Driving in Nairobi

I drove yesterday for the first time in the rain AND the first time at night. Those sound like fairly lame accomplishments, but driving in Nairobi is a totally different ball game than in the US.

I wish I could appropriately describe the driving conditions here. Jeremy gave you a taste of it in one of his earlier blogs. Essentially the roads here are just wide enough for two cars, have no lines, no street lights, no traffic lights, pedestrians and bicyclists along the side of the road or actually in the road, sometimes hawkers or beggars even standing in the middle of the road (I could buy a puppy, kitten, or bunny without getting out of the driver's seat), and motorcyclists driving down the middle of the road if traffic isn't moving fast enough for them. Then there's the added excitement of other vehicles without working brake lights or turn signals! And dodging potholes!

In America, there are tons of signs and laws dictating how we drive. And much as we like to complain about other drivers, or that jerk that got into the left turn lane but has now decided to go straight, US drivers obey the signs and laws. In Kenya it's a free-for-all and literally whoever goes first has the right of way. There are some roundabouts in downtown Nairobi that have traffic lights, but no one even looks at them. During commute times there are policemen directing traffic to prevent complete snarls, but otherwise you just go when there's the opportunity. There are also plenty of 4-way intersections with no traffic lights or stop signs. I know there are some of these in Portland, but they are on side streets. In Nairobi, they are on the main thoroughfares. This leads to those wonderful situations where you have 2 or more cars stuck in the middle of the intersection and literally no one can move forward or backward.

Which leads me back to my driving adventures yesterday. It poured yesterday for the first time since December. Which meant the roads were covered with massive puddles or flowing carpets of rain. I felt so bad for the poor pedestrians who were just getting pounded by the waves of muddy water from all the passing cars. Luckily only once did I get windshield whiteout from another car's spray. And lucky that I have the high clearance of an SUV. Then I offered to drive someone else home after dinner. Although they live near me, they failed to mention that their house lay on the other side of a construction site with only muddy tracks leading the way through the mounds of earth, ditches, half-erected structures, and construction vehicles...again with no street lights and certainly not the blinding spotlights used at construction sites in the US. Plus the path had changed sometime during the day, so we ended up at a dead-end and I had to execute a K-turn in this dark environment. I'm going to be a driving pro by the time I get back to the US!