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Monday, November 29, 2010

ALCOHOL CHRONICLES; THE NAKURU PILGRIMAGE

ALCOHOL CHRONICLES; THE NAKURU PILGRIMAGE
Months before this blog was born, my fraternity went on a pilgrimage to the Rift Valley town of Nakuru. There’s something about this town that makes it an ideal place for the annual, or monthly campus pilgrimage. It has something the city can’t offer, anonymity and cheap raves. The planning was as meticulous as a plan by men can get, beer, money, house, transport and rave points were marked and thoroughly researched (Who needs Google maps or foursquare). Let me save you the work of sorting out the hundreds of inboxes that were exchanged on face book among four guys (and yes, I still think its gay for guys to inbox, unless it’s something top secret and illegal).
So that dark Friday evening we met outside Ukwala, conveniently, because its one of the few supermarkets in town that still stocks alcohol( On your Face New ALCOHOL BILL), once inside we went on a shopping spree in one aisle, moving from brandy to gin to vodka to rum doing the only math that a campus guy can do after the exam, minimizing expenditure and maximizing effect. In this am a proponent of vodka and rum, the former being specifically KIBAO for low income beggars and starters, but I was rolling with people who consider themselves high rollers(sad, because they were getting the money from m-pesa, mum sent?), and we ended up buying alcohol that can not even disinfect a scratch, but when no one else was looking, I sneaked in a bottle of KIBAO vodka and we queued and paid.
A few minutes later and we were seated in a shuttle headed to the Rift Valley, to, as the Swahilis call it ‘kula anasa’. Sad as it was, the mat was a sad affair because it was full of old women coming from I don’t know where on a Friday night, and when John, eldest member of the squad, decided it was as good a time as any to do a few shots of vodka, and the whole mat started smelling like a bar(the smell of tires and burning fuel made it smell more like a strip club, if you catch my drift).You could see the disgusted look on the women’s faces, the frowns, and the thirsty look in the men’s eyes(there were only like two other guys in the mat).One 750ml of HUNTERS CHOICE fulfilled its life’s mission there, even before the matatu reached Soko Mjinga( Someone is feeling genius for having need it that?), which is about 55minutes from the city. Riley wanted us to start on the Napoleon (and am putting it out there that I don’t do brandies any more, it has impotence issues/effects, I hear, and it tastes like coal and rotting watermelons.)but everyone else thought it would be too much, and we still needed to find our way to the house, whose location no one but John knew, and you cant get the guide drunk(you can actually, but this if you don’t mind ending up in someone else’s house and having dogs released on you).By the time we got to Naivasha I had discovered the cure for motion sickness I have been seeking for so long, alcohol! Somewhere between Naivasha and Nakuru, the brandy was downed, and I think everyone in the mat got high by association.

The matatu ‘touched down’ in Nakuru town at around 10:15 p.m, all four of us were slightly tipsy by then, but the night was just beginning, and there was a lot that could still go wrong9 Four men, booze, strange town, do the math). The first thing that hits you when you get to Kenya’s fourth most developed town is the number of tuk tuks, they are so many that the probability of getting hit by one is slightly lower that finding a virgin in a strip club. But you get to appreciate them when you start moving around town and you discover that they offer the most convenient means of transport within town and its outskirts.
After debating on whether to go raving or not,we voted to find the house first and the plan for the night,so we boarded a tuk and by some cruel trick I hadn’t really foreseen, I ended up sitting at the front with the rider, and my three buddies squeezed at the back. The maneuvering within town is just plain madness, especially if you are sitted at the front because things seem a bit different there. We got out of town smoothly though, but we counted our chicks too fast. The house that would host four men for the next to days is an apartment in a small town called Shabbab, around 10mins away on a tuk tuk but the weather is a bit unpredictable and as the gods of the skies would have it, it had rained a few hours earlier and the road was pretty messed up, and if that wasn’t enough, we were stopped by cops, apparently(and life is indeed a learning process)it is against the traffic code for a tuk tuk to carry more than 4 people including the rider and it is even worse if the ‘excess person’( Don’t they teach grammar at Kiganjo?),in this case yours truly, to sit with the rider. If you go to campus in the city or anywhere around it you know cops hate us, and they think anyone who schools in Nairobi or anywhere close to there is as rich as Dangote, and as generous as Mary Magdalene(Go figure!).Suffice to say that we feigned innocence and the rider ended up paying the 150bob he earned from providing his services to us as a bribe to the cop, and he let us go, (cheap bastard!)But then again, this is Kenya.
We got to the house and didn’t even explore it. We stocked the fridge and started planning our weekend, and once we had located the kitchen and the glasses (the fridge is in the living room, small place); we sat and started the ritual. Two 750mls of 40% alcohol later and everyone was now high and happy and the weirdness started when, at around 4:30, Sam (the last of the Fraternity you haven’t met yet) started doing borderline gay things. It is an unspoken rule among men drinking squads that everyone has their day to get silly, I had had mine some weeks prior(ssshhhh, the walls have wiki leaks) and this day was Sam’s by default, and his ‘object of obsession’ was Riley. He started chasing him around, nagging him and like I said some sentences back, borderline gay stuff (gross! gross! gross! give him some Napoleon?).So we dragged him to bed and left him there, and had the gods of throwing up not invaded his alcohol induced stubbornness, he would not have woken up again, I still have photos of him lying on the washroom floor (I would really love to post them, but I have a to-do-list for the future so..) looking like those drunks you see when you go to shagz just high and sleeping so peacefully on the roadside.



(Day2 next blog post)