Leaving Rusinga - Ethipoia Bound! (Almost) - Sam

Well, here we are. Sitting idle in Nairobi. We were told by the agency we are going through in Khartoum, Sudan that the necessary paperwork has been submitted to the Sudanese embassy in Nairobi needed to issue our visas. And yet, here we are with no visa...waiting. Getting a visa for an American is no easy feat. When we went to the embassy to apply, they told us we would have to go through an external source that would take our information and either approve or decline our request and then send our info (passport copy, passport pictures, flight itinerary, etc...) to the embassy in Nairobi. Then we can go pick up our visa. As it turns out the agency sent our visa approval to Washington D.C. instead of Nairobi. Classic Africa. Also, for an American the visa costs nearly $160 compared to about $50 for anyone else.

One would think at this point in our trip we would come to expect delays such as these. However, one does not release his ingrained western sense of time and efficiency in just three months. No in reality it takes much, much more time than that. It also takes a conscious release of expectations. "Relax, it's Africa," a common phrase we hear throughout the continent. Easier said than done for these Americans. African bureaucracy makes going to the DMV seem like a vacation. If you ever have to wait one day, even two for something to get done, don't even think about complaining. Or if you find frustration and anger welling, just take an African vacation. It will resolve your plight through the necessary defeat that is accompanied with getting anything done on African soil.

Just a few days ago we left Rusinga Island. Our time there was a nice break from the buses, cars, trains, ferries, sickness and the constant travel we experienced through southern Africa. We got to experience the slow pace that accompanies small villages in Africa. We read...a lot. We woke up each morning and had our tea and our mandazi, traditional fried dough, and got a couple chapters in before we headed off to class at either the primary school or the secondary school. Or we would ride into Mbita and use a computer, if the power wasn't out or the internet hadn't stopped working. There were no set times, or schedules. Everything ran on African time and was subject to change.

Our last weekend before we left, Matt and I traveled to Kakamega forest, the last surviving tropical forest in Kenya, the rest, which was quite vast, has been overused and deforested. Kakamega is the small bit of forest left the government has preserved and limited the use of. On the way there I had an interesting experience. I crashed my motorcycle into a car. It wasn't very fun.

I was riding on the shoulder of the road, a common practice among motorcyclists in Kenya going around 70kph. A car passed by on the road to my right, when suddenly the car slowed down and began drifting into my lane and turned right in front of me. I slammed my brakes and tried to slow down as best I could, but to no avail I could not slow down fast enough. I hit the front corner of the car and flew across the hood hitting the left side of my body on the ground. This is where the story gets interesting.

I jumped up with more adrenaline rushing through my veins than I have ever experienced, took my helmet, off threw it onto the ground, and began yelling at the driver. I lost total control. I yelled obscenities at the man and asked why the fuck he didn't use his turn signal or use his mirrors. The man exclaimed that I should not have overtaken him on the left side of the car and that it was my fault. Within a minute or two a crowd had gathered. I picked up my bike and thankfully it started. The rear brake pedal was bent completely out to where it was perpendicular with the bike and the metal bar that connected the pedal with the actual break was rubbing against my tire and making a terrible sound. People began looking the bike over. Many hands where touching parts on my bike. An older woman showed up and started yelling at random people. She had a large rock in her hand and was threatening to hit random people, people that had nothing to do with what just happened. She began touching my bags on my bike and I, still in my state of adrenaline fueled rage, yelled at her to get her fucking hands off my shit. She did. At some point I calmed myself down and talked with the driver and asked if he called the police. He hadn't and I apologised to him and said let's not call them. He said that because he was a born again Christian he wouldn't. Thank God for the colonizer's religion. I shook his hand and the hand of the passenger and the crisis was at bay. I then felt my leg which was beginning to hurt to make sure I didn't have a tib or fib poking out. I did exactly what I learned people do in such cases and exactly what you should not do. They have adrenaline pumping and are in a state o confusion and shock. They get out of their totaled cars and walk without realizing they have a broken ankle. Thankfully in my case I didn't. I walked away with a few bruises and a scraped up knee and no incident with police where bribes would have certainly taken place with the officer and likely the driver of the vehicle.

My bike was rideable, but just barely. I rode about 40kph to Kisumu, the nearest town about 15 km away, where I went immediately to the boxer shop to have the damaged assessed. There was surprisingly little damage. There were guys outside the shop, one of which looked at my bike and told me to buy a new brake lever and he would fix it for 200 shillings, or about 2 bucks. I bought the part for 1000 shillings and he got to work. He started pounding metal parts back into place with a hammer only too have two of those parts break, the bar that the break lever slides onto and the foot peg that you rest your foot on when you ride. He had me follow him around the corner to a welder who put a couple spot welds on the parts. We went back to the shop to find out that the break lever wouldn't fit back on the metal peg because the spot weld prevented it from sliding all the way back in place. Back to the welding shop. The welder attempted to grind the spot weld downg but couldn't get the large grinder to fit into where he needed. He then resorted to grinding the break lever I just bought down enough to fit it on the peg. It worked. That's African ingenuity for you. Back at the Boxer shop the guy, mechanic I guess you can call him, finished getting the break hooked up. The bike was back to workable order within an hour of arriving at the shop and cost no more than 20 dollars.

As slow as most things take in Africa, this was incredible. A shop in the US would have not only cost at least 10 times that it would have taken at least a whole day to get your bike back, maybe more depending on where you were in line with other vehicles. One of the racks on my bike is still bent and the engine guard is bent, but the guard did its job because other than the bent bars and two bend foot pegs, you can't tell the bike has been wrecked. When I go to sell it I will bend the engine guard back by hand and call it a day. That is, as long as I have no more incidents. I learned some lessons and am going to be more cautious and attempt to anticipate incidents before they happen. I may have been able to anticipate the driver was about to break and in the future I will assume the worst. A motorcyclist barely has more rights than pedestrians and people in Africa drive like absolute morons. Riding safely on this continent necessitates those two nuggets of truth.

We left Rusinga and rode the 11 hours and 450 km back to Nairobi where we expected our visas to be waiting. 450 km is a long way to ride in one day on 150cc bikes. As is the life in an African village, travelling on bikes is slow going, especially for us as we seem to get lost easily. Again, on the way back to Nairobi we got off track. And since neither of us have smart phones (I lost mine while in Rusinga as well as another nice jacket and a pair of riding gloves) it is much more difficult for us to stay on track. We do however have a tablet where the map is usually accessable offline. The issue with that is that it is much less accessable than a smart phone and we look at it less. During a break from riding, which are necessary to heal our backsides and keep from losing sanity, we pulled the tablet out and discovered we had missed our turn to stay on the intended road. Fortunately I remember seeing this route on the map and it only added around 40km to our journey so we deecided to press on. The new route stayed in the cooler Kenyan highlands much longer and offered a much more picturesque ride with lots of large pine trees, healthy cattle and vast tea plantatioons. Getting lost is the price you pay for freedom from the reliance on public transportation. One that Matt and I glady accept.