Well is this a great reflective topic. Surprisingly I have never been asked this before in my simple travel life, so wow, It was actually three days before my sister’s wedding and I had felt overwhelmed with all the wedding planning, so I decided to wake my brain up by taking a small detour trip (call it a crazy journey) and spice my life up…
Since I am the queen of Cheap thrills and budget traveling?, my friend and I randomly decided to board a bus to Great North Road with Moyale in the Ethiopian side being our focus destination???.
Moyale borders Kenya and Ethiopia and is a marginalized town which is a partial home to the famous Alshabaab and had also just experienced tribal clashes and cattle raids between different clans in the Kenyan side and the Ethiopian side.
These pictures are just but a pint depicting the rawness of this journey:
The upside of this journey was that who knew that our lovely country Kenya was sooo beautiful???
Guys, Kenya is humongous, heck! As a Nairobian, it is easy to live in ignorance and only consume what we see on the Television. Most tourism companies focus on the Coastal region and the Maasai Mara… but Kenya has so much to offer besides those two famous destinations. It was actually shocking to see so much beauty in such a marginalized region where social media only focuses on the number of people killed after clan wars. The Chalbi Desert was insanely beautiful… even though we saw it from the moving bus. Infact, from Isiolo County to Marsabit County there are so many table top mountains with Mt. Ololokwe being our biggest highlight!
From Marsabit to Moyale, there is a place called Sololo which has beautiful mountain ranges covered with clouds that are ten times cuter than the Ngong Hills! Breathtaking aint even a description, you need to see it with your own eyes to believe it?!!
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The downside of this journey is that this bus we were in was the only bus operating on that road during the wee hours of the night so it kept on collecting people along the road … people sat down on the bus aisle from Nanyuki to Moyale, an entire 584 kilometres! There were cushitic tribe people who were chewing Khat and were very energetic thus ended up talking the entire way from Nairobi to Moyale (791 kilometres of non stop talking) wheeew?! To add on, there was someone who kept on farting continuously…?#SilentKillers? … My people… We died and resurrected a couple of times! Let’s also not forget the 52 children in the bus who cry continuously coz it was hot and stuffy … Therefore you can only imagine how harassed we looked upon arrival!!!
Upon arrival, we immediately booked a bus that would be travelling back to Nairobi because we didn’t want to find ourselves sitting on the bus aisle on our way back home. After that we went and crossed the border into Ethiopia and this is where the craziness set in.
The place was desolate and had many military officers standing on the streets. It looked like a horror movie shot after war. Houses were burned, some destroyed and my friend and I looked totally misplaced! Despite our obvious happy faces for making it and the long attires we had worn to fit in, it was clearly evident that we were Nairobians and on that note, the few pastoralists taking care of their camels were very friendly and showed us an open mini restaurant place to enjoy Ethiopian coffee and plenty of Injera at a very affordable price.
Ethiopians, Somalis and Kenyans are all one people in Moyale. They all speak one language despite their clan wars. The only thing that separates them are border lines, the number of cattle and camels one may have and the food of course! Ethiopian food is everything, Kenyans please take notes from our neighbors.
After monitored exploration and bonding with a few locals and understanding the reasons for clan wars, we boarded a bus to start our 14 hrs journey back to Nairobi. Just to mention, for those of you who are considering on embarking on this journey to the North, don’t forget to carry some form of Identification, either your National ID or your Passport because of the many police checks on this road especially at night. Every time we’d approach a police check, for some reason there was no phone network service at all, like literally. It was just us and heavily armed policemen in the middle of nowhere.
At some point we got exhausted and overwhelmed by the frequency of checks, until we decided to askone heavily armed police man why the keep on over checking, coz yooo, this ain’t fun anymore, and we love fun things.
He said its for national security purposes and basically to ensure that there are no Alshabaab and illegal immigrants (esp Eritrean Immigrants). Later on after loading?, a few hours later in spongebob’s voice,? the concept of illegal Eritrean immigrants blew our minds coz whoa!!? How did these Eritreans even reach Kenya, just by use of Public means?? ?So Cool!! This became our newest food for thought. Now we must go to Eritrea because they is an assured working public transport system?
This was a random but a very enlightening journey as I got to see for myself the endless beauty Kenya has to offer in terms of nature, culture and food and in the process, I also got to inspire my few social media friends to get out of their comfort zones undertake this journey because we have only one life, one’s own country is worth the exploration, and a beautiful country at that!!! And Most Importantly, I made it in time formy sister’s wedding??.
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