A perfect adventure feat. matatus, flamingoes, and soda ash
A few months ago, my girlfriend and I wanted some adventure. Our idea was to hop on a matatu going out of town, and see what we could find.
We have a friend named Lin. One time Lin’s wife sent him to go buy a car, and he came back with a camel (1). Later the camel was stolen by bandits, but he recovered it. He seemed like a perfect person to get adventure advice from.
He said this place called Magadi was pretty cool. The stars are beautiful there and there are flamingoes. Perfect.
“So Magadi is a town?” I asked.
“No it’s a factory". Lin replied.
I didn’t really know what he meant by that so decided to ignore it.
Height difficulties on first leg
On Saturday morning it took us 15 seconds to find a matatu. 40 cents to go the 16km to Ngong Town. It was a packed 16-seater van, and the ceiling was super low.
The second leg was similarly straightforward. You just get out of the bus, announce to the air “We are going to Kiserian town”, and someone materializes and says “50 bob, leaving right now, come.”
So far this was way too easy.
For our third leg, we wanted to stop for lunch at a place Lin had vaguely described to us as “a kibanda with a great view of the Rift Valley.” Our best guess was this was at a place called “Corner Baridi” on Google maps.
Unfortunately, a matatu hawker told us that big busses don’t drop people there. Our best bet was “go down to that corner, and turn right. Find the silver Toyota. It can take you.”
View from the trunk
We couldn’t find the one he meant because there were 5 silver Toyotas at that corner, but we eventually found a car that ran a regular route past Corner Baridi. For 200 shillings ($2) we could sit in the trunk and then hop out at Corner Baridi.
We didn’t end up finding the kibanda Lin mentioned, but we did find a kind of kitschy hotel/resort restaurant. There seemed to be far too many staff working per patron - including two staff who just stood in uniform, on the highway shoulder outside the gate of the hotel. But on the bright side they had great hats.
Jia: That’s a lot of meat for one person
Waitress: Is it?
Lunch was an excessive amount of goat meat for Jia, and some chapatis for me. As we left we realized that the corollary to “buses don’t drop people at Corner Baridi” was “buses don’t pick people up from Corner Baridi.” Finally a little bit of a challenge.
Through a combination of walking and riding on the back of a motorcycle, we found ourselves in a town called Kisamis.
Kisamis’s best quality is that it was just two rows of shops, and felt like a town from a Western. Its second best quality is Dan, a guy with a car, who agreed to take us all the way to Magadi, as long as he could first take us 15km back to Kiserian and have us sit around for 1 hour there. Sounded perfect.
Crammed into the front seat of Dan’s car, we made our way to Magadi. Three adults were crammed in the back, and the trunk was full of flour he was getting paid to drop off at a small town on the way.
As we got close to Magadi, Dan asked us where we were going to stay. “Oh, we’re just going to find a hotel.”
“There are no hotels in Magadi.” Dan said, with more concern in his voice than he really needed to have for his two stupid mzungu passengers who deserved whatever they had coming to them.
We got a little worried, but we could see the lights Magadi in the darkness in the distance. There were a lot of them. “Any town with that many lights has to have a hotel.” I reassured Jia. Turns out, those were factory lights, not town lights, because Magadi is a factory.
What first tipped us off should have been Lin explicitly telling us that. What ended up tipping us off was the sign that said “Tata Chemical Limited” at the security gate to Magadi factory (2).
Through methods unclear to me, Dan talked his way through security and drove us to the guest house (fortunately for us, there was a guest house). There was a janitor who said we could stay there for ksh 1,500 (about $15) for the night.
Lodging for guests - expected or otherwise - at Magadi factory in case anyone is planning a visit
“Is there any restaurant we can eat?” we asked.
“No.” he said.
“We need to have some dinner - is there nothing?”
“I can get you food from the bar".”
“Oh can we just go to the bar?”
“No".
“Can we walk anywhere outside the confines of our room and this 5x15m dirt courtyard which is surrounded by a concrete wall?”
“No. You stay here.”
We were getting the sense that we weren’t supposed to be here, and an even stronger sense that Tata Chemical Limited wouldn’t see a shilling of the 1.5k we were paying.
In any case, we had a room to stay in. He got us some chapatis and beer that we ate with the leftover goat.
The next morning Dan picked us up early and said he could take us to see the flamingoes for $15. He drove us out the exact road we came in on, pulled the car over at the side of the road and said “There. Go look at the flamingoes”.
We looked at the flamingoes. They were beautiful. We wondered why they were always in such big flocks. We talked about how they turn pink from eating shrimp. We lamented that it was hard to get a good picture since they were so far away. All of this took about 5 minutes. Then we hopped in the car and headed back to Kiserian.
We passed a herd of goats on our way back - Dan said they were his goats, and that he was Maasai and he lived nearby and did we want to stop to see his house? We said we would love to.
His house was about 1km from the main road, and there was no road to get there. Luckily roads are a construct of human perception which need not be trifled with by the likes of Dan and his sedan.
I was worried that we would be offensive / awkward - two foreigners going to see how some Maasai people lived. Luckily, we were able to strike a mutual unspoken agreement - they got to see the (to them) unusual sight of two mzungus in the middle of the country (3), and we got to see the (to us) unusual sight of a manyatta (4).
Our final matatu home was a true nganya - a poppin’ party matatu, covered inside and out with paintings of Harley Quinn, and playing 2010-era bangers.
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All in, the trip was about 30 hours. We toured the countryside, talked to a bunch of interesting people, saw soda ash and flamingoes, learned to validate the existence of hotels before planning travel, and were back before noon on Sunday.
We were going to take a matatu to lunch in Nairobi, but ended up deciding that Ubering was way easier.
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1. A camel is cheaper than a car
2. Lake Magadi is rich in soda ash, which as we learned, is used in making lots of things like glass, soap powders, and paper
3. Earlier in the trip, a couple high school kids were very amused to see us walking on the side of the road so far from any city and asked to take a picture with us
4. Some very true facts we learned about the Maasai from a very reliable website aimed at Chinese tourists:
Maasai eyesight is 3x better than 20/20 vision
Maasais can jump 5 ft. in the air
The average height of Maasai women is 6’1”