The most remote place of my life

So far I killed 5 spiders - and an uncountable amount of termites - I do not believe in reincarnation 🙃. I felt something slowly moving on my shoulder, and it was a beetle. I just push it away, somewhere far in one of the corners of my room. Ah, actually in my room there are no corners: I am sleeping in a circular hut tonight, and after all the journey it seems the walls are spinning around me...

I believe I am in Tamugh, a small village enclaved in the mountains of West Pokot, north west of Kenya. We arrived here in the evening, so now I am just imagining the scenario which will be in front of me tomorrow, when the sunlight will come. 

I think this is the most remote place I have ever been in my life. My German friend invited me to Pokot many times, and this is the one I actually accepted to come. He always described this place as very poor, very isolated,  very much into the mountains. Despite the description would turn up to be accurated, coming here was very surprising. 

We leave Eldoret midday, all the way along to Kitale, then Kipenguria. Here we meet the family which will host us in Tamugh, where my friend is supporting some water projects. In Kapenguria, these people are doing definitely too much shopping. I should have suspected something... in my mind I thought "are we going for an expedition?", but I also thought "oh, Kenya is so developed, with all the rural areas connected to electricity and 4g signal". 

I should have trust my German friend - also, why could I even thought not to trust a German? 😄

When we leave the main road, and take the muddy,  not cemented one, I am still far from perceiving how long still is the way to Tamugh.

The scenario is very much Kenyan: green, very green. Muddy, very muddy. A rural area, with few houses scattered here and there. Bushes, trees, and some people popping out of the bushes and walking at the edges of the road. The vegetation takes over to everything else. 

The road is actually quite large, as some Chinese companies are building bridges and putting asfalt on it. But proceeding, it becomes more and more narrow. More and more rocky, full of bumps and so uneven. The rains, just started, are carving the surface of the road so badly, creating big fractures and holes on it. Luckily, we are on a big old dear Land Rover. My friend is driving fast, confident. I wonder how. 

The landscape start changing. Mountains start appearing in all directions. Lots of mountains, layers of mountains. One after the other. Green, edgy, with the weirdest shapes. They seem to create an impenetrable scenography.  I cant believe we are actually going to cross them, to delve so deeply in the vegetation. But so we do. The road starts going up, very steeply. I am sick of bumps and jumps, but what's worst is that the road becomes very exposed in one side, with a very steep edge in one side. Going further in the forest, we have to cross some rivers. This place is becoming too far even for Chineses to be able to build bridges. It could actually become very dangerous to cross these streams during the rains, but today the water level is low, so we are fine. I am losing my sight in the mountains, in the nature, in the landscape surrounding me with its greeness from each side. I am familiar to mountains, but this is breaking my paradigms. I grew up in a valley, were mountains were in the left and in the right. Not in the front. Not in the back. Here mountains are everywhere, surrounding in each direction. We are still going up, and up, following a road that looks like a brown snakes amongst the tree.

It is becoming dark - and I am captured by the sunset in the far end of the mountains layers. Still people are around. On motorbikes, or on foot. Moving things or returning home. I cant even imagine why and how they would want to even try to leave their house to reach somewhere else, on this bit of land which seems far from everything... far even from what it is possible to imagine.

When we arrive, it is dark. I dont know how the place here actually looks like. I just know I am in this beautiful hut with too many insects and without a mosquito net. Crickets and frogs are cricketing and "froggeting". I imagine there must be a river not far from here.

 I am here once again, just after few days from my experience in the villages, to describe another day in a remote area. I am struggling to find the words, to build up an accurate description. To transmit my emotions. Well, I am not gonna lie. The insects made me nervous, at the beginning. And the termites! Ah, people keep telling me I should eat them: I just found them disgusting. But you know what? Ultimately I am alive, full of food - ugali and goat liver, smiling and interacting with people, listening to the crickets, there is no rains, there are thousands of thousand of stars (also, I have some signal to publish this post).. so, if waking up with a spider on my face is the price to pay, well, I some ways I am happy to!