The Day Off

We took Sunday the 22nd off in part because, well, we needed a day off at some point. The other part because it was my colleague Rafa's birthday. He wanted to go out to the Rift Valley for a hike through a park called Hell's Gate and I was not one to argue with that.

We stopped at the grocery store for sandwich makings and headed a few hours out of Nairobi. It was my first time out of the city and the vastness of the Great Rift was even more majestic than I had romanticized in my mind, along with thoughts of roaming beasts and the dawn of mankind.

Carlos, our driver+translator+fixer extraordinaire had hired Rasto, the same guide he and Rafa had last year when they did this hike. He is a Masaai man who both went to school and spent four years in the bush, so he had a unique perspective on the clash of cultures going on in his country. Here he is telling us about the various clans in his tribe while standing right before the entrance to the Devil's Bedroom, the end of a long canyon we climbed through.

Rasto had a wealth of knowledge about the area having lived in it his whole life, as his father and father's father and so on and so forth since the beginning of humanity. My favorite story started the Monday before we arrived, when a little girl from Sweden asked him if he had ever seen snow. He had not, there had never been snow in the area. He gave her and her family and tour and they left on their way, only to be followed by a storm that brought, can you imagine, snow! The first ever! Hah!

The park has been home to Masaai's long before it was a park and the tribe has been moved a number of times to make space for steam plants that drill down into the earth to harvest the geothermal energy. They were loud and very scary places where it felt like you were hearing the rumble of the depths of the earth's core from miles away. Rasto assured us they were well compensated for their moves, but that it had seriously disrupted their nomadic shepherding ways of life.

We had planned to go to Pride Rock with a potential reenactment of The Lion King, however our climbs through the canyons were slow, sometimes sideways, often through a few feet of murky water and once a 8 foot jump down a steep wall. It was very Indiana Jones, which I had been watching last week while I was sick, so I was totally digging it (even with pitifully low energy levels). Actually, Tomb Raider was filmed there, although I couldn't find a still of it because they made the whole thing look like Cambodia.

I had an interesting conversation with Rasto about education, money and culture. I asked him if it was possible to have all three. He said in his experience you can have education and money (I said lots of people have that in the US) or money and culture (he said some people have that in Kenya), but you can't have education and culture. He agreed that like the US, in Kenya sometimes people get their education, earn their money and come back to attempt to reconnect with their culture. It reminded me that culture really is an education. They are one and the same - we simply have a culture of Western schooling rather than, for example, ancient land-based tradition. Which is also the case for his newborn son, who his wife (from another tribe that doesn't go into the bush like the Masaai) had in January. He said his people were some of the last to get Western style education, which began for them in the 90s, while other tribes began as early as the 40s in Kenya (which, coincidentally, I had learned in my pre-travel research was the beginnings of daycare in the country). It gets my imagination running wild, thinking of what our country might be like if we were just now watching native culture crumble, rather than having decimated it a few hundred years ago!