Conspiracy against travellers going upcountry for Christmas

If I had a teenage daughter, which I don’t (God only blessed me with sons), I would never allow her to straddle some hot-blooded young man’s motorcycle, especially if the said contraption was a boda boda.

The last two times I tried the bicycle variety of boda boda, I ended up with my skinny bum kissing the tarmac. Granted, my teeth are not exactly configured or coloured like those of Diane Warwick, but I have no intention of collecting them from the tarmac, you know.

That’s what I had to do with my onions, tomatoes and fish when a cyclist with a questionable armpit, peddling furiously like there were ravenous ants up his trousers, spilt me on the tarmac.

I must, however, admit that it was the closest I have ever come to visiting State House because I fell flat at the main gate to Kisumu State Lodge. I must pay tribute to the stiff GSU sentinel, though. He didn’t blink.

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The other reason has everything to do with physics. Brethren, when you are riding a motorcycle and you hit the brakes, your passenger sort of careens into your back.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want some hot-blooded motorcycle taxi driver slamming the brakes every two seconds so that my teenage daughter’s twin towers can polish his wicked back.

Eleventh Commandment

For obvious reasons, too, I would scream blue murder if I discovered my wife perched astride a motorbike. I don’t want assets for which I paid massive bride price getting into rather unseemly contact with a total male stranger, a guy who affords booze but not a helmet.

In fact, if the redoubtable feminists I see on Twitter and Facebook grabbed a ride on one of those things, all motorcycle taxi riders would discover themselves firmly behind bars for sexual assault.

But what’s my point? There is a conspiracy in this country against travellers. Each time you pack your three-year-old toothbrush and your equally aged pieces of cotton in a faded bag and head for travel, Kenyans shaft you.

First, preachers — most of the chaps who wouldn’t recognise heaven if it was thrust up their noses — arrive uninvited and attempt, in a span of two seconds, to take you to heaven — of course, in exchange for ‘something small’.

Theirs is the last prayer. They know your bus driver is a lunatic. Then hawkers arrive to sell you things you don’t need. Look, no sane fellow is going to hang around the city for 12 months only to buy underwear made in China from a hawker while on the bus to his village of birth for Christmas.

Finally, when you travel in this country, everyone assumes that you are the beneficiary of a co-operative loan that you are itching to burn. It makes perfect sense for Kilaguni Lodge in Tsavo to sell a bottle of soda at Sh100.

After all, you sip the chilled juice while watching elephants and nibbling on (free) nuts. But for a roadside kiosk to sell a traveller a tepid soda at Sh60 is madness. Hence the Eleventh Commandment. Thou shall not rob the traveller.