An Ugly Drive Through Nairobi

Sunday, August 28, 2005


There is a space up in the front cab in the truck if one of us wants to sit there for a while. I hop up in front with Wayne. Its a big wide slippery seat with no seat-belts, but an enormously wide view of whats up ahead.

East Africans drive on the same side of the road as the British at enormous speed. It seems like every other car on the road is jam-packed with people though not to the extent that I was to see later.

At first we drove on a modern highway through the kind of semi-rural area that always seems to surround airports, but soon we came to the city outskirts where the main road became littered with potholes.

I saw people living in broken-down shacks only feet apart. I looked down crowded and dusty alleyways, littered in garbage, and felt a pang of guilt and shock as I did in Morocco when I saw the poverty people can live in. People in ragged clothes and bare feet walked by the side of the road carrying bags and buckets.

I didn't want to gawk but couldn't tear my eyes away.

The slums of Nairobi are famed for their atrociousness and I know we weren't even in the worst part of it. It looked like an unhealthy place to live. Wayne said that many, many people in this city die of malaria every year because they cannot afford the price of the medication to prevent it. Imagine dying because you can't afford twenty dollars.

We headed into a less run-down area known as "Karen", after Karen Blixen of "Out of Africa" fame, and stopped at the modern Silver Springs Hotel to pick up two girls who were the last to join the group. We are advised to use the bathroom here as its the last Western one we'll see in a while.

We are also joined by Pete, a shy fellow from Mombasa who will be our cook on this trip. We will soon realize that Pete is a national secret in gourmet- safari circles, as well as having uncanny animal-spotting powers.

We make a brief stop at a Nairobi corner store which is both the same and totally different from convenience stores in my neck of the woods. The shelves are half-empty and the brand-names are mostly unfamiliar, but wouldn't you know it, Coca-Cola and Pringles chips are available just about everywhere on the planet.

The pollution is thick and smelly in the air as we drive through busy, rumbling city streets. I'm glad we're leaving the city, driving up into the hills of Kenya's Rift Valley.