I feel lucky to have survived River Road, Nairobi, Kenya in the summer of 1991. Homeless kids as dusty and dirty as the street itself, hustlers, whores, drunks and rough bars no sane person would visit. River Road had it all and I dived in with both stupid feet before escaping to the North Eastern Province and its vast emptiness.

Ethiopia

When visiting the North Eastern Province I ended up in Ethiopia where the Ethiopian Civil War of 1974 to 1991 had just ended. Instead of a border post there were heavily armed youngsters who took me away for interrogation as a suspected spy. After hours of arguing, and the intervention of an older Ethiopian man, I was released and invited for Ethiopian coffee. I wonder if the youngsters with machine guns and hand grenades were members of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.

All negatives were lost when the Boeing 747 crashed into my house, so no visuals apart from a scene from Les Éthiopiques by Hugo Pratt.

North Eastern Province, Kenya

The stupidest thing I probably did was walk from Marasabit to one of the gofs (meteoric craters) all by myself unaccompanied. This was before tourism was a thing. In four weeks time I didn’t see another traveller expect a white nun in a Land Rover probably doing some Christian fieldwork. At the time I barely had a travel guide, and most pages I had to tear out to use as toilet paper. Years later I looked up the craters near Marasabit and learned the area was teaming with wildlife including lions. I was warned about elephants so I was frantically looking out for fresh elephant dung. Nobody in the village mentioned lions.

Lindsey Nicholson - Flickr: The big and empty Marsabit road

I also visited Wajir, a dusty town in the middle of nowhere mainly inhabited by Somali’s. The arial photo shows how remote Wajir is.

Alex Maisuradze - Own work. CC BY-SA 3.0