Eldoret
— — where the morning belongs to runners.
Not only on a wall.
“A market town on the high plateau west of the Rift Valley, at roughly 2,100 metres. Mornings here belong to runners: Kenyans and visitors from everywhere, threading the red-earth roads before the sun has come over the escarpment. The smell is woodsmoke and ugali. The light at altitude has its own clean edge.
Eldoret, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Eldoret is the capital of Uasin Gishu County in Kenya's Rift Valley, on a plateau of roughly 2,100 metres (6,890 ft). It grew from a 1908 railhead settlement called 64, the marker stone counting miles from the colonial railway. The town now holds around 475,000 people and serves the surrounding maize and wheat country that feeds much of western Kenya. Moi University and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital anchor its civic life. The road climbs west from here toward Iten, the high training village above the Kerio Valley escarpment.
The altitude is the whole story. Eldoret and nearby Iten sit on a plateau where the air carries about 25 percent less oxygen than at sea level. The Kalenjin running community has made these roads the most famous training ground in athletics, joined by distance runners who come from around the world. Eliud Kipchoge, the marathon world record holder, has lived and trained in the region for two decades. Visitors who run here in the first week feel the altitude in their chest before they feel it in their legs.
Eldoret International Airport takes daily flights from Nairobi's Wilson, about a forty-minute hop, and the highway from Nakuru via the Rift floor climbs steeply at Timboroa. The town is the staging point for visits to Iten, 35 km north, where international training camps cluster along the Kerio View escarpment. The dry months from January to March and July to September give the easier road conditions; the long rains in April and May turn the red roads slow. The matatu vans run frequent routes between town centre and the highway junctions.