Go Speedracer, Goooo!

James. Where do I begin with James. James was my tour guide in Kenya. For six days he drove us around in a minivan, or three minivans actually, as he kept destroying the vehicles with his "pedal to the metal" driving philosophy.

I suppose first I should try to explain the condition of the roads here - they're horrendous! Huge deep ruts, steep shoulder drop offs, bridges that are blown out in sections, and where there is paving, there are numerous enormous potholes. All this, and my point of reference is the rough & bumpy streets of poor ol' DC!

From the start of the trip, James' strategy was to just slam it and ram the minivan as quickly as possible along the treacherous paths. This worked for about an hour, and then we apparently had torn a hold in the radiator. So for the next couple of hours we'd stop every 20 minutes or so to collect water from whatever mud puddle we could find on the side of the road, and pour it into the radiator. Finally, at one stop, someone from the other van (who had to stop and wait for us each time) suggested we crack raw eggs into the radiator (that guy, Chris, was henceforth knows as MacGyver in my mind!). So we bought 3 eggs from the nearest Maasai village, and cracked them in (whites only). Sure enough, the eggs cooked and sealed the leak...for about 30 minutes, but after enough bumps and hits, they too came loose, and we were back on the side of the road with a smoking engine. At this point, the drivers collapsed all 12 passengers into the one good van, so with the driver we were 13!!!! And with so much weight in one car, it wasn't long before we hit a sketchy patch of road, began fishtailing between rivets, and almost flipped on one side before crashing down in one of the deep rivets. We were so deep and stuck that we couldn't even get the doors open, so we had to climb out the windows as Peter, the other driver, hit the gas with our wheels just spinning & spinning and the bottom of the van stuck, grounded on the top of the rivet. The guys all sacrificed their clean clothes and pushed from the back of the van until it was free & moving again. And by this time, we'd amassed a huge crowd from the nearby Maasai village who just watched and grinned. This was all on day one as we drove to Maasai Mara!

The next day we had a new vehicle for our game drives in the Maasai Mara Reserve, so we assumed all would be well. But then James decided to ignore all the signs about staying on the paths, and when we saw a cheetah, we were off into the fields of the Mara! We got great shots of the cheetah, but given how much rain there'd been, we also got ourselves bogged in the mud. Again, we were spinning & spinning our tires to no avail... So my fellow passenger, John, got out and he & James went around collecting sticks and such to put under our wheels for traction -- all this on a nature reserve filled with wild animals - the cheetah was even still in sight! John's wife was ready to kill him! Funny stuff!

The business of getting stuck, getting tossed around, getting bruised, breaking vans, etc. continued each day we were with James. Toward the end it was just amusing & expected.

James told us that "James" is his baptised Christian name, and that his birth name is Swahili for "bull." I think he's doing a fine job fulfilling the connotations of his birth name!

Mere