By the time we reached the third waterfall on the Kahunira trail, my wife, Kiki, and I had been walking through the forested backcountry of Kiambu County, Kenya, for nearly three hours. Along the way, we had tasted sweet lady finger bananas in the market town of Githunguri, sipped a sour Kikuyu home brew called muratina proffered by laborers at a rural gravel quarry and made a heart-pounding shortcut across rust-flecked irrigation pipes that traversed a steep gorge fringed with tea plantations.
Our companions were two dozen young Kenyans who’d learned of the excursion through Lets Drift, an outdoor recreation community that creates weekly hikes, bicycle excursions and mountaineering treks in the countryside outside Nairobi.
Upon arriving at the forest-shaded waterfall, some members of our cohort stripped down to swimsuits, performed acrobatic dives off boulders that edged the cascade pool and posed for selfies in the midafternoon sun.
In a part of Africa where the conventional tourism industry was built around a wildlife-focused, British colonial footprint, Lets Drift stands out as an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise. Its aim is to celebrate outdoor recreation and, at the same time, generate a sense of community among the country’s growing urban middle class.
Created in 2018 by Alex Kamau and Paul Njuguna, both from greater Nairobi, Lets Drift attracts roughly 8,000 participants each year, many of whom participate in activities like hiking, e-biking, backcountry camping and digital detox retreats. “Our mission is to make adventure more accessible and affordable for Kenyans,” Mr. Kamau said.
Lets Drift also welcomes international travelers looking for an unconventional experience in Kenya. Within the traditional model of East African tourism, outsiders endeavoring to “meet the locals” often wind up having roadside photo-and-souvenir encounters with Kenyans wearing traditional Masai or Samburu costumes. But on the Kahunira waterfall trail, the Kenyans we interacted with wore Lycra and hiking boots, and carried day packs. Like us, they were tourists; unlike us, they weren’t traveling all that far from home.
‘Affordable and accessible’
The decision to begin our Kenya sojourn by joining a Nairobi hiking club flowed out of my habit of perusing online local newspapers of the places I one day hope to visit. After reading a December 2020 Business Daily Africa feature about Lets Drift, I began to follow the Kenyan hiking community on Instagram. The outdoor images posted there resonated, not because I found them exotic, but because I found their celebration of exploring the wilderness within driving distance of Nairobi relatable to my own youthful summertime explorations of the backcountry trails of the Colorado Rockies.
Indeed, just as the notion of who was able to travel long distances was democratized by railroad and steamship technologies in the 19th century, social media has democratized the kinds of stories — and storytellers — that can inspire and inform us about places before we go there. In giving us a peek into what local people do for fun in the places we seek to visit, hiking clubs like Lets Drift (or similar communities tied to things like sports, art or cuisine) enable us to explore ways that we, as tourists, can respectfully join in.
Our relaxed five-hour Kahunira waterfall hike looped us back to the town of Githunguri, where we shared a classic Kenyan meal of nyama choma (barbecued goat) and ugali (cornmeal porridge) with our fellow hikers as we waited to catch a shared minivan back to Nairobi. In keeping with Lets Drift ritual, we addressed each other by alliterative trail names — Dazzling Daisy, Jolly John, Kurious Kiki, Relaxed Rolf.
When I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the Kahunira waterfalls described in any guidebooks or on any travel websites, Wango Alfred, a 25-year-old artist and photographer from Nairobi who’d served as our guide, told me that Lets Drift scouts out its own routes. “We rarely seek out the same places as international tourists,” he said. “We like to keep things affordable and accessible for everyday Kenyans. Sometimes this means walking across private agricultural lands, so establishing relationships with local leaders and spending money at the village level — like we are right now — counts for a lot.”
I asked him: “Was it strange to have a couple of Americans come along?”
“All kinds of people join us,” he said, noting that Nairobi is a cosmopolitan place that mixes cultures within Kenya, which means Lets Drift hikes might involve people from various ethnic groups socializing with those from other groups: Kikuyu with Kalenjin, Luo with Kenyan Somalis and Kenyan Asians — all of them learning about one another’s cultures as they go. “When Americans or Europeans join us, it feels like we get to travel outside of Kenya and learn things about those places, too. The goal is simply to relax and be present, to feel the ground as we get to know new people, whoever those people might to be.”
The mission: ‘To evangelize outdoor adventure’
In the days following our hike, Kiki and I combined day visits to Nairobi sights like the Karen Blixen Museum and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage, with evening meet-ups with our new Kenyan hiking friends.
At a restaurant called the Talisman in the city’s Karen suburb, we had beef stir-fry with a 27-year-old foreign-relations lawyer who’d hiked under the name “Malignant Marc” Chirchir. At the BigFish in Westlands, we had brown ugali and tilapia that had been “wet-fried” in a vegetable stew with “Radiant Ruth” Kuria, a 34-year-old study-abroad administrator. Our conversations mixed the local (Ruth had recently been married in a traditional Kikuyu ceremony; Marc’s Kalenjin family hailed from a tea-growing area) with the global (Marc had spent time in Rwanda and Britain, Ruth in Malaysia and Turkey).
Kiki and I also paid a visit to the Nairobi Garage, a Silicon Valley-style co-working space not far from Nairobi’s central business district. There, on a breezy veranda full of young Africans doing business on their laptops and smartphones, we met Mr. Kamau, the 30-year-old Nairobi native who helped found Lets Drift in 2018.
“Our first goal was to evangelize outdoor adventure among Kenyans,” Mr. Kamau said. “And at the same time, we’re trying to decolonize that idea of travel. At popular tourist destinations like the Masai Mara, three out of every five safari outfitters are operated by Western companies, not by Kenyans. I don’t take it personally, but I want to shift the dynamics with what we are doing with Lets Drift. We are fighting hard to make sure people aren’t looking at just one dimension of our country.”
Alex told us how Lets Drift started as a WhatsApp group of recent university graduates who enjoyed hiking together as a way to stretch their comfort zones and experience new places. As word of mouth grew, Mr. Kamau and Mr. Njuguna asked for a small subscription fee to cover group expenses. The turning point for Lets Drift came in 2020, when dusk-to-dawn Covid curfews compelled scores of Kenyans to seek outdoor diversions by day.
“Before Covid we would have maybe five people on a hike,” Mr. Kamau said. “The first hike after Covid attracted 50 people. I remember calling Paul and asking him, ‘Do you know anyone we can hire? We need more guides.’ So instead of having one hike on a single day, we’d organize five.”
Rich stories
Lets Drift operates on a subscription model, with Kenyan members gaining access to a variety of beginner, moderate and challenging hikes for the 2,000-shilling monthly fee (about $15; non-Kenyans pay the equivalent of $20 to $40 per excursion, depending on the type of experience and the distance from Nairobi).
Hikes are organized around attractions, accessibility and safety; some offerings also include yoga, mountain biking and photography excursions. “We want more people to travel,” Mr. Kamau said, “so we’re experimenting with all the things we can do for them.”
“We’ve seen a shift in the way Kenyans view their own wilderness,” he added. “People used to view hiking and mountaineering as a mzungu thing,” he added, using the Swahili term for foreign people. “Now we see it as something that’s accessible for everyone.”
Mr. Kamau went on to describe some of the reasons members have given for joining Lets Drift. “One member told me she joined Lets Drift because it was a more enjoyable way to work out than going to the gym,” he said. “Another joined so she could have a day each week where she could just be herself, instead of being seen as someone’s mother or daughter or employee. And of course, people like you and Kiki are just looking for a different way to experience our country.”
“When you match all these perspectives together,” he said, “the stories people hear about Kenya become so much richer.”
Rolf Potts is the author of five books, including “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Word Travel” and, most recently, “The Vagabond’s Way.”
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