The Beast

Wanted to write a little about our trip to Mount Elgon. Before we left I had our car serviced and in the process many problems were discovered. New shocks were needed, no surprising with the road conditions here, and a new clutch was needed. It also turns out, unknown to us at the time we bought this car, that it’s hard to get parts for Nissans in Kenya. What the mechanic has to do is remove the old part, send it to Nairobi for an exact match (sometimes the match isn’t so exact and they have to send it back) before they can install a new part. What a hassle! Well we decided not to take the car up Mt. Elgon, it almost forced us to cancel the trip when Mark, one of the Walter Reed expats offered to lend us his ‘beast’ to drive. The Beast is a late 70’s Land Cruiser. He’s in the middle of restoring it (see photo in gallery), I think… No air conditioning, none of the gauges work, it’s enormous with those bench seats, and noisy. But you can get a huge amount of stuff/people in this thing. It didn’t drive that well on tarmac, there was a sort of delay when making small steering adjustments I had to get used to but off road this thing really shined.

We were in The Beast climbing Mt. Elgon on the second day, beautiful forest dirt road, amazing views, high altitude when we stopped for a pee break and someone asked me how much petrol I had left, I said I didn’t know, they asked if I had filled up at the last town before we entered the park, I say no. their eyes widened as they reminded me that this car is a huge gas hog. Yikes. We decided to just leave the car where we were and all piled in one car for the last 5k before arriving at hiking area. If need be I’d just coast down, hopefully. Well believe it or not we were able to drive it down and got gas on the way back to Kisumu, whew! A close call.