At the park, we were told that we could hire a care for KSH1500 or if we brought our own car, it would cost KSH300. ken had said that he could drive us to ruma on Tuesday, so we decided to save the money and wait till then. That was a mistake.
The rest of the day was spent at gerald’s home in homa bay. Gerald’s cousin showed us his pink guava trees. They weren’t quite ripe, but we tasted some of the early fruit. The second one i took had a translucent grub on the opposite side of my entrance bite. I didn’t see it until i had eaten all the way through the fruit, but i did see it in time to not eat it. That took away my appetite for more guava.
I was pretty hungry by the time lunch rolled around. Gerald’s stepmom had cooked chicken (the most expensive meat, traditionally given to visitors). When she brought in the pot, the lid was crawling with black specks. I thought they were flies, since the hut supported a heavy fly population, but when i waved my hand over the lid, they didn’t fly away. Then i realized they were adolescent roaches—maybe 10-20 of them—running frantically over the lid and the handle. Gerald thumped the table a couple of times, and the roaches all fell away from the pot to skitter under the table. I don’t think any of them managed to get anywhere near the chicken…my guess was that the lid was placed on the ground while the chicken was cooking, where it collected the roaches, but i was still pretty grossed out. I mean, i know the feeling was small and unworthy, but i have a thing about roaches…even more than the thing i have about most spiders. I wouldn’t call it a phobia yet, but they make me extremely uncomfortable. If i see one, i think they’re everywhere, and that they will swarm me and lay eggs on me. One of my greatest fears is suffocating under a mound of cockroaches. I guess it’s more paranoia than anything else. Anyways, i tried really hard to put the roaches out of mind, but for the rest of the visit, i was pretty constantly swatting at my feet or brushing off my pants. Obnoxious behavior...I hope they didn’t notice me too much.
Other than that, the chicken was delicious. Gerald gave me the heart and a leg, and he took the head. I really like heart—the way it chews and tears against my teeth. My mom used to make it when i was a kid, but i haven’t had it in ages. I was very impressed with erika—she not only tried a bit of the heart, she also voluntarily took the claw. I watched her pull out each toenail before gnawing on the knuckles. Way to go mzungu !
I guess a lot of this trip is about finding boundaries and pushing them. After that visit to gerald’s, i started noticing cockroaches everywhere : in the squatter at night, on the floor of daniel’s hut, even on the table with the free tea and coffee at the backpacker’s hostel in jinja. I’m getting better at swallowing my discomfort. I’m trying not to see them so much. It’s stupid of me to be more worried about roaches than mosquitos. Roaches don’t carry diseases and they don’t bite. This is a resolution : no more silliness ! plus, there’s nothing i can do about it anyways. No sense in fretting.
We left gerald’s family to go into homa bay town. It was definitely bigger than mbita, but not any cleaner or more impressive. If mbita has maybe 3 streets of shabby shops and dirty roads, then homa bay has 10. also, i was rudely swiped by a dirty, staggering man as he passed me. He looked like he was gonna pass on the left, but at the last second, he switched directions, walked across me and ran his hand roughly across my stomach. I really wanted to run after him and punch him in the nose. What a jerk ! maybe this incident colors my views of homa bay, but i did not come to africa to see cities or towns. Gerald then took us to a nicer hotel sporting an expansive lawn with paper mache giraffes and lions. It was nice to sip my black currant fanta out of a glass bottle, unmolested by insects, but i don’t think we were suitably impressed by the building. Gerald likes to show us nicer houses or hotels…i guess the way we might show someone the empire state building or the chrysler tower…and i think he’s confused when we would rather look at hippos or monkeys or lake birds, the way we are when tourists are more fascinated with the pigeons and squirrels.
Despite gerald’s best efforts to pass the matatus and buses that kicked up clouds of dust, we still acquired red streaks of dirt on our faces by the time we got home. I was very happy for that trip to end so that i could give my bruised bum a rest. We would try again for ruma on Tuesday.
Monday night, ken and his friend come home at 10pm for dinner. Erika and i wait up for him to discuss details for Tuesday’s journey. We want to go early so we can catch the animals in the morning, when they are most active. Ken’s friend keeps us up till 11pm, talking about kenya’s political problems and the good that they’re doing to fix them. Interesting stuff, but neither of us can keep our eyes open. We cut the conversation short, and ask ken what time we can leave in the morning—ideally, it’d be around 7 so we can hit the park by 8. ken wants to leave at 10. turns out, he promised some woman that he’d give her a ride to her boarding school, and she needed to do some shopping in a neighboring town, so he figured he’d just kill 2 birds with 1 stone and drive us to the park afterwards. I wish we had known that beforehand. We would’ve gone on our own on Sunday. Plus, we needed to get back into mbita by 4pm so i could pick up my lariam from the clinic and run a couple of other errands before we left on Wednesday. i felt let down, grumpy, and sleepy. Not a good combo. Since we were at an impasse, ken decides to call gerald (at midnight) to get him to rent another motorbike for the morning, to take us to ruma, without him, to hire the car for KSH1500. at this point, ken is coming off as pretty inconsiderate (both to us and to gerald), but at least the issue is resolved.
The next morning, gerald shows up a bit late. Understandably, he’s grumpy, and we’re still a little chafed from the lack of sleep and the unexpected change of plans (and did i mention that to hire a motorbike for a day costs KSH700, plus KSH300 in gas—not a TON of money, but in the 2 weeks to date, we’d only spent around KSH7000 each, which includes the transportation from nairobi, so in comparison, it seemed like a lot). All the bad feelings evaporated as soon as we hit the road. I love the smell of motorcycles in the morning.
When we get to ruma, they tell us that hiring a car would cost at least KSH4500. they won’t budge at all on it. apparently, on Sunday, the boss was in nairobi, so the underlyings were gonna drive us around on the sly and split the proceeds. On Tuesday, the boss was back from his trip, and we were screwed. Even finding out this bit of info took an hour of arguing back and forth, them talking to gerald in luo, gerald translating to us, us arguing back in english, them responding back to gerald, etc etc. can we say frustrating? (can we scream it ?)
We weren’t willing to spend the cash to see herd animals (ruma is the only park that has the roan antelope), so we call ken in the hopes that he’s now done with the boarding school girl’s errands. By 1pm, we meet ken at some town, down a yogurt each for lunch, and drive to ruma’s public access road. We see some giraffes in the distance, which is mildly exciting, but they’re pretty far away (btw, the swahili word for giraffe is twigga, which i think is much more appropriate for the animal than the english). I fall asleep. When i wake up, we’re in some small town and the car’s broken down. We spend 4 hours trying to fix the clutch with bits of rubbish from the side of the road. In the interim, we are harassed by an outgoing girl and her toy razorblade. We were friendly for the first hour or two, but by the end, i just wanted her to stop reaching into the car and trying to touch us. The razorblade was dull, but i still didn’t want her scraping it down my hair. Ditto for the empty bottle of brake fluid that she kept dropping into the car via the open window. Not a fun game. At this point, it was obvious that i wouldn’t get back to mbita in time for errands. Let’s use some adjectives : grouchy, dirty, disappointed, hot. When ken turned to us, waved a hand and said, « come » in a very imperious way and then expected us to pay the mechanic who had failed to fix the car, i had just about had it. luckily, erika is better at playing bad cop, and she told him straight out that we weren’t going to pay. I ended up giving him the money anyways (only KSH100), but he got the idea. We ended up towing the car to the local police station and riding home in the back of a truck, covered by a canvas tarp, packed in with 4 other ppl and a truckload of sugarcane, bananas, printing paper, etc. the other passengers seemed to enjoy the ride, laughing carelessly while cracking jokes about HIV (i think they worked at a testing center or something), but the heat, the road, and the constant smell of gasoline got to erika and me. We both had to boot out of the back of the truck at some point. As far as booting goes, it was one of my more comfortable experiences—purely fluid so it came up smooth, no stomach acid to burn the throat, the wind and the speed of the truck to pull it away from the face, and a convenient metal bar to pressure the gut. Overshare ?
Wednesday morning, instead of taking the 7am ferry like we had planned, we took the 10am to give me time for errands. As we were packing, we noticed that our energy bars had disappeared. We suspect that sullivan had stolen them since a grownup would’ve taken our money instead. Erika found a couple of powerbar wrappers in the bushes behind our hut. We told daniel and ken, but i’m not sure what will happen to sully. They spoil him pretty bad, so i think they’re inclined to believe him innocent and not punish him at all. he’s the pampered baby of the family, and cries if he doesn’t get what he wants…like food that stella is eating (she’s the 7 yr old aids orphan that takes care of him), or toys that aren’t for him. Oh well, energy bars can be replaced with chocolate bars, and he’s not our kid, so what do we care if he grows up right. Plus, a couple more hours, and we were away !
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