Buses, boats, bikes and... some guy who picked us up

Finally, Lake Victoria.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29
In the downtown Nairobi bus station waiting room before dawn the main attraction is a 15-inch television hung in the corner tuned to the morning news. Your choices are look at TV, sleep or stare at your neighbors, most who look weary an hour before the bus even arrives. It's eerily silent, which is a little unsettling as you sit there alone hoping the bus to Kisumu announcement won't be made only in Swahili and leave you stranded. But at least you can hear the newscaster clearly.

In newspaper newsrooms we have a snide perception that television anchors really are just pretty faces that simply go on air and read the news we work hard to research and print. In Kenya, I learned that morning, it's completely true. The anchor stood at a podium, unfolded his newspaper and just started reading out loud. And he wasn't just scanning headlines and interpreting the stories, he was reading them, word for word, including the jumps, and must have spent half an hour making his way through the A section. He even found the editorial cartoon and read that.

That's funny to me as a newspaper journalist, but as a traveler it was a reminder of the patience that permeates Kenyan life. We paid enough attention to catch the Akhambra bus that morning, and settled in for the six-hour drive west. Other than the stretches of road construction and the descent from the Rift Valley that left us breathing the scent of burning brake pads for three hours, it wasn't too bad. (The eight-hour return trip on Akhambra was a different story. Just wait until they get my Yelp review.)

The Rift Valley drive-by of a tea farm.

From Kisumu it's another 90 minutes by car to Luanda Koiteno, where you catch the Mbita ferry, which leaves four times a day on a 45-minute ride to the Mbita causeway, a man-made road of 50 yards or so that connects to Rusinga Island. Then another 20 or 30 minutes in a car (if you're driving, no taxis on this side) or piki piki motorcycle (these are in place of taxis).

No shortage of piki piki for the evening commute.

Rusinga is the end of the line, and wasn't an easy place to get to. So it was nice of Prof. Walgio Orwa, Theodora's older brother, who lives in Kisumu, to give us a lift and save us the trouble of putting those big bags of soccer boots on the piki piki.

Timm and Orwa find their "seats" on the Mbita ferry.

I'm interested in journalism, like I mentioned above, but since I live in Bremerton I also like ferries. So the Mbita ride was one of my favorite experiences. (And they were even down a vessel, so it felt just like home.)

Here's how it works, in case any WSF captains are reading: The boat pulls in to a dirt bank that is the "terminal," and lowers its ramp. The exchange of coming/going passengers occurs simultaneously. You push through and find a bench or a wall to lean against, and then they squeeze on sacks of produce or fish, and the cars. Four is the limit, though on one ride the captain was talked into (or bribed into) cramming a fifth on board. See him work his parking magic below:

Full boat!

All this for 100 shillings per ride, maybe less if you help carry sacks.

On the return trip we didn't have Orwa, so we took the piki piki to the boat. We were advised to ask around to see if any of the cars on board were going to Kisumu, to save the trouble of having to wait for a matatu (taxi) once we landed on the other side. Our friend Ochieng asked around for us in the waiting line, but there were no takers.

So Timm and I enjoyed the ride over, speculating at length about the science and morality behind Lake Victoria's tremendous algae problem. Like I said earlier in this post, we were developing some skill in killing time. As we got close to land the captain found us, and motioned that we follow him. There were many times Kenyans spoke to us and we had no idea what was going on, so we learned to play along. This was one of those times.

The captain had, without our knowledge or request, negotiated a ride to Kisumu. We felt a little on the spot given his effort, so without much thought we threw our bags in the trunk of a little white Nissan and hopped in. We said hello to "Dan," and, well, didn't say another word. No problem, still seemed like a good deal.

Except Dan pulled over and stopped soon after we drove off the ferry. This was another one of those "we have no idea what's going on" times, though slightly more ominous because of Dan's reserved nature. A minute later three men Dan apparently knew, or brokered similar carpooling deals with, joined me in the back seat. Four of us crammed back there, none of the three speaking or even really looking at either Timm or I, and some kind of crude spear (I'm serious) pointing toward my midsection from the front seat's passenger side.

You'd think that would be surreal enough for the story. But this blog is better than that. "Dan" then turned off his Swahili radio program and put on a tape of an American reading a motivational self-help book. So we sat there for the next 90 minutes, cramped and wordless as we barreled through the countryside, listening to this white man's deep baritone tell our silent carload the stories of Horatio Alger and Warren Buffet, reminding us that we, too, can achieve anything we want in this world. All I wanted was to get out of the car safely, so I put my mind to that.

It's anticlimactic to add in the part about Dan's car getting a flat tire, because that potential catastrophe was averted with incredible swiftness. The notion of Kenya patience I started this blog post with does not apply to this kind of task. Four Kenyans had that tire changed like we were in a NASCAR pit, and Dan took us the rest of the way, dropping us wordlessly in downtown Kisumu.

That's where, of course, we waited 40 minutes for our next ride to show up.