Leap: An African Adventure

By Sarah Alitis

Sarah Alitis is disenchanted with her stationary existence in Colorado. Longing to hit the road and explore her own limits, she alienates her loved ones by choosing to travel solo in East Africa for three months. But her plans to go it alone are derailed in Nairobi when she meets Heath, a South African traveler on a motorcycle. Forming an instant friendship, the two set off together on the bike to journey through the mountains, forests, savannas and canyons of Africa. Along the way they encounter a wide range of food, wildlife, road conditions, and people - some dangerous, some hilarious, all interesting.

But two months into the trip, Sarah is still feeling lost and unfulfilled, so she makes the leap to leave Heath's easy company and test her mettle on her own. It doesn't take long for her solo misadventures to come to a head, and she gets what she was looking for: an opportunity to push her limits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Alitis
• Release date: Jul 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476062006

Sarah Alitis

A wanderlustin' Colorado girl, currently based in Fort Collins. Most recent trip: on motorcycle to Panama. Next trip: through Europe and Asia on motorcycle in pursuit of my favorite adventurer/explorer from the 1930's (can't give it away just yet).

Book preview

Leap

An African Adventure

By Sarah Alitis

Copyright 2012 Sarah Alitis

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Map

Prologue:

Fort Collins, Colorado 2007

The Only Way to Be

Chapter 1: Nairobi, Kenya

Chapter 2: Naivasha, Kenya

Chapter 3: Western Kenya

Chapter 4: Central Kenya

Momentum

Chapter 5: Eastern Uganda

Chapter 6: Western and Southern Uganda

Ain’t Got Wings

Chapter 7: Lake Victoria, Tanzania

Chapter 8: The Tanzanian Coast

Chapter 9: Moshi, Tanzania

Chapter 10: North-Central Tanzania

Full Circle

Chapter 11: Mount Kenya

Chapter 12: Lake Magadi, Kenya

About the Author

Map of the author's travels in East Africa

Dedicated to Heath.

Thank you for the adventures.

Prologue

February 2006, Fort Collins, Colorado

My finger hovered over the computer mouse, frozen in space. What a simple little act it would be to press down on the button, to click the icon on the screen, to be done with it. Such a seemingly easy task, and yet my finger wouldn’t so much as twitch. It felt like my hand wasn’t mine, like the whole thing was frozen, wooden, dead.

The hesitation made sense—the small motion would signify a big move. I’d been watching airfares for months; the lowest prices came and went last week, and now they were on their way up. I was twenty-one years old, surviving on a college waitressing budget, and I couldn’t afford the extra costs. I had to act now or risk losing hundreds of dollars. Act now, I said. Now.

Nothing.

Sighing, I released the mouse and turned to look out the second story window next to my desk. I usually loved Fort Collins, a college city with old town charm, but in the February gloom it looked far from perfect. The wet pavement shone black against depressing, slushy snow. The massive oaks that lined the streets, trees brought in from the moist east coast climate and cajoled into growing in a semi-arid plains city, were leafless and dreary. The spruces and pines were still green, though, cradling small pillows of snow in their sturdy branches. The scene was pretty enough, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to see. I wanted acacias and baobabs. I wanted equatorial sun and air I could bake in. I wanted Africa.

But no one else wanted me there, and that was certainly a large part of the hesitation. The opposition I was facing from friends and family was intense. I knew they were just scared for me, that they were worried, and that I should be touched. But I was a woman (or trying to be) with big plans to head off alone into Africa, a la Karen Blixen, a la Mary Kingsly! A little loving support instead of loving opposition would have been nice. Instead, my roommates kept looking at me like I was dying from cancer, my mom refused to smile around me, or even look me in the eye, and I hadn’t spoken to my dad in months. And I resented them all for it. I resented the hell out of them. Poisonous thoughts during what was supposed to be a happy moment.

I looked back at the screen. Was it stupid, what I was about to do? Yes, yes it was. It was beyond stupid, it was sheer idiocy. I was spending all my money and alienating my loved ones to embark alone on an aimless ramble around a rather unpredictable region of the third world, and I couldn’t even answer the simple question of why I was doing it. I couldn’t explain to anyone, myself included, that I had to go. It wasn’t a decision I was making, there wasn’t really a choice. It was simply something I had to do. And I had no idea why. Try explaining that one to your mom.

What I did know what that I was unhappy that winter, very discontented and restless. If nothing else, Africa would solve that little problem.

In my heart I already knew I was going, but my index finger was still doubtful. I resituated my hand on the mouse, but still the finger wouldn’t budge. The curser hovered over the innocuous gray icon: BUY TICKET.

Then I felt my stomach sink in that reassuring way, the way it did when I went for broke and let sheer will power and momentum steer my life, back-burnering the logic and thoughtfulness that often ruled. The way it did when I made a decision—and I don’t go back on my decisions.

With one more glance at the icy streets of Fort Collin my finger pressed down with thrilling determination, bringing forth a satisfying click, a small sound that launched me into the adventure of a lifetime.

The Only Way to Be

Kenya

Chapter 1

Nairobi, Kenya

When I was a kid, airports were fun and exciting places, on par with malls, playgrounds and restaurants. I always associated airports with happy times: family reunions in upstate New York, or visiting a childhood friend in her new home in Montana. As I grew up, my positive associations with airports diminished. One year before this story, when I was twenty years old, I had to board a plane heading home to Colorado after three months of hitch-hiking solo around New Zealand. I hadn’t wanted to go home, and I loathed the airport and everyone in it for tearing me away from the paradise I had found, away from the contentment that had settled in my heart in that beautiful country. After that, I never thought of an airport in the same happy way. No longer just the symbol of happy vacations and childhood fun, it was now also the symbol of blissful times prematurely ended, of painful goodbyes.

My departure for Africa reinforced my darkened opinion of airports. It was difficult facing my mom as she choked back tears of fear and frustration. The levee let loose when we hugged goodbye, but still I squared my shoulders in defiance, holding my ground against the outpouring of emotion that made me feel like such a terrible person. It called to mind the conversation I’d had with her months earlier, when I’d told her about my plans. Well, it wasn’t exactly a conversation so much as the opening punches in a six-month long fight.

Hey, Mom, I figured out what I want to do this summer! I’m going to Africa! By myself! Smile.

No you’re not. No smile, maybe a little terror in the eyes?

Oh… Smile faltered. Well…huh.

My wonderful mother, in a full panic about my impending trip to Africa, did everything in her power to prevent me from going, just short of locking me in the basement. Tears, fights, yelling, silence, hugging, threats, pleas…and now, despite the guilt that racked me for the three months of sleeplessness and stress I was about to submit her to, I was feeling proud of myself for standing strong in the face of opposition. In the face of such love.

It was time to board my plane. Noticing that my shirt was wet with her tears, I gave her one last hug and promised to write her whenever I had access to internet. Then I squared my shoulders and walked away from my mom and her tears, alone down the long, gray hallway to my gate.

God, I felt like such a jerk. I was a bad, bad daughter.

I shook my head to rid myself of the feelings, to deny them room in my mind. And with their absence, the old familiar feelings of Independence and Courageous Strength were able to take over. Just like that, just that quickly, they began to course through my veins. They pumped from my quickly-beating heart, plunged into the nervous pit of my stomach, and shot out my fingertips like beams of divine light. They collected in the soles of my feet and sent shivers up my sides. They were feelings I hadn’t entertained since New Zealand, and by god did they ever feel good. They made me feel like I could do this trip and come out the other end of it just fine, and that was a feeling I needed.

In the back of my mind I knew those feelings made me different from all the people around me. Better, even. Vain as that sentiment was, it didn’t feel remotely wrong. After all, travel at its core is an egotistical and self-serving venture—the traveler travels for herself and no one else, so she can see the world, so she can have an adventure, so she can come home with stories of the distant world. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, and the ego-boost felt good. My stride lengthened and a glint shone in my eye.

At last, after two years of stationary living, I was on the road again.

The flight was long—a nine-hour leg to London, a nine-hour layover in the airport, and a further nine hours to Nairobi. Time passed slowly, painfully so. But how could I be bothered by the molasses-like quality of time when every passing second, every mile whooshing by under the wings of the silver jet-liner, brought me that much closer to Africa? I thought about the explorers and travelers of the past, and how their trips took weeks by ship, being tossed over waves, stewing in the stink of their cabin-mates’ vomit. I was grateful to not have to travel that way, but also a little envious of those intrepid men and women, and their indomitable spirits.

Before leaving for Africa, I’d read Martin Dugard’s Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone, and learned all about the terrible conditions Livingstone lived through during his explorations of East Africa. Hunger, malaria, dysentery, infection, smallpox, leeches and subcutaneous, flesh-eating maggots assailed him and his crew. We have had precious hard times, he wrote in 1867. I would not complain if it had not been for gnawing hunger for many a day, and our bones sticking through as if they would burst our skin. He lost his front teeth from gnawing on unripened ears of corn, and dropped a quarter of his body weight in one week from dysentery; even the animals they traveled with came down with dysentery and died.

It wasn’t even until the 1880’s that the link between mosquitoes and malaria was known. And those who came down with malaria treated it with huge doses of quinine, either chugging it straight from a bottle—often resulting in stomach illness—or injecting it, which could lead to death by pulmonary edema. The most popular drink in British East Africa was gin and tonic, since tonic water contained small amounts of quinine, and worked as preventative medicine. For myself, I was taking a modern prophylactic, doxycycline, every morning before breakfast. With any luck, the nauseating pills would help me stave off malaria while in Africa.

On the last leg of my journey, I ordered a glass of red wine to help me sleep, and curled up with the thin airplane blanket, so useless yet so comforting. My thoughts were restless, bouncing around in my head with the nervous energy of a caged falcon. I had absolutely no plans upon arrival in Nairobi. All I had was a round trip ticket through Nairobi, the Lonely Planet Guide to Trekking East Africa, and ten weeks to explore a small corner of a large and diverse continent. But that was how I had planned the trip to be: unpredictable, maybe a little dangerous, just enough to keep me on my toes without killing me. I was pretty sure I was a tough and capable girl, but that conclusion was drawn from twenty-one years of soft upper-middle class American living. How I fared on this trip would be the real proof.

Eventually the soporific effects of the wine kicked in and I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. I awoke just once, in the middle of the night. The cabin was dark and silent and still, and the smooth hum of the plane engines was the only sound to be heard. I peered out my window onto the backs of clouds shimmering silver and blue under a full moon. A break in the clouds suddenly appeared below me, and all I could see through the gaping hole was deep blackness—The Dark Continent. My stomach lurched in a mixture of fear and excitement. The hole disappeared behind the plane, and I leaned back in my seat to fall back asleep with a smile on my lips.

At eight o’clock in the morning the plane touched down at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, capital of Kenya. I was practically quivering in my seat as we taxied down the runway, catching glimpses out the window of savannah grasses and the trees that are so distinctly African, the spindly umbrella-like acacias I’d only ever seen in movies. Those trees are what brought home for me the realization that I had made it, after all. I was on the other side of the world, in Africa, and already I was the happiest I’d been in months.

Ads for vacation packages and safari tours sing the praises of Nairobi, claiming that it’s cosmopolitan, diverse, exciting and beautiful. Photos of the city generally focus on the gleaming skyline, which looks tall and shiny enough to belong in downtown Denver.

Don’t be fooled by these advertisements. Nairobi is one the most crime-infested, slum ridden, dangerous rat holes on the face of the planet.

Panning out from the modern skyline, one quickly grasps what the city is really about. The new image reveals the shoddy cement and plywood buildings that surround the one square block of modernized skyscrapers, and the gritty congested streets that connect dozens of slums. One figures out that Nairobi is a whole different world than any Western city.

The name of the city comes from a Massai phrase meaning place of cool waters. That name used to apply to a nearby water hole. Nowadays, the only way Nairobi is associated with cool water is when someone is walking down one of the dusty streets craving just that, and has nowhere to get it. In 1899, the railway connecting the coastal town of Mombasa to interior Uganda was constructed, and Nairobi became a depot on the line. Because of its relatively high elevation, it quickly became popular: the cool climate meant no mosquitoes, which meant no malaria. Unfortunately, the city’s redeeming features end there.

As the little depot grew, it became the capital of Kenya under the British Empire. After Kenyan independence in 1963, the economy went down the tubes, and impoverished Kenyans from all over the country flocked to the big city. The infrastructure, abandoned by the English and taken over by Kenyans, couldn’t keep up with the booming urban population. Of the three million citizens of Nairobi, nearly half now live in slums that cover a mere five percent of the city’s land. And as if three million people weren’t enough to deal with, the population is predicted to reach five million by the year 2015.

Power cuts and water shortages characterize the city these days. Oh, and one other thing: crime. Commonly called Nairobbery by tourists and expats, the capital of Kenya is known as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and it only seems to be getting worse. A few years ago its safety rating was downgraded from B to C, making it worse off than Beirut and Bogota. And the city’s police force, one of the most corrupt forces in the world, is only facilitating it.

There is no good reason to like Nairobi, and certainly no reason to linger and explore. If you do, the only things that will improve are your odds of getting mugged or having your car high jacked. And yet, despite its danger and grime, or maybe because of it, I fell in love with Nairobi as soon as I stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac.

I don’t think my jaw closed once during the taxi ride to my hostel. Everywhere I looked there was something new to see. The streets were the most insane I had ever witnessed: three lanes of traffic packed onto a two-lane road, with scores of cyclists, motorbikers and pedestrians weaving nonchalantly in between the moving cars. I passed a tree full of White Ibises, and another full of Marabou Storks, those hulking, four-foot tall birds that look like hunched over panhandlers on street corners in New York City. I drove past a large contingent of camouflaged soldiers carrying assault rifles; I waved at them, and they, to my childish delight, waved back. Looking around, I wasn’t sure what I had gotten myself into, but I knew that it would be an adventure, and that was all that mattered to me.

My hostel was in the Upper Hill district, at the summit of the namesake hill itself. The grounds were secure behind a rusty, dented metal gate and a high, vine-covered wall. Four mutts ran rampant on the grounds, one of which was tame enough to pet. More dogs hung around outside the gates, hopeful for scraps from tourists—we’re a sappy bunch, suckers for a good set of puppy eyes. The proprietress, a charming and quiet African woman, greeted me with a kiss on the cheek and a warm smile, and invited me to pitch my tent in the back yard between lines of drying laundry. A few travelers, all older than myself and all paired off with friends or significant others, sat in the restaurant, reading travel guides and looking at maps. More sat in the garden drinking beers, or walked out through the gates into the city beyond.

Still running off of new-arrival adrenaline, I energetically set up my tent and unpacked my stuff. After that, though, there was nothing specific to do, no tasks, and I felt the energy drain out of me in an instant. Succumbing to the warmth of the day, I stretched out in my tent, taking a moment to chill out, collect my thoughts and regain some energy. It was so easy to just lie there in my tent, basking in the dry heat and listening to the birds chirp in the trees. What a difference from winter in Colorado! It made me giggle just to think about it. Relaxed and happy, I wanted to rest for hours, to sleep and process the day. But my mind was far too active, and it was whispering to me a warning: If you get too comfortable in gated tourist communities like this, you’ll never get out and see the real deal. It was telling me that I had to undertake my first daunting task in Africa: an independent exploration of the City Center. And I had to do it now.

While the downtown area of Nairobi is the safest place in the city, it is still a very dangerous place. It’s one of those places that are alright by day, and deadly by night. Even during the day a person can never feel truly safe: taxis are high jacked regularly, cameras are stolen through windows, and pickpockets are rife. With all the lawlessness, the thought of venturing down into the smog and dust by myself honestly terrified me. But I was determined to throw myself right into the thick of things, to break down that initial wall of fear that can be so debilitating to someone stepping out on their own for the first time.

I knew just how incapacitating that fear could be. I clearly remembered how scared I was on the eve of my solo adventure in New Zealand. I was nineteen years old, in an airplane somewhere over the Tasman Sea on my way to Christchurch. The flight was practically empty, so I had the entire rear half of the plane to myself. I was stretched out over three seats with my face in a square of sunlight shining through a window when Fear suddenly broadsided me, and I started sobbing. For weeks I had been convincing myself that solo was the way to go, that I would have a better time that way than I would with a group of people I probably wouldn’t get along with anyway—but the emptiness of that plane got to me. I was just so unsure of myself, so scared that I didn’t have what it took to fully immerse myself in the moment like I’d always wanted to be able to do.

My fears proved legitimate. Over the next few weeks I hardly took any personal risks. I traveled by thumb, meeting some terrific people along the way, but almost every night without fail, I would retire to my hostel room to read a book, write in my journal, and fall