Mt. going, going...Elgon

After leaving Kisumu, Barry and I caught a matatu to the town of Kitale, which would serve as the base for our ascent of Mt. Elgon, a 4300 metre peak located on the Ugandan boarder. Unfortunately the residents of Kitale and the park rangers at Mt. Elgon did not seem to share our vision. Kitale was a rough and tumble town that had a real old west, frontier sort of feeling about it. I was only in town 2 minutes when someone had stolen the hiking shoes off my back, not an ideal start to a 5 day death march in the high alpine. The machine gun-toting guards at each store did nothing to alter our impressions of this town.

Once the disappointment of losing my shoes had passed we set out to find me new footwear. Our efforts to find my recently "liberated" shoes for sale in the local market were a failure, but we did find a shop selling piles of pre-owned shoes from Canada. Twenty minutes of digging through the various mounds resulted in my purchasing a pair of half decent leather hiking boots that seemed to fit me well.


With my new shoes in hand we set off for the park gates at Mt. Elgon, but not before engaging in an animated round of negotiations with the local taxi drivers over the fare. We arrived at the gates bright and early with our 25 kg packs in tow only to be told by the ranger that we were not permitted to climb his mountain. Barry used his best interrogation skills to extract the reasoning behind this unfortunate turn of events. Alas all we could extract from the man was some vague excuse about security. However, he did kindly inform us that we were more than welcome to use a 4x4 to reach the top. No reasons were offered as to why this was a more acceptable option. In the end we managed to convince him to let us camp at the nearest campsite and visit the Kitum cave. This cave is world famous for the frequent visits by elephants who mine salt from the walls to supplement their diets. Unfortunately we did not see any elephants here, but we were visited by a curious troop of baboons. Between protecting our food and camping gear from our new visitors and worrying about a potential elephant stampede/leopard attack in the middle of the night we came up with an alternate plan for the next few days. The verdict: The Cherangani hills.