An Eventful Drive

Tuesday evenings usually see me heading out to my church home group in Karen. It used to be that I could get there in half an hour if I left after 6:30pm. These days, it’s a different story.

Last Tuesday, It poured in the afternoon. I hoped (in vain as it turned out) that people would have left work early on account of the rain. Ho, ho, ho. Instead, within metres of leaving my compound gate, and slaloming my way around the obstacle course of deep potholes (filled with water now, after the storm), I came across hundreds of stationary vehicles before the T-junction at the end of my road. All was not lost – I was turning left, and they were all headed right. However, I still needed to maneouvre my way around them, and was then stuck, as impatience had prevailed, with various vehicles which were attempting to exit from another road, now blocking the road I was on, to traffic going in any direction. (Not an unusual state of affairs in Nairobi!) Meanwhile I was entranced by the numbers of flying termites in the air, caught in the vehicles’ headlights. It was almost like a light snow flurry.

Eventually, I was moving, and turned along the road that was recently opened having been closed for road construction for nearly 2 years. Not that it’s finished. Far from it. You never quite know which side of the road to drive on. It’s quite possible to get so far, and then find you can’t go any further. The freshly laid tarmac soon reverted back to a surface that could only be described as ‘off road’ except that this is a fairly major road through this part of town. Lurching from side to side as I progressed along the undulating stretch, staying clear from the edge which is a drop off, I got onto Hospital Road. Again, this has been dug up for at least a year now. This was now a boggy mass of mud and muddy puddles. As with many of Nairobi’s roads, no thought is seemingly given to pedestrians who this evening, were trying to pick their way through the morass, the way lit only by car headlights. (Come on Nairobi City Council – surely it’s time for more pavements for the multitudes who walk!)

Finally, I reached Ngong Road. And here I made an error, turning off onto a road that goes by Nairobi Hospital, thinking that as it was after visiting hours, this should be quicker. I sat pretty much stationary for the next 15 minutes, before admitting defeat, doing a 3-point turn, and rejoining the traffic on Ngong. That in itself was a good move. What wasn’t so good however was that this led to something of an encounter with a matatu! Just past the area where matatus and buses stop to drop and pick up passengers (they don’t exactly pull off the road to do this….) there’s a left-hand filter lane for those turning left at Mortuary Roundabout. It’s not that big an opening, with a raised curbed area, preventing you from getting in if you miss it. A van on the right-hand side of me clearly wanted to get in there, and despite being in completely the wrong lane (being in the right lane ahead of time is a concept that doesn’t seem to compute with a lot of Nairobi drivers!), he started to cut across just in front of me to try to get through the opening. I had a choice – plough into him, or slam on the brakes. I chose the latter! However, the matatu driver behind me didn’t make quite the same choice, ploughing into the back of me, and was seemingly perturbed that I’d chosen to brake! It was dark, so it was difficult to see what damage there was to my car, although the fragments of the matatu’s headlight were clearly visible on the ground. I took his insurance details, and set off, a policeman arriving on the scene just as I was ready to go. Other than the initial reaction of the matatu driver, it was all fairly amicable. (Since then, I discovered just what the damage was. Whilst relatively minor, it’s meant 3 days without a car this week while it gets fixed, and a bill of about 30,000/=. Thankfully our insurance through work is very reliable, with just an excess of $100.)

And so the drive to home group continued. Nothing overly untoward after that. Heavy traffic most of the way, three lanes of traffic where there should be one or maybe at tops two. A lorry piled high with mattresses, cutting in across the central reservation, its high load looking decidedly unstable. Cyclists with no lights or reflectors venturing along roads, seemingly unaware of the dangers of being non-visible. There’s one part of the drive that I dread, at Dagoretti Corner, which is one of the reasons I normally opt to go a completely different route. There’ve been times along there I’ve felt as though I was in a rugby scrum, getting sandwiched between 2 buses. Public service vehicles ‘need’ to get places as quickly as they can, no matter what it takes to get there – driving down the wrong side of the road, forcing other vehicles off, or driving down the pavement – and then forcing their way back onto the road again, wondering why it is that you’re not necessarily inclined to let them back in.

In the end, I made it, 1 hour 45 minutes after setting out, and an hour late. For all of 10 miles! Slightly weary, and with a rather crumpled right-hand rear corner of the car. Was this an unusual drive? Not exactly. My evening activities are regular reminders to me to be thankful that while Upper Hill is getting more built up, and the road construction is seemingly never-ending (with the mud and dust that brings, depending on the time of year), being able to walk to work rather than have to commute is worth a lot!