I’M DRIVING AND SURVIVING IN A CRAZY CITY

I have had my car now for 3 months and I have to say I am loving my FREEDOM, my own set of wheels and also the savings that comes with not having to use my taxi, Steve, to get everywhere.  Suzy Blue gets me around from point A to point B safely and I get to jive to tunes through my FM transmitter that I bought in London.  The downside; I miss my mate, my friend Steve and our chats that we had while driving and sitting in traffic.  We still try and keep in contact every few weeks and when I head out for a few drinks I will always call Steve to throw some business his way.  I am so grateful that I picked a small car, as the parking facilities in my compound are a little tight at the best of times and a big car would be a nightmare to park here at home.  Let’s just say I have become an expert in reverse parking and parking manoeuvres that my driving instructor would be proud of.  There are more cars than parks, so if you come in late at night, you generally have to double park someone in and then you get asked to move your car in the morning.  I have only had to park someone in once and I just left my keys with the night guard so they could move my car for me without having to come and get me the next morning, much to the shock of some of my Nairobi mates, thinking it is a risk that my car may just not be there in the morning.  The few times I have been parked in, it had been annoying as the owners take their time to come down and it can take 20 minutes for someone to move their car and for me to be on my way.  ANNOYING.  But most times I am lucky I work on ‘retirement’ hours, so I am one of the last to leave in the mornings and one of the first back in the afternoons, so parking for me isn’t too much of an issue on the whole.   

I have seen a lot of cities in my travels and there are a few traffic; congested cities that stick in my head.  To name a few, Rome in Italy, Accra in Ghana and of course Nairobi rates in my top 3.  Not only is there the congestion, there is the matatu’s (local taxi vans) that have to be taken into account, the safety aspect from robbers and also the driving abilities of the locals and of course the expats…..just because you are not from Kenya does not discount anyone from bad driving and if anything sometimes the diplomatic plate drivers (ascertained by their red number plates) are the worst offenders.  I am a confident driver, and I am sure everyone thinks they are, but I am a good driver and I enjoy getting behind the wheel, even if it is in a city that has a name as one of the worst cities to drive in in the world.  It is funny the things you take for granted in a country like Australia, on roads that you can travel safely on 24 hours a day and here you have to be on your guard every time you are on the road. 

I have been driving around my side of town quite confidently the last few months and I took my first excursion to the ‘other’ side of town a few weeks ago to meet a friend for coffee.  It is funny, I have done the drive hundreds of times with Steve, but to actually do it yourself, on your own, well it was a little daunting for me.  My main concern was getting lost and crossing into an ‘unsavoury’ neighbourhood by accident.  I tried to buy a Satnav/Tom Tom when I was I was in Australia in December, but all the models I checked didn’t come with African maps and after asking it seemed that we couldn’t download them either.  Luckily, when I got back to Nairobi, Altu told me the best satellite navigator was my GPS Google maps on my phone and you know what?  He was right.  It has worked a treat each time I have used the map for directions and even though I had it on my trip across town, I still managed to get lost and after jumping a turn I should have taken due to traffic congestion (thinking there would be another turn), well I was wrong on that, I did find myself in a dusty ‘local’ town where the pot holes were bigger than the car and the busses were just inches from my car mirrors.  Lucky for me it was during the day and I managed to chuck a miraculous U-turn and find my way back and still made it to coffee on time, even after my detour.  Talking to people, they said the best way to find your way around is to get lost and as long as you know where the major roads are, you will always be able to find a way back to somewhere you know.  Wise words.

We are lucky that on ‘our’ side of town the roads are in quite good condition.  If you drive on the ‘other’ side of town there is lot more traffic on their roads and they have fallen apart over time, forming potholes that give your car suspension a run for its money.  You really need to be paying attention as you don’t want to hit one of those suckers driving at 60km an hour.  The condition of some of the main roads are littered with pot-holes which also play’s havoc with the congestion.  They are filled in periodically, but this gets dispersed almost as soon as the holes are filled in.  You just need to take care and just try to manoeuvre around the worst ones.  The economy of Kenya does not allow for Tarmac-ing of roads, other than the main ones.  I am lucky I live on a side of town where the roads are not so bad, but the second you head to where most of the mzungu’s live the roads are truly atrocious, which is ironic when all the foreign people live that side.  Go figure.  Once you have gotten used to that and adapted, if they don’t slow you down then the speed bumps will.  The city is covered with them.  The major road arterials are ‘bump’ free, but some of the major arteries are riddled with them.  When I travel to Elsabe’s house, a 12 minute drive away, I have to go over 23 speed bumps to get there.  I now know where most of them are which helps as most of them around the city are marked by yellow posts that are about ½ a meter tall, so at night you can at least see where they are.  But there are a few that are not marked and if you aren’t paying attention you can fly over them and get a little airtime and hope that your passengers are wearing their seatbelts.  They don’t have the speed bump signs that you may be used to and they certainly aren’t painted.  What I hate is that being in a smaller car I have to slow right down to get over them without losing my chaisse, where a 4WD will just over take you and fly over the bumps like a ballerina.  Jealous.

There are a few things that stand out on the roads for me.  One is the impatience of the drivers.  There are the matatu drivers, who I can understand to a point that they are in a hurry, as they make their money on the amount of passengers that they pick-up and carry each day.  There are other matatu’s that run on the same route, so it is a dog eat dog world and they all try and push past each other to gain the business of the people waiting on the side of the roads.  They do CRAZY driving manoeuvres, especially in heavy traffic.  They will drive on footpaths, drive on the wrong side of the road where they can to push as far as they can until an oncoming car is seen and even make their own lanes to keep their vehicle moving wherever possible.  With this driving mentality, it is also these matatu’s that can make a bad traffic day into a worse day, clogging the already hectic congestion.  The impatience then feeds onto the ‘normal’ drivers and then you get crazy people doing some crazy things.  The things some people do to pass you (like over taking on bends, hills they can’t see over) to just jump one car space is insane, really, and they really don’t get anywhere faster and all at a risk of an accident!  INSANE.  The good thing about traffic is if you are stuck in non-moving traffic no-one is going fast enough to cause a serious accident, and the jams generally will sort themselves out, it may take time, but it gets sorted all the same.  There are no painted lines on most of the feeder roads (not that it would change anything), so people are quite blasé on sticking to their side of the road or lanes and when driving behind people it can be quite an ‘Uh-oh’ moment when they pass oncoming traffic, as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room between the vehicles sometimes and they just seem to miss each other by a hair-literally there are some close shaves!!!!!                

So I am now confident driving around my local area-check. 

The last time I drove to the other side of town I didn’t need to use my GPS-check.

I have done a trip into the city (even though it took me 3.5 hours to travel 20km)-check.

And my last driving challenge I had to conquer was a run out to the airport.  I crossed this last milestone off the list when I had to drive Zoe to the airport a few weeks ago.  And it wasn’t just any drive; it was a night drive at 7.30pm.  I knew the way; that really wasn’t the issue; it was more the night traffic and also travelling along Uhuru Highway, which at night is not really ideal place you want to be found stopped at a red light on the roundabouts.  So travelling there was no problem as I had the company of Zoe and actually worked out that we got all the green lights the whole way and made it to the airport within 30 minutes.  The test was on the way home, on my own.  So, I am pretty confident while I am moving and I’m happy to have my window down, but when I had to stop at the roundabouts, I would wind the windows up as a personal security measure.  The great thing with Suzy Blue is that the windows are tinted so dark that you cannot see a thing through them and for me it is another safety measure that keeps me confident during the day and night.  The trickiest part of the drive is the roundabouts on Uhuru Highway.  There are 6 main roundabouts on this particular stretch of road and a few months ago they installed lights to see if that would help the flow of traffic.  Well we have found out the hard way that it hasn’t helped the day traffic and traffic police still control the flow of traffic and the vehicles move when they are told rather than in sync with the traffic lights, which during the day isn’t so bad, but at night time it causes some confusion as people have been booked going through a red light, but other times people just go when there is a break in the traffic whether the light is green or not.  Being a law abiding citizen, if the light is red I stop, but then the impatient Nairobi drivers get itchy when they see no traffic and with a bullying volley of beeping from behind I was forced to go on the red on the next break in traffic and just hoped that I wouldn’t get booked and from then I went through the next 3 red lights at 8.30pm at night.  I have actually heard of people getting robbed at these roundabouts at night, so it makes sense to just travel through them late at night and handle the police later if you are unlucky enough to get pulled over.  Road rules are in place and adhered to at a whim, but you can still get booked if seen breaking them by a policeman.

Being a member of the NES (Nairobi Expat Social) Facebook page, you see posts and threads from people letting other members know of their experiences on and off the road.  Some of them have included people that have been mugged (yes in their cars) including politicians, no-one is immune, the paying of bribes to corrupt policemen for non-existent misdemeanour’s (I carry 2 purses for this scenario, one with not a lot of money to show them all I have), motor bike gangs that seem to be rife and would follow you until you had to stop and with guns they would rob you at gunpoint.  One piece of advice I have been told is if you are robbed in gridlock, carjacked or any other time with a weapon is to never resist. Give your money, belongings, whatever is demanded as most people are hurt because they do not cooperate with demands made.  Good point.  I am lucky enough that I have not been a victim (or any of my friends) of any of the above scenarios (touchwood) or witnessed anything like the above, but the stories feed through every day on one or more of the above mentioned incidents and they seem to be a daily occurrence for the drivers of Nairobi.  Steve and I were one morning in 8am peak hour traffic through the city and I had my window down and a policeman sitting in a 4WD was next to us in the gridlock and he told me to wind my window up to be on the safe side, in peak hour, on a weekday, in the city.

Last but not least you have to have patience.  Nairobi traffic is rated as one of the worst in the world and having had several experiences myself it is something that just comes with the territory of living and now driving in the country.  Kenyans are very religious people –and having experienced Nairobi traffic first hand I can quite see why.  Only people who have an absolute faith that there is a divine presence protecting them against their own stupidity (and that of other road users) would make some of the driving manoeuvres you see on the roads considered normal. In fact I would go so far as to say that the most dangerous thing you can do in Nairobi is to drive cautiously!  I have little doubt that much of the atrocious driving is provoked by frustration at Nairobi's paralysing traffic congestion as the road system is hopelessly under designed for the current volumes of traffic. 'Traffic calming' is achieved primarily by a series of roundabouts which are frankly useless once traffic significantly exceeds the design capacity, since the roundabout principle assumes that the traffic has somewhere to go once it exits. Nairobi in rush hour is proof positive that this simply doesn’t work given current traffic volumes and the congestion cascades back up through the system.  For example, we travelled to Junction on a Friday night which is a 20km journey and it took us 2 hours and 20 minutes and that was with Steve and taking some ‘short cuts’ to get me to my dinner 40 minutes late.  The good thing in these instances is that nobody is immune to the traffic and everyone was late.  Crazy times and you need to take travel time and possible traffic times when getting to your destinations.  Especially on Fridays and Tuesdays which are the 2 busiest days on the roads. 

I know I make a big deal about driving in this crazy city, and that other people (mzungu’s) do it every day, but there is also a high percentage of foreign people that don’t want to/have to drive themselves and they have drivers, that work solely just for them and drive them everywhere, and this is fine, and also a bonus on really bad traffic days as they know all the back roads to take to detour around the bigger jams and have the local knowledge, that will take me time to find, if ever.  But for me it is a BIG deal and you just need to make sure you have your wits about you, your common sense at all times and I believe everything will be fine.  You do things here on the road that you wouldn’t do driving on the roads back in Australia, but if you didn’t do it, you would not get anywhere and cop a lot of harassment from other drivers in the process.  It is part of the game of learning the tricks of driving in the big smoke.  I know if I have a problem I have people I can call now and that makes me feel 100% better when I am out and about on the roads on my own.  You need to be vigilant and not drop your guard.  Being a mzungu, we are a prime target, with dollar signs on people’s minds, so be diligent and know your surroundings, that has been the best advice I have been given.   

I am driving in a crazy city and I am loving my independence and every minute, even with the extra precautions and warnings that need to be taken on board each and every time you get behind the wheel.  It is a sense of accomplishment and anybody who drives in this city and survives deserves a pat on the back!