The Great Run XII, Part II

Last week we had the first part of the 12th Great Run adventure and instead of narrating how things went, I might have ended up doing snap reviews of four cars, one of them brand new. Here is the second part and we will dwell more on how the two days panned out and how a charity drive turned into a car-hopping exercise.

Why I used four cars

Even-numbered Great Runs have always been off-road jaunts ever since the legendary Amir Mohamed, The Paji, stretched our driving limits by having us cross large distances through tan dust during the fourth event four years ago.

Now, I don’t own an SUV (yet), so options for participating are limited to either leasing one (very expensive but doable) or bumming lifts from fellow runners (very imposing but doable as well) in their own cars. This being the hellish year it has been meant cash flow difficulties were a clear and present problem. Leasing was out of the question. I would have to wangle my way into someone else’s car.

I started off in the white Pajero because, why not? The driver is my friend and he was alone. So I offered my company and navigational skills and he was amenable to the arrangement.

However, for reasons that are not important to this story, he had to head back to Nairobi after the Amboseli section, which left me standing by the road scouring the landscape for my next victim, and I found him in a brand new Fortuner. It’s a seven- seater and the occupants were fewer than seven, so:
“Got seats?”
“Yea, sure”
And I was in like Flynn.

Third car was the 80 Series Landcruiser at the beginning of Day 2, mostly because I had made acquaintances with its driver the previous night over post-dinner nightcaps and wanted to solidify the new connection further. This is what I tell myself, because the real reason I was in the 80 Series is that I was actually meant to go in my lawyer’s Range Rover but he had happened upon some carless freeloaders like myself as well and thus his car was occupied.

I finished up in the Classic because this was the vehicle I was supposed to use from the very beginning anyway; that was the initial plan but as I said last week, plans change. So now that we are up to speed on why I went from car to car, let us see what the roads looked like.

Champagne Ridge: The middle of nowhere

This was what I will call Off-road Sector 1, an unappealing landscape defined by black clay soil, sparse yellow grass and leaf-bare acacia trees. It is the scene of one of the country’s best upcoming 4WD trials, called the Champagne 4X4 Challenge.

The place is called Kipeto and there are two ways of accessing it: follow the Namanga Road up to Isinya and turn right into the dirt road, or do it like the Great Run and drive down to Kiserian and past it in the Magadi direction, then hang a quick left at Kona Baridi and struggle with the lunar road-scape from that point on.

And struggle you will, if you want to make any headway. The first half of this sector is properly rugged and almost tripped my lawyer’s Range Rover right before my eyes. The latter half, closer to Isinya, opens up and flattens out somewhat, but the hazards shift from the previously almost intractable surface to random humps, puddles and of course, livestock. This would be a good beginner’s proving ground for those who live in and around the city and want to flex their SUV-driving muscles lightly.

In the current dry season it might not offer much of a challenge, but once the rains come that clay soil turns into quagmire; black muck that can suck your tyres and throw your day out of whack when you are well and truly stuck. I intend to come back here when it is wetter. Should be better...

Namanga-Meshanani: Rumble, bumble and stumble

Let’s call this Off-Road Sector 2, and easily the worst of them all. It was a nightmare tackling it during the recce and full disclosure: I was not looking forward to driving through here again. While the general layout is not entirely dissimilar to the arrow-straight Yankee off-road pastime that is baja (or what they call “pre-running”), the road surface is what will nail the inept and claim the unwary.

Current grading by some heavy machinery meant the surface initially was smoother than I left it earlier; a bit too smooth to be honest. The diggers churned up the soil and spread it out, which meant we were driving on a cushion of fresh murram, which felt nicely pillowy and nebulous – until we realised it also meant there was no grip to speak of.

The vehicle started disregarding steering inputs and introduced yaw into the driving dynamics, while braking took much longer distances than anticipated. It made the present tense and for a nervous drive, a circumstance not helped by the fact that we had about 30 vehicles ahead of us, each throwing up the loose soil and creating a curtain of dust that sometimes became thick enough to chew.

This is where my driver put the hammer down and decided that perhaps being at the front of the pack would be a lot more comfortable than ingesting soil into the air intake of his well-used diesel engine. This is where the overtaking started.

We carved our way through roughly a quarter of the starting field before reaching the ungraded section of this road and what was previously a tribulation transformed into an outright nightmare. Rill erosion. Ruts. Rumbles. Dips. Suspension. Air. Thumps. Air again. Yaw. Gnashing of teeth. Clunking of shock absorbers. Rattling of doors. Scuttle shake like you can’t believe.

I came dangerously close to asking myself why I even bothered to leave my house at all that morning when I clearly knew this lay ahead. And then relief: we had reached the Meshanani Gate of Amboseli National Park.

The “Amboseli-seli” sand pan

Off-Road Sector 3: the most epic of them all by a dusty mile, and also the most captivating. Geographers will tell you of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans in the northeastern Botswana section of the Kalahari Desert but we have our own knock-off sandbox in the form of a flat featureless plateau that is eerily reminiscent of a dried-up lake bed without the smooth rocks. The real Makgadikgadi might be larger than Switzerland, but ours is the size of an average ward. No biggie, it works.

This sector started immediately after crossing the gate where the driver of a hired tour van (part of the Great Run as well) said he knew “a much better road” than the one I had drawn up and took a hard right into a plateau. I don’t know what he meant by “road” because the only road here was the tyre tracks left by the vehicle ahead.

It didn’t take long for people to become tired of driving in each others’ dusty wakes (again!) and as soon as we discovered this, some of us took liberties and started forging our own paths across the tabletop landscape. At certain points we ran five wide in what I can only describe as a re-enactment of a Mad Max film.

I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe the feeling as you look across the vast, white emptiness of the Amboseli only to see a flotilla of Landcruisers, Pajeros, Hilux double-cabs and Volkswagen Touaregs ploughing forward, five abreast, on a charge to nowhere – since only the tour van driver knew which way we were heading after laying waste to my best laid post-recce planning right at the park gate.

It didn’t matter. We were War Boys, he was the Imperator, and we were having a dust-coated replay of our favourite movie scenes in our rigs but like all good things, it had to end. Amboseli is only so big and that dust pan does not even constitute the entirety of the park. We exited at Kimana and I had to bid adios to my TT-winning driver as he headed back to the city.

Kimana-Chyulu: Are we there yet?

Coming after Meshanani and Amboseli, this was the last leg of the day. It was a test of patience, not because it was particularly difficult, but because it came at the end of the day and we couldn’t wait to reach our respective evening quarters to freshen up and unwind. It was not as easy as we assumed it would be, especially not after the violent tedium of Meshanani or the exciting dust charge of the Amboseli plain. We were running out of energy reserves.

The challenge with this leg of the run is not the road quality (varies between narrow and slightly bumpy, and wide and smooth – and combinations thereof) but the distances involved. From the tarmac to the Chyulu Gate is 68 km and if you arrive there not well organised, the park services could easily send you back the way you came. The issue here is that cellular phone reception is sketchy at best, and nonexistent at worst, which makes things tricky when trying to make payments using mobile phone functionalities (M-Pesa).

This is a step up from a few years ago, when the only acceptable payment method was the use of a Safari Card; no cash is accepted. Those who had no cards had to drive back the whole way and look for them at Amboseli.
Well, the use of M-Pesa might have eased things a bit, but the park gate here is quite literally the bottom of a geographical bowl because the place is ringed by the famous Chyulu Hills.

Electromagnetic waves just sail overhead, cleanly missing the desperately searching internal antennae of contemporary smartphones, which might explain what you see in the picture (right). Those are not enraptured people overawed by the beauty of the scenery and reaching to the sky in supplication to the creator; they are grown men trying to find a signal and complete a transaction. We stopped here for quite some time, grabbing whatever snippets of RF waves that happened to tickle the nearest device.

From the Chyulu gate it is another 30km before you reach habitable grounds — having driven past the spot where I was half-digested by a hyena last year — the habitable grounds being the first of many markers indicating what section of Tsavo West National Park lies in which direction.

Finding Ngulla

Finding Ngulia

After what seemed like an interminable drive we finally came to one of the numerous direction markers that typify junctions within the country’s national parks. To the right was Serena Kilaguni, two kilometres. Hope for the weary and the heavy of pocket. The rest of us were shacked up at Ngulia, which was... straight on, 35 kilometres. What?

It was an anthropological exercise watching the faces of all Ngulia dwellers as they reached the spot and read the signs. Two kilometres to Kilaguni would brighten up a face (“Ngulia cannot be much further”) before the countenance fell several inches as they saw the 35, then a clenched jaw and steely resolve would become evident in their eyes.

They would invariably shift their vehicles back into gear, internally psych themselves up (“Right. Let’s do this. Can’t turn back anyway”) and then proceed. There was relief at the end, in the form of a lodge, but that relief was hard-earned. We almost got lost and headed to the wrong Ngulia (bandas, instead of lodge) but many discussions and one leopard sighting later, we finally got there, right at dusk. As far as Great Runs go, this was quite an event.

Conclusion

The Great Run has always been many things. First and foremost, it is about charity, doing good, giving back, sharing the happiness and spreading the love. This was a byproduct of its initial raison d’être: lovers of travel getting together to embark on a massive road trip.

If you love driving, you will enjoy The Great Run. There was the option of picking one very long route and repeating it year on year, but there is no fun in that, which brings us to aspect number 3: tourism... local tourism to be exact.

Addendum
Last week I might have referred to the diesel Pajero as a V6, when in fact, it is not. It is has an inline four, codenamed 4M40. My apologies for the error.