Hilary’s Travels

Today I traveled through the stunning countryside north of Nairobi in a hired cab.

Climbing up out of the city, one passes roadside vendors selling bananas, cabbages, lambskins and trinkets. Donkeys start to show up as a mode of transport. The fields are fresh and green. My first view of the rift valley was breathtaking. At the edge of the escarpment, the land drops away in two giant shelves, the bottom of the valley thousands of feet below. In the distance sits black Mount Logan, an ancient volcano and reminder of the Rift Valley’s violent origin.

Cutting across north of Nairobi heading east I passed through villages busy with woman hauling baskets suspended from their foreheads, men painfully wheeling carts with enormous loads of sisal grass fodder, children steering wheelbarrows, donkeys laboring under giant cargos, goats trotting about alertly. I passed tea plantations the low bushes stretching out in neat rows across the hills. Lower down and markedly warmer, coffee plantations appear. I whizzed past spectacular blooming trees with giant orange flowers, gently mauve Jacaranda trees, handsome lone Cedars. Further on and lower still, the vegetation is dryer, more yellow and space.

I visited the bustling vegetable market in Thika, filled with pyramids of potatoes and tomatoes and hills of cabbages, carpets of pineapples. Women in colorful skirts bartered and gossiped. A stick-lean young woman with black horse teeth wearing a black covering on her head vivaciously chatted with me in Kiswahili. Men waved and clowned for my camera.

On to Del Monte pineapple plantation, 6000 acres of pineapples stretching as far as the eye could see. In the middle sat the factory where pineapples are canned and juiced. Neat little suburbs of houses outlined by hedges surround the factory, a sharply hierarchical world of supervisors houses separated from lower middle managers houses separated from middle managers.

Outside the Del Monte plantation, about a mile along the road are the slums where the fruit pickers and planters eek out a living, denied a regular job or benefits with the classification of “seasonal worker”, even through the season is year round.

I visited the Blue Posts Hotel where two rivers converge, from two different watersheds, each descending past the hotel with a waterfall, now red with eroded soil and much reduced in volume due to deforestation and urbanization. A wedding reception was underway, the bride and groom promenading across the grounds, the guests seated with a view of the African band warming up.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 12:48 am and is filed under Kenya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.