Moyale, Kenya | 4 May, 2007 | $2.26 (my share of a 2-bed room)
While in Addis I met someone who wanted to travel together along the long, rough overland route to Ethiopia. Folks, don’t do it! It is not worth the hassle and discomfort unless you have your own car. If I could go back in time I would have bought the connecting flight from Cairo> Nairobi with a one month layover in Ethiopia. Looking back, riding in the back of a cage through bandit run countryside for 24 hours is a great story but it was a breaking point for me. It didn’t help that my travel partner abandoned me at the Kenyan border.
The Ethiopian side of the border is much more developed but we needed to catch a ride first thing in the morning and didn’t want to risk missing the police caravan. When I asked for a shower I was taken to the roof, given a bucket and pointed toward a spigot and outhouse. Once I was inside and undressed in the pitch black shack a man walked onto the roof and started his evening prayers ten feet away. I felt pretty awkward but he thankfully left before I finished scrubbing the layer of orange dust from my skin.
2 responses to “Where I Slept: Moyale, Kenya”
oh man… the trip from ethiopia to nairobi is definitely brutal. heh, sounds like yours was way worse than mine even.. i cant imagine being in a cage, unable to move for hours! what a nightmare. we were “lucky” enough to take the bus. such a hellish 2 day journey. it was especially awesome when we stopped for lunch and one of the passengers tells us that this is the town where the massacre happened two weeks ago. oh, and the other awesome thing that happened was that my girlfriend had to pee in the middle of the night. all the other passengers were asleep, and the cab of the bus, where the driver was, was separated from the passenger area, so we had no way of getting ahold of him. when she started feeling desperate to stop, she had to start yelling at the top of her lungs, waking everybody on the bus, in order to get the bus to stop. everyone looked at her like she was crazy.
There was a few guys in a 4×4 leaving with the police escort and I talked to them about getting a ride. They totally had room but were obviously not wanting to be inconvenienced. I told them I’d come back if the bus didn’t work out. Once I discovered the bus wasn’t running they had already left. Even worse, we passed them when I was in the back of the cage and they were out of the car, taking pictures and having fun. It was miserable.
Your girlfriend’s situation sounds about right. We only stopped once for the bathroom—about dinner time in a town. We didn’t stop for lunch.
People in Eastern Africa are nice, and coming from Ethiopia where people didn’t speak English but were super friendly, I was shocked at how mean my fellow passengers were to me.
Did people try to stop you? People told me it was a rough trip but I didn’t think it would be that bad. I like traveling by land but in this circumstance I don’t think it was worthwhile at all.