An interesting journey through northern Kenya up to Ethiopia

And by interesting I really mean long, dusty and very frustrating. We got stuck in Nairobi for a while fixing the Landcruiser. After we took it in to Toyota in Nariobi for a service, the messed up so many things that we spent the next week trying to repair the damage they had done. Anyway we finally left for the long road north. The road is good for the first 300kms or so up past Mt Kenya to Isiolo and then turns into a really nasty corrugated nightmare. It is nothing like the roads we were going through in Cameroon which were deep mud, but was almost more uncomfortable because the corrugations are quite large. Once we past Archer's Post (which we learnt is where the shifta - or Rendile bandit - territory starts) our right rear shock came off. After a quick call back to Footloose in the UK, we tied it back on. We carried on rather tentatively and by nightfall crawled into Marsabit where we replaced the shock. We left Marsabit early the next morning and carried on up to Turbi where apparently it gets more dangerous and where we had to take a police escort. This was provided at some expense, and given there hasn't been any trouble since 2005 (when admittedly 90 people were massacred by Ethiopian cattle thieves) it seemed the police escort was more to do with padding their pension funds than protecting us. On the way up to the border at Moyale our replacement shock bust its seal and started leaking oil so we slowed down and didn't crawl up to the border until late in the day, but we were delighted to be there. The road from Moyale north to Addis Ababa is perfect, so we could relax. This feeling raplidly faded once we learnt that we couldn't get a visa at the border (despite getting both the US and UK embassies to call them to beg for us), and so couldn't get into Ethiopia without going the whole way back to Nairobi to get our visa there, which in turn was a problem since our vehicle was in no state to go back over the corrugations. After a moment of questioning how we could have been so dumb to head out there without a visa when our book (which we hadn't read) clearly states you can't get a visa at the border, we formed a plan of action. We headed to the first place in Moyale where one can buy a beer, which happens to be the Prison Canteen, conveniently located right next to the prison. Over a few calming beers we hired a driver with his own Landcruiser to drive us back to Nairobi. Mohammed was his name, and he was a fanatical Muslim, intent on converting us to Islam. Soon after he started preaching I decided to ride in the back of the van leaving Wendy to learn exactly which aspects of her life are haram (which seems to mean immoral) and to learn from her new teacher how a second wife is a great way of stopping prostitution. Mohammed in another life was also a race driver. He took us the whole way from Moyale to Nairobi in 15 hair-raising hours. We did it in three days. The visa took 10 minutes and another 15 crazy hours later and a huge number of dollars poorer we were back at the border. Next time we will read the book