumption to the right of way.  But the owner of the cow cannot or refuses to be identified.  And the young cowherd has run away, all of which raises the quite reasonable suspicion/inference that they are afraid of being found responsible for the damage to the van. 

On the other hand, the van clearly hit the cow, there’s a sign at the side of the road right before the accident site reading “Slow, cattle and children crossing,” and Titus saw the cow at some point before impact while moving at a fairly good clip as evidenced by the fresh skid marks in the roadway.  Did someone say accident reconstructionist?  And, of course, no one actually knows what the behavior of the cow was before the fatal impact except Titus, and his story is that the cow burst upon the roadway quite without warning and literally ran in front of the van as Titus tried to brake, turn, and avoid impact, and there are no witnesses to contradict his version of the events. 

The notion that no one knows who owned a creature worth close to $1,000 US dollars seems very odd to me.  Yet everyone in the village denies any knowledge of who the owner might be.  Even when the local police arrive an hour later, alighting from a civilian car they flagged down after they’d walked from the police station to the main road, about ten kilometers away (having no car of their own or police vehicle), no one comes forth to claim ownership of the cow, or to identify the cow’s owner.  Village solidarity is strong; the police effort to crack the wall of silence weak.  Titus is of course quite concerned because it is he who will be responsible for repair of the vehicle.

I propose that, since the owner of the dead cow cannot be identified, Titus take it in compensation for his loses, and when he tells me there is no way he can get the cow in the van (duh), I suggest we call the butcher in Lake Namuku, have him come out and butcher the cow on the spot, and give Titus fair value for the meat.  Titus quite likes this idea, especially the thinking outside the box it represents, and goes to the police to run the idea passed them.  But the senior policeman, who is not the most articulate fellow, says quite augustly, as if quoting familiar statute and verse, “there is no provision in our law for the removal of a dead cow.”   And so we are forced to leave our only source of potential compensation bloating in the sun and to wonder who will claim/harvest the hundreds of pounds and dollars worth of meat when night descends aside from jackals.

Back on the road we stop for lunch at a restaurant that serves freshly cooked meat from its massive outdoor grill, one of three such competing restaurants with massive grills at exactly the same junction on the road, this being the only highway going north from Nairobi for truckers and tourists alike, and this is the one good highway rest stop for hours in each direction. 

It is like a comic scene in a weird movie to see at least a dozen African men, all wearing tall white chefs’ hats, come running into the roadway waving with long forks, trying to direct cars pulling off the road into their respective establishments.  I have no idea how we pick the restaurant we do, but before long a man is standing at our table with a couple of grilled legs of goat, cutting chunks off the legs on a wooden chopping block, then cutting the chunks into bite size pieces using his hands to pull the pieces together in small piles, then leaving them, along with a big pile of salt, on the cutting board, whereupon we all dig in with our hands to the very tough, quite tasty and chewy, pieces of meat, the smoke created by the fat of cooking meat dripping onto the ten foot long grills and into our faces as we consume a good percentage of some goat who met its own fate in its own roadway.

I am leaving the tent camp at Maasai Mara with two men hitching a ride with us into Narok where we are again going to lunch at the Dreaming Garden Restaurant and where I will wait to switch to another van to go off with its passengers to Lake Nakuru, while Damian and Natalia (the Argentinians) will continue on to Nairobi.  Another two men will ride with us to the point in the road where their cattle transport truck got stuck in the mud and where they have contracted to meet a local tractor owner who will try to pull them out.  As we are waiting to leave camp I’m seated in the passenger seat of the van with the door still open.  Maasai men in traditional garb with thick bracelets around their wrists and ankles are milling about the van, chatting with the drivers, checking out the vehicle, passing time, saying goodbye.  I point to the watch on the wrist of one of the Maasai men shaking hands with me.  The watch has a very unusual and attractive face, and I say casually and totally unconsciously to the man pointing to his wrist, “Nice watch.”  I’ll learn not to do this one of these days, because in a flash he has his watch off and is attaching it to my wrist.  So I take my watch off, one of probably comparable value, a Casio, or Timex, and hand it to him.  He likes my watch.  It has a much nicer Velcro band than his watchband that is plastic.  Another Maasai man comes over to the van; he takes off his watch and places it on my other wrist.  He takes my watch from the first man.  He examines it.  I give his watch to the second man.  A third man comes over, not to be denied a part in the action of trade, and soon watches are being examined and moving from hand to hand.  I end up with all three watches while they admire mine.  I give back two of the watches and keep the one I first admired.  The owner of that watch takes my watch.  We each put our new watches on.  The van driver arrives, says “Twende,” (we go). All of the Maasai men and I shake hands.  I admire my new wristwatch – ascribe it with Maasai meanings, with the pleasures of time and travel, of possessions and value, of good faith and non-attachment.  It acquires significances not associated with my one time watch now adorning the wrist of a Maasai man hundreds of miles away.  I feel myself to be an inordinately happy trader. 
As opposed to my new driver, the loud and sometimes impatient and annoyed Titus, who is definitely not happy with his current six passengers, two of whom are a young Japanese couple, a single man, a single woman, and the two somewhat dour (shy?) young women from Norway who the driver tells me never say yes to anything he asks or suggests and will probably not tip him well, if at all.  I nickname them the “No Way” girls and commit myself to getting a yes out of them by offering cookies I’ve bought, or to buy them sodas.  I even ask if I can help them out of the van, or carry something for them.  By the end of the day I am batting zero in my effort to get them to yes.
Titus is just not my favorite guy.  He is opinionated and believes things I don’t … that Obama hates Kenya, that Tanzanians are lazy, that I should help support his kids.  He is critical and annoyed with other drivers on the road.  The father of three young children, two of whom are in private school, he is also very obviously trying to see what he can get out of me.  Nothing ventured nothing gained. 
When we get to our overnight guesthouse on the far side of Nakuru, a bustling town one hundred miles northwest of Nairobi on the main (only?) Mombasa/Nairobi road that goes to the Somali and Ugandan borders and is filled with big trucks making their runs, Titus takes me aside and asks if I trust him.
“Sure,” I say hesitantly.
“Would you like to stay at a better guesthouse, the one I stay at?” he asks.  “No extra cost.  Nicer rooms.  Better showers.  We’ll have a drink and dinner together.”
“Sure,” I say … hesitantly.
So we drive to a part of town that I would say is definitely seedy.  On the way we pass what I’m sure will forever be my favorite store name in all of Africa, the “Pentagon Butchery.” 
The gate to the guesthouse/motel-like structure we will arrive at is opened by one of the armed twenty-four hour security men on duty.  We are again the only guests I can see and we park inside a gravel courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by the motel, a barricade, a fort.  My room is meager but fine.  I do yoga, have a shower, play with the functions on my new watch, do not use the hair pick left so considerately hanging next to the room mirror.  Titus comes to call me for dinner around seven.  We pass through a small locked gate opened by another security guard on the other side of the courtyard, pass through an open air restaurant with a few customers, pass goat carcasses hanging in the open restaurant kitchen, pass some private dining rooms, and end up seated at a table with a pool hall on one side and a bar with a big dance floor on the other.  Some men are playing pool, but no one else is dining and no one is in the darkened dancehall.  Titus has preordered our dinner, a big single plate of stewed chicken in a light tomato sauce, steamed spinach, which I tell him is kale (which it is), and he insists is spinach, and roasted whole potatoes that are just fabulous dipped in the sauce.  There are no utensils on the table.  A waitress comes over with a plastic pitcher of quite hot water and a basin.  She pours hot water over our hands, which we “wash.”  The meal is shared and eaten with our fingers.  Titus tells me he always sits at this table so he can see people coming from all sides.
“If something is biting you it’s inside your clothing,” he says.

Titus calls his wife in Nairobi.  He puts me on the phone with her.  She is delightful.  He next puts me on the phone with his eleven year old daughter Elizabeth who wants to be a doctor and loves science and who I encourage with all my heart to live her dream.  Then I take my leave, and retire for the evening by eight, falling asleep quickly.
I am up again at midnight, awakened by fabulous throbbing music coming from the dance floor on the other side of the gate. I so want to go and see what is happening, but this exploration seems beyond even my comfort zone and sense of prudence; that I would walk into a bar somewhere in Kenya where I’ll be the only white person and watch people dancing.  I don’t think so.  But I so want to go.  I really do.  I want to see Africa.  Isn’t this what I came for?  So I get dressed.  Then I get undressed.  Then I dress, struggling gaily with myself about the potential risks and potential rewards.  I think I must have taken off and put on my pants three times.  I’m laughing at myself having such a good time not knowing what the hell I’m going to do and enjoying my struggle.  Of course in the end my pants are on and I cannot deny myself the experience of seeing what can be seen.
I leave almost all my money in the room, taking just a little cash, my passport, and one credit card, as I head out into the night, cross the courtyard, am admitted through the small locked gate that separates the motel from the rest of the complex by an armed guard, pass tables filled with people, and enter into a totally transformed environment, the music loud and pulsing, the dance floor, complete with strobe light, in what is a very well designed bar and tables surrounding the dance floor, a night club atmosphere, busy waitresses taking drink orders, and the dance floor filled with sixty or seventy people moving in delight.
I park myself in a corner of the room, but it is not long before a quite attractive woman in a lowcut blouse finds me and asks if I want to dance.  I decline.  She smiles.  She comes near enough to rub her leg against mine.  She has a genuinely lovely smile. 
“Buy me a drink?” she asks. 
“I left my money in my room,” I say. 
“Well let me go to your room and get it with you,” she says. I say no.

A man comes over to introduce himself.  I recognize him as a guide. He says he’s headed to Maasai Mara tomorrow.  We have a pleasant conversation about where I stayed in Mara, who my guide was, what animals I saw.  He tells me again that he is a guide, as if I didn’t get it. 
“You are about to have a real taste of Africa, my friend,” he says smiling and nodding toward the woman, “Just watch your passport and your money, I don’t want to find you crying in the morning.”

The dancers are absolutely wonderful.  Mostly men are dancing with men, or dancing by themselves, or dancing with whoever is next to them.  There are also women dancing, some with women, some with men, some alone.  The movements are subtle, feet often hardly leaving the floor, shoulders and hips so fabulously expressive in such a narrow range.   Some men dance with women whose backs are turned to them, the man’s hands on the woman’s thighs, pulling her into him as she dances and moves.  Some women caress their breasts as they dance.  Older men are dancing alone.  Big men are dancing lithely.  The strobe light magnifies the movements.  The dancers seem so happy, so lost in delight.

“Welcome to Summerland,” the same woman says to me, “I’m Kendin, would you like some company tonight?”
“Well yes and no,” I say.
“Tell me three reasons why no,” Kendin says smiling coyly.
“Well one is that I have a woman at home I really really love,” I say.  “Two is disease.  And three is that I’m just not the kind of guy who goes off with women he meets in bars, women who go off with strangers.”
“You not fear on me,” she says, and I cannot hear if she is saying fear or fair.  But it doesn’t really matter. 
“Come, dance,” I say, and walk onto the dance floor where the music literally doesn’t ever pause or stop, the sound and the Afro pop beat awesome, the dancers in some state of delight, and before long so am I, other women coming near as we dance together, no one paying the slightest attention to me as best as I can tell, except for one slightly drunk man who comes over to bumps fists with me and shake my hand as Kendin leaves the dance floor, and I am alone … with about sixty other people, in a bar, in Africa, dancing in delight.

Later Kendin asks again if we can go to my room.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she says, “Just be friends.  Have company.  Be fear on me.”
She is thirty three, and beautiful, a beautician with a three year old son.  And my answer is still no.  The fact is no.  Fear or fair is no.  And when I say goodnight to Kendin I almost feel badly for her. Later, when the first rooster calls at four in the morning and wakes me in my room, the music is still playing.