We’re talking about Ngong

Okay, let me start with a justification of the following.

According to the Rough Guide, ‘the number of attacks and robberies of walkers has discouraged people… …and the north side [of the Ngong Hills] is considered especially dangerous’.

The Lonely Planet - ‘take an organised tour or an escort…’

Destination East Africa (the new and brilliant tourist magazine) ‘…hire an askari (guard)’.

Right, now to the story.

We have finally made it to the Ngong (pronounced Gong, sorry Meryl) Hills, after much viewing from afar and ‘shall we, shan’t we’ discussions. You see the hills have a fearsome reputation, and we were not sure that the rewards did not over come the risks. But then we saw an article in the new Destination East Africa magazine, and decided that, yes, we should go – especially as we could hire a guard. So with Maggie, Tristan and the Right Rev James ‘Burgers’ May Jr. we set off for a picnic – shortly arriving at the Rangers Station.  Here we attempted to hire the guard who would protect us from hordes of panga wielding thugs.

   Swiftly we learnt, to our consternation, that the situation was such that we needed not one, but two gun totting guards. Apparently, the ‘thugs’ were getting bolder, and one machine gun no longer acts as a deterrent! Oh yeah, and ‘it’s the law.’ The situation was made to sound so bad that a swift retreat home to the football was considered. Unfortunately they wouldn’t budge, and so two guards were hired.

And what a colossal waste of money they turned out to be. Instead of making us feel safe, they made us feel ridiculous (thanks ‘el pedant’ for the spelling). Basically, the hills were swarming with both tourists and Kenyans, with not another guard in sight. Well done Lonely Planet, well done.

But nevertheless, we had an excellent day. The views from the hills were great – the rift valley to the East, and Nairobi and the plains to the West. The guards, thankfully, kept their distance allowing us to pretend we didn’t know who they were –although we did get a bit of amusement from them. When we settled down for lunch (the kids needed recharging), a suggestion was made that thugs had recently been seen scampering into the bushes and so the guns were made ready. Unfortunately I wimped and told them that it was a joke before they went charging into the bush to massacre some random collecting firewood. But most of the time they chatted on their phones or to buddies they met along the way, far enough away that it if we had been robbed they would have been as likely to shoot us as our antagonists.

We did have a brief discussion with the guards about corruption – they agreed that it was bad and should be stopped. They than pocketed the fee (this, apparently was a ‘private hire’). This was not exactly the actions that we had hoped to promote with our diatribes. Oh well… At least we lived through our walk on the Ngong hills, the most dangerous place on Earth.