Indiana Jones and the Riders of the Loose Car

After a luxurious breakfast at the Methodist Guest House in Nairobi where Mike and I have been staying for the past two nights, we were picked up by Faustin and Salome in a taxi headed for the bus station. Today's 8-hour bus ride marks part one of a four part exposé on the inner dealings of the Easy Coach line from Nairobi to Western Kenya. It's a trip I'll be forced to enjoy three more times during my stay in Kenya. It's the same trip I likened two years ago to 8 hours of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. I was told that it would not be like that this time, but I wasn't holding my breath.

The bus extravaganza began at the Easy Coach station, where they pulled an old fashioned shell game on us. Except instead of hiding a pea under one of three cups, they hid our luggage in one of three busses. We watched them load our luggage onto the bus headed to Bungoma, and then went to stand in line. Apparently, in the time it took for us to turn around and get in line for our bus, they moved one bus out, and backed our real bus into its place behind a third bus, and it wasn't until we were all about to step onto a bus to somewhere else that we discovered that we weren't in line for the proper bus. Of course this meant that we needed to ensure that our luggage was indeed headed where we were, and amazingly enough, they had it right. Pretty impressive sleight-of-bus if you ask me. After three Easy Coach employees asked me to take their picture and two of them tried to either buy or steal my monkey, we were under way.

You're probably wondering about my previous statement. I should have included Marvin the Missions Monkey in my cast of characters, but he was misbehaving at the time of my last post, so I had chosen not to give him the attention he wanted. Marvin is the representative of the Granada Heights Friends Church missions department, and I am his caretaker on this the first of what will surely be many travels to many distant lands. Someday, he'll have more mileage under his belt than that monkey the Russians launched into space, and with the added bonus of not being dead. He's quite adorable, and he knows it, which accounts for both his poor behavior, and his appeal to random (and unexpectedly bold) Easy Coach employees. Back to the bus ride.

For two-thirds of the ride, it seemed as though the promise of smooth sailing would ring true. Most of the road repair that was going on then has been completed, meaning that we spent much less time on dirt side-roads. This cut down immensely on the indianajonesness of the ride, but the ride wasn't over. We made our final rest stop in Eldoret, two hours from our final destination. After 10 minutes for a quick bathroom and snack break, we were called back to the bus, and the driver took off. One problem. Faustin had gone off to do whatever Faustin goes off to do during 10 minute rest stops, and no, there's nothing to read into there; Faustin often heads off to accomplish things while the rest of us are snacking and relieving ourselves. I'm sure he had accomplished 30 minutes of... accomplishments... when he was heading back to the bus, but the problem was that he wasn't physically on the bus when the bus took off. He wasn't emotionally, mentally, socially, or spiritually on the bus either. Mike and Salome put up quite a fuss, and we pulled over to let him on.

After Eldoret, the final two or three hours were still maddeningly bumpy. Between the absurd frequency of rather invasive speed bumps, the smart-car-sized potholes, and the unevenly laid asphalt (as if hastily glopped on by Lightning McQueen himself), there was almost no space between the bone-jarring bumps. Every part of the bus was squeaking or clanging, producing a cacophonous concerto of chaos, nay, a reverberating raucous rhapsody of ridiculous rattles that's as annoying as an avalanche of asinine alliteration. Either some poor sap needs to tighten every loose bolt and screw in the entire vehicle, or the whole thing needs to be dipped into a vat of WD-40. At one point, Mike pointed out how amazing it was that the bus was still intact. A small miracle indeed. Probably on par with that water-into-wine parlor trick. Without prompting from me, he also likened the ride to Indiana Jones, adding significant support to my analogy. Until this point, I had been entertaining myself by taking pictures out the window (yes, I took pictures out the window for 6 hours), but the funny thing about taking pictures is that you have to be able to hold the camera still enough to know what you're taking a picture of, let alone to get a focused exposure. So I decided to switch to reading. The funny thing about reading is that you have to be able to hold the book still enough to distinguish the words on the page from one another. So I decided to switch to sitting. I knew from experience that attempting to nap would result in the collision of my head with the window, so I didn't try that. Once safe in Bungoma, we stepped off, feeling as though we were still vibrating, as you may continue to feel the sway of the ocean after stepping off a cruise ship, but not so pleasant, and without the fond memories of just having been on a cruise.