The Soulless Journey

PHOTO/COURTESY 

For purposes of not offending my host, I’ll say that I visited Cheploch Gorge. Other than the scenic features formed mainly by gully erosion, the area is exquisitely Phot. Forget about making love during the day, unless you are deranged. The tool won’t even rise to occasion. And if you manage to do so, climax will sound the same as a hot iron being cooled with water. I can authoritatively say that the entire population was conceived at night.

The escarpment is quite scenic especially if you harbor no thoughts of scaling it but to just to marvel at the wonders of nature. There are all manner of snakes here, my host assures me of that. In fact he pointed a location where a python was once killed. Even a rattle snake is present in this landscape. However, I was assured that years of human interaction have made these extremely poisonous snakes human friendly. When you encounter one, it will greet you like a long lost friend by sinking its fangs on your feet and injecting enough venom to kill you, as is the biblically accepted human-snake greeting.

After days of toiling in the sun and sweating approximately all my bodily fluids, including seminal, it was time to head back home. A two-hour trek, which was our choice rather than is the norm, we stopped by the tarmac a few metres from Cheploch Gorge. I would have loved to go there and witness the daredevil divers perform their tricks but I was too tired. Besides, my feet were already threatening  me through the standard feet language which is blisters. A matatu stopped and we boarded earnestly, relieved of the heat (I am speaking for myself here) and the fatigue.  There was only one passenger inside, which made three of us excluding the crew.

And there began a grueling and extremely soulless journey to Iten. The matatu flouted every single traffic rule, including the ones that are yet to be formulated. First it stopped at Emsea junction, a man with an indestructibly sheepish grin loaded a milk container, which may or may not have contained milk, but judging from the energy the handlers expended when hauling the container, it may have. He stood there, scanning the environment and returned greetings with such vigour that would have outshone a politician. We stopped there approximately seventeen and half minutes.

A few people boarded including a man who found it prudent to purchase meat which he would transfer more than ten kilometers away. Man, I pitied that meat. The driver kept enquiring who was ahead from his fellow drivers as well as making phone calls. We set off and he pressed the gas, triggered one of the many phone calls he made.

Along the way, we picked women who looked like traders or sort. One kept making phone calls with her mulika mwizi phone, then instructing the driver, who I learned was called Kibe, to stop at certain places upon which people would mysteriously appear and hand her money. She made close to five such phone calls. One woman was unsuccessful in using this technique and was forced to alight and board another matatu to head back. Kibe missed her stop point. Some passengers tried to urge her to use m-pesa but she could hear none of it. It was like convincing her to phone sex a few metres from her man. You would be convinced only if you had two brain cells that worked. And she had plenty of them in tip top condition.

At another stop, a swarm of women accosted us in quite a threatening manner, with an assortment of goods – tomatoes, onions, oranges, and mangoes. They surrounded us with eyes that suggested that somebody’s health exclusively depended on our benevolence, and that we’d be condemned to an eternity of damnation, or worse still, not reach our destinations. Realizing the gravity of the situation, some passengers actually bought.

The matatu continued picking up passengers even when I thought there was no space even for air. In fact the concentration of carbon dioxide exceeded oxygen because there was no space for oxygen to circulate. But people still boarded as if there’d contract a fatal disease if they didn’t board exactly that matatu. I was particularly irked when a man, elephant in size, sigh at the sheer number of passengers, and still squeezed himself in. I heard someone call him ‘mwalimu’ and I pray that he isn’t a real one. We don’t need such teachers, unless they are in parliament.

At some point, there were more than twice the recommended seat size, people crammed in all sorts of formations and positions. I wondered how someone would sit in such an inconveniencing position, and still reach their wallets and retrieve the new currency notes to pay their fares.

As the journey progressed, people alighted until we were nearly the only people inside. The driver meandered the road expertly although he seemed to use his head to guide the matatu through the bends rather than the steering wheel. We passed by Tambach and a feeling of nostalgia gripped me. Four tortuous years. Four year’s worth of tortuous memories that molded us into the fine men we’ve become, contributing wholesomely, despite complete disregard to our livers, to the alcohol industry.

The rest of the journey was uneventful until we reached Iten Town where we boarded another matatu to town. The touts dared us to board if we had souls. And we did, because we had had a completely soulless journey. Also, it offered us a chance to see how Kenyans do not care for the traffic rules, least of all their lives.