The old road down the Rift Valley escarpment is the one riders recommend to each other and then quietly stop using in April. It is narrower than the highway, it carries less traffic, and the view from the viewpoint chapels is the reason people ride it in the first place. None of that is the problem. The problem is that the descent concentrates every difficulty of wet season riding into about eleven kilometres.

What the surface does

The tarmac on the descent is old and polished. Years of heavy vehicles have burnished the wheel tracks smooth, and the camber on several bends drains toward the outside rather than the inside. In dry conditions this is barely noticeable. In the first twenty minutes of rain, the polished sections behave like a different road surface entirely, and they are exactly where you would naturally place a tyre.

The three sections that catch people

  • The first sequence of bends after the upper viewpoint, where the gradient steepens before the corners tighten.
  • The long right hander roughly halfway down, which has a broken outer edge and a drop that is not obvious until you are on it.
  • The final straightening section, where riders relax, accelerate, and meet standing water across the full lane width.

How to ride it

Brake before the bend, not in it, and do the majority of the work with the rear on the polished sections. Move your line away from the burnished wheel tracks toward the centre of the lane where the texture is still open, while staying far enough right that an oncoming truck cutting the apex does not become your problem. Expect to be overtaken by vehicles that have judged this descent differently, and give them the room rather than the argument.

The descent is eleven kilometres of a ninety two kilometre route, and it accounts for almost all of the risk.

Fuel and timing

There is a stretch of roughly forty eight kilometres with no reliable fuel once you commit to the old road. Fill in Nairobi rather than planning to fill on the way. If you are riding a small displacement machine this is comfortable. If you are two up with luggage and you have been sitting in traffic, it is closer than it looks.

Leave early. The descent in the first light of morning is dry more often than not, the traffic is thinner, and if something does go wrong you have the whole day to deal with it rather than the last hour before dark.

If it goes wrong

There is very little shoulder on the descent and almost nowhere safe to stop between the viewpoints. If you have a problem, keep moving to a viewpoint if the machine will do it at all. Stopping on the road itself, on a blind bend, in rain, is a considerably worse situation than a slow limp to somewhere with space and visibility.