Going Down River Road
I feel fortunate to have survived River Road in Nairobi, Kenya, during the summer of 1991. The street was filled with homeless children, as dusty and dirty as the surroundings, alongside hustlers, sex workers, drunks, and rough bars that no sane person would dare to visit. River Road had it all, and I dove in headfirst before eventually escaping to the vast emptiness of the North Eastern Province.
Ethiopia
While visiting the North Eastern Province, I found myself in Ethiopia, just after the Ethiopian Civil War of 1974 to 1991, which lasted from 1974 to 1991, had ended. Instead of encountering a proper border post, I was met by heavily armed young men who took me in for interrogation as a suspected spy. After hours of arguing, I was released thanks to the intervention of an older Ethiopian man, who invited me to enjoy Ethiopian coffee. I can’t help but wonder if those young men 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 (meteorite craters) all by myself, unaccompanied. This was before tourism had really taken off. In four weeks, I didn’t see another traveler, except for a white nun in a Land Rover, likely doing some Christian fieldwork. At the time, I barely had a travel guide, and most pages had to be torn out for use as toilet paper. Years later, I looked up the craters near Marasabit and learned that the area was teeming with wildlife, including lions. Although I had been warned about elephants and was frantically on the lookout for fresh elephant dung, nobody in the village mentioned the presence of lions.
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