Like I was saying, I’ve finally arrived in Ethiopia. On the roads there are camels, and in the sky the North Star is back. A wanderer of the web who lands on this blog and sees the banner "Dekaro in Southern Africa" might think: Ethiopia in Southern Africa? Isn’t this Dekaro a bit confused? No, dear wanderer. The thing is, the journey started there, and little by little I’ve ended up here. So don’t bother me. Anyway, now I’ll tell you about the journey from Nairobi to here. As an Israeli couple who had done that journey in the opposite direction warned me before I started: "They told us to expect the worst, and the worst is what we got". And now I can fully agree. In fact, it was extremely hard and stressful, but in the end also very adventurous and fun.
So, shortly after writing the last post, I took a taxi to a suburb of Nairobi called Isli, mostly inhabited by Somalis, where I had been told that buses or trucks leave for Moyale, the town on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia.
I wanted to go there and back before dark because Nairobi, with the exception of the central area around the Hilton, becomes very dangerous at night. But we got stuck in an insane traffic jam. So we arrived in that neighborhood when it was already dark, and the taxi driver was absolutely terrified, he kept nervously looking around and muttering that Somalis are bad people, bad people…
We didn’t even know exactly where to go. Then we were directed down a dark street that was completely blocked by some cars stuck in the mud. So we got out and continued on foot. The taxi driver was getting more and more scared, and he was putting an incredible amount of stress on me as well. On top of that, I had everything with me, passport, credit card, and that damn camera (this camera has taught me one thing: whoever owns it is owned). Finally, we arrived in front of a tiny, run-down shack that served as the office for this bus.
Inside there was no one, but a man showed up and issued me a ticket. He said the bus would take at least 35 hours, but almost certainly more, and that it would leave at 11 the next morning. "Be on time", he pleaded.
The next morning at 11 I was there, but the bus wasn’t. I looked inside the little shack, and at first it seemed like no one was there. Then I spotted a tiny, emaciated boy curled up in a corner. He already had the look of an old man, and his eyes were a deep yellow, perhaps due to some kind of illness.
I asked him where the bus was, and he told me it would arrive in minutes. I sat down on a plastic chair by the side of the road and just stayed there for a while, watching people pass through this Somali neighborhood. Towards 4 in the afternoon I started to slightly suspect that no bus was going to arrive. By 5, that opinion was shared by everyone waiting there, and many of them had already had the same experience the day before. The little guy, though, kept assuring us that the bus was just about to arrive, only a few minutes away. At 6, even the little guy, under pressure, admitted that no bus would arrive... but the next day for sure it would!
Me and most of the others took it in stride, but some got pissed off and started yelling at him. In the end, an elderly woman completely lost it and, after storming into the little shack-office, started beating him badly. To be fair, the little guy didn’t really fight back, he just tried to block the blows, while everyone else was shouting at the woman to stop (I guess, they were speaking Swahili). But no one physically stopped her, maybe because, in the end, we were all kind of glad he was getting a bit of a beating.
Then, after she had given him a good beating, the woman left, and with her, almost everyone else.
We were left with only the few of us who absolutely had to go (it was April 10th and, as I mentioned in the previous post, I absolutely had to reach Addis Ababa by the 15th for an appointment at the airport with a friend coming from Italy). We made it clear to the guy that he’d better sort the situation out, and he actually got right to it, running back and forth through the trucks, trying to find us a ride.
In the end, he had found me a spot on a truck that was leaving for Moyale, but the problem was that usually you can ride on top of these trucks, so it’s not that dramatic. This one, however, was different: it was carrying wooden planks, and there was a small space between the end of the planks and the edge of the trailer, just over a meter wide. I was supposed to squeeze in there, sitting down at the very bottom, tightly wedged in. Doing 35 hours or more buried down there with four other unlucky guys didn’t really seem like an option. Besides, I don’t think it was even that safe, because if there had been a sudden brake, the wooden planks could have shifted forward and crushed me.
Luckily, in the meantime I had met a distinguished man in his thirties, Hussen, who had been in Italy as a child and has a sister working in Milan. Hussen, without asking for anything in return, really put himself out to help me, and in the end he found me a situation ten thousand times better: a place in a truck, in the driver’s cabin, heading to a town called Marsabit, about 8 hours from the border. There I could rest for the night and then catch another truck the next day. Perfect.
In the truck cab I felt quite comfortable, it was spacious and had a nice view. Between me and the driver there was a young man named Ismael, who had also been waiting for the bus. He could speak English, so once we set off we started talking about various things, in particular religion, he is, in fact, a devout practicing Muslim.
Around 3 a.m. we stopped for a break in a place called Isolo. Up to that point the road had been in good condition, but from there on it would be terrible all the way to the border. In the rest area all the truck drivers were talking in an agitated, heated way, and I asked Ismael what they were saying. It was about the fact that that night bandits were active on the stretch of road from there to Marsabit, and some trucks had been attacked.
So it was decided to continue together with two other trucks, like a mini convoy, to be safer. Ismael explained to me that these bandits usually block the road in some way and, when the truck stops, they come armed with rifles and force you to hand everything over. Other times they simply jump out suddenly from the sides of the road with their rifles pointed, and if the truck doesn’t stop, they shoot. He added that if we were stopped, I absolutely shouldn’t react or resist in any way to what they said, otherwise I could be killed. Ok.
So we set off again with one truck in front and one behind, and indeed soon the road started to get terrible, at times you could hardly even call it a real road. The truck in front was going very fast and often disappeared from sight, anyway, at some point it also took a different route. The other one, meanwhile, often fell behind, so in the end we were almost always on our own.
The area was desert-like, there was a full moon, and the shadows of the bushes constantly created in my mind the illusion of fierce armed bandits. When the first rays of sunlight appeared, a wave of relief washed over me, and despite the bumpy road I fell asleep.
A couple of hours later I woke up, we had stopped. Ahead of us, the other truck was also stopped, and everyone was talking animatedly. The guys riding on top of the other truck’s cargo claimed they had seen some armed men among the bushes in the distance. I said to Ismael, "How is that possible? There’s light now!", but he replied that it didn’t matter. The bandits are active 24 hours a day.
After about ten minutes, it was decided we would rush through that stretch at maximum speed, both trucks keeping close together. Ismael was calm: God would help us. Yet moments later, he took out his cell phone and said quietly that he wanted to make a call. I asked, "To whom?", "To my wife, in case I never get to speak to her again".
And it certainly didn’t reassure me to hear the driver complaining that the bandits often beat people badly, even when there’s no resistance, and that you could end up with a few broken bones. And that was the situation.
We fired up the engines and off we went! From that moment, the driver didn’t utter another word, completely focused on driving. We sped like mad, bouncing along that road full of ditches and potholes. Nothing happened, except at one point, a guy suddenly appeared from the bushes, running toward us, shouting something and signaling us to stop. But he wasn’t armed, so we just ignored him.
And so we made it safely to the only checkpoint in the entire area. There, we had breakfast while waiting for the other trucks to arrive. Before long, we formed a convoy of six or seven trucks, and from there we set off together, because the most dangerous stretch was about to begin. Luckily, when a convoy is this long, bandit attacks are rare. Each truck carried about ten people on top of the cargo, so there were quite a lot of us.
As we went along, the driver grew increasingly worried, recounting attacks that had occurred nearby. What was really striking was when these attacks had happened. It wasn’t a year ago, or months, or even weeks. No. The day before yesterday, they came out of there. Three days ago, they attacked a friend of mine just after that curve. Yesterday, someone was ambushed right here...
He also told us about a particularly unlucky truck driver who, three days earlier, had been attacked twice in the same day, both on the way there and on the way back! I asked Ismael if he knew who they were. He said they mostly belong to the Rendille tribe, who inhabit those areas largely as nomads, living off hunting. They dress almost like the Maasai, but unlike them, they don’t shy away from firearms. When, as now, there are periods of extreme drought and they can’t hunt animals to survive, they resort to attacking trucks.
We also made two stops in small Rendille villages. And indeed, they are not exactly peaceful. They didn’t want to be photographed, so I took a few pictures secretly, trying not to be noticed by the people I was photographing. But others would pop up instead, protesting quite aggressively! Luckily, Ismael was always there to handle the situation for me.
After passing the last dangerous stretch, where rocks sloping down to the edge of the road created a perfect hiding spot, we finally arrived in Marsabit at around 5 in the afternoon.
The next day (April 12), Ismael, who had now reached his destination, helped me look for a truck to Moyale, the small town on the border with Ethiopia. At first, I had found a ride on top of a truck that, I was told, was about to leave. I climbed up, and it wasn’t uncomfortable, but soon I learned that the truck wouldn’t go directly to the border, it would stop overnight somewhere in the middle of the desert. I feared I wouldn’t make it in time for my appointment, so I got down and started looking for something else.
But there were no alternatives: it was already late afternoon, and all trucks would stop overnight. In the meantime, I found another truck with space in the driver’s cab and, on top of that, I was glad I had left the previous truck, because it didn’t depart until 7 p.m., which would have meant sitting on the cargo in the sun for about five hours!
We set off around 8 p.m. As cargo, we were carrying the car of the only tourists spotted during the entire Nairobi–Addis Ababa journey: three American guys who had miraculously made it this far in a regular car (not an SUV). The car had arrived more dead than alive, and by now that stretch of road was truly impassable. We entered a real desert, no bushes in sight, and around midnight we stopped to sleep in a rather spartan shared room, so to speak.
The next morning, around 7:30, we set off again. The driver said we’d reach Moyale in three hours. Great. The road was a muddy mess, and it kept getting worse. About an hour later, we got stuck for the first time, and we didn’t get free until a couple of hours later. Just fifty meters on, we got stuck again. We weren’t the only ones: trucks were blocked all along the road. After a couple more hours, we finally got moving again, but by then a tire had blown. There was no spare, so it had to be repaired on the spot. Luckily, by then we were no longer in the open desert, with some bushes providing shelter from the sun. I sat in the shade and waited. We set off again around 2:30 p.m., so basically it took us six hours to cover a hundred meters. Not exactly a Schumacher performance.
By evening, we finally arrived in that damn Moyale, a town split in two by the Kenya–Ethiopia border. And once again, I have to thank the Swiss couple (and the saint who sent them my way) for telling me that you can no longer get an Ethiopian visa there. Otherwise, after all this, I would have had to go back to Nairobi! I would have shot myself.
The next morning (April 14), I left for Addis Ababa, with an overnight stop in a town called Awasa. On the bus, I met two Ethiopian sisters, Yeshi and Isega, who helped me with everything. That evening we visited Awasa, its lake, and a park full of birds, and then enjoyed a delicious traditional Ethiopian meal (cost: half a euro!). The following afternoon, I finally reached Addis Ababa just in time for the appointment… only to find out that my friend hadn’t shown up! At the last moment, he had changed his mind and didn’t take the plane.
The proxy I'm using made the photos too slow to load, so I put them in this external album instead: Follow the link to see them.
Photos of the journey from Nairobi to Addis Ababa
