Hell's Bells and a Glass of Champagne

It was after a full day of traveling that I finally arrived in Kenya. I was starting to sober up after my plane trip booze up and the heat was like something out of a scary campfire story, but at least I was surrounded by the people I love. That said, I was now tired of travelling, I wanted a shower and I either needed a glass of wine or some pretty strong Panado. But, unbeknownst to me, getting from the airport to Michelle’s house was to be the most stressful journey of my life.

You see, in Kenya you need a drivers licence to drive on the roads but Michelle achieved hers by driving out of the traffic department, turning left, entering a roundabout, first exit out and then driving another hundred meters. That’s it! That is all that she had to do to be given a licence. So you can imagine then that, what seemed like a billion Kenyans all on the roads at once would be a nightmare.

Well, Hell's Bells!!! The word ‘nightmare’ has got to be the biggest understatement of the century. I’m pretty sure that at one stage I was wishing that I was at least 300 kilograms heavier just so that when we did come to our inevitable stop in the rear end of another 4x4 I would have some extra padding to protect me. And more than once I wished that we had just decided to walk to literally the other side of Nairobi.

It seemed to me that the roads were fairly good, and all the signs were in the correct places and they even had countdown timers for their robots but after about five minutes in Nairobi traffic I had worked out that NOBODY, and I mean nobody, bothered to pay attention to any of that and to make matters worse at one of the intersections the traffic officer was directing traffic in the complete opposite way to the robots and it occurred to me that no one listened to him anyway.

Yes, my only unhappy memories of Kenya will be those that we spent on the road with me digging holes into the arms of whoever was sitting next to me at the time in the hopes of staying upright. The good news is though, that the Kenyan traffic scared off any hangover that I might have had and by the time we got home I was ready for a much needed glass of champagne.