The allure of Northern Kenya

The driver of the 2NK shuttle that I boarded at 4.30pm to Nyahururu, then onward to Northern Kenya, thought I should get my head examined when I told him my final destination.

“You might die of anything: cold or heat, animal attack or bandit assault,” he warned.

The three hours’ drive from Nyahururu as the rain pounded the shuttle were filled with discouraging stories about the North.

You need a gun to go through some places. There will be no mobile network. Scorpions will bite you. Where will you sleep? What will you eat? You cannot travel during the day because of the heat.

How will you survive the ethnic animosity? the wet blanket of a driver ranted. And all this time I was thinking to myself: “If that is the case, why isn’t everyone dead there?”

Halfway through the journey, I contacted a team of 18 journalists and officials from the National Museums of Kenya, the Kenya Tourist Board, and the Kenya Tourism Development Corporation, who were waiting for me at Maralal. No word of encouragement there, either.

“To be honest, you will not make it to this place. If you are lucky, it will not be on time,” one of them said.

Simon Gathuo from Kinamba, about 15 kilometres from Rumuruti town where the tarmac road from Nyahururu to Maralal ends, tweeted to me that it was raining heavily. “You have to wait for the road to dry.”
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