An Optical Illusion?

Wild horses cannot drag me out of our 'awesome'(it's the top word used in the children's school!) abode and I am specially reluctant to leave the house on Sundays.But a few months ago we had heard about a remarkable phenomenon that occurs in a place which is around an hour's drive from Nairobi.Friends from our Dar Es Salaam days had told us about it and since then we had been agog to view it ourselves.So when they invited us to join them last Sunday, we were more than ready.
We had heard that there is a spot on a hill called Kituluni Hill a few kilometers from the market town of Machakos,which was a Kolonial administrative center and is a few years older than Nairobi.It is also called 'Magic Hill' and this particular stretch of a few meters is said to defy the rules of gravity!We were finally getting a chance to test it ourselves and become eye witnesses to what is termed as a miraculous sight!
We set off from Nairobi by mid morning and this time we were going in the direction opposite to the one we had taken to go to the Great Rift Valley.As we left the outskirts of Nairobi, gradually, the landscape began changing.The hilly contours of the city that is our current home gave way to flat,arid land.All we could see were small,stunted Acacia tress and,sometimes,scraggly Eucalyptus trees that still managed to look stately!Even the maize in the fields we passed had turned yellow in the hot summer sun.
We are now so accustomed to seeing green everywhere,dappled with bright splashes of Nairobi's beautiful flowers,that I began feeling strange even before we had reached the 'strange' spot!And there were no giraffes or zebras grazing casually by the roadside as there had been on our last trip out of Nairobi!Puffy white Cumulus  clouds stretched across the sky.A few grey clouds hovered over the horizon but it did not seem as if it would rain that day!
As we entered Machakos town,we could see green,terraced hills once again and soon enough we started going up a gentle incline.The car climbed steadily up for some time and then around half way up the hill we were at our destination.We parked by the side and were surrounded by the local people who were eager to demonstrate the weird phenomenon.They took a plastic bottle,filled it with water and gave it a push to make it roll down hill.Instead,before our very eyes,the bottle began rolling uphill!We had to blink twice to reassure ourselves that we were not seeing things!My son,being the typical analytical Aquarian that he is,insisted that the strong breeze was pushing the bottle in the wrong direction!So one of the men opened the bottle and poured the water out on the slope.As per all known laws,it should have flowed down the incline.It began snaking it's way upwards!My son was dumbfounded!I had finally found something that shut him up!!
Then they asked us to get into our car and put it into neutral gear and release the brake.Logically we should have begun rolling backwards,something that makes me panic even today after a bad experience we had on the old Mumbai Pune road when I was a child.Today,however,I had nothing to fear as our car began climbing up the slope in neutral!Wow!
There are many legends surrounding this place,one of which says that a woman who had two husbands lived here and the husband who lived uphill had a stronger attraction towards her and so pulls things towards him!Polyandry seems to have funny repercussions here!Another story says there are certain minerals buried deep in the hill which are exerting this pull.There is a similar spot in Ladakh in North India which is manned by the Indian Army and has been termed Magnetic Hill.The same phenomenon has been observed here though magnetic compasses show nothing unusual.
 Scientists in other parts of the world insist that this is an optical illusion and what we see as a road going uphill actually has a downward direction.Only the surrounding topography gives us the illusion that the road is curving up.I only know that what I saw with my own eyes defies what I have studied and I would not have missed it for the world!