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| 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.
