Mayhem

My most trying experience here in Kenya has not been wearing the same outfit for over a week or trying not to fall in the squatty potty first thing in the morning.  No, the title of most stressful experience in my Kenyan life goes to driving through Mombasa.  Seriously, every time I step out of the vehicle my muscles relax and I appreciate life a little more.  I am no stranger to traffic - I have experienced my fair share of traffic jams and played Frogger through downtown Ho Chi Minh City - but Mombasa traffic is a breed of its own.  

To start out, they drive on the opposite side of the car and road than I am used to.  So when I sit “shotgun” I actually feel like I am supposed to be driving or at least have some control over the vehicle.  And they have even more items to clog up the streets.  The roads are a continuous mélange of piki pikis (motorcycle taxis), tuk tuks (three wheeler taxi things), cars, matatus (van taxis), and trucks galore, not to mention the pedestrians, bike riders, and cart pushers that fill in any possible gap.  The busyness could be manageable if there was some semblance of order.  I’m sure there’s some sort of hierarchy, but at this point, all I can tell is that the only rule of the road is also a basic rule of physics: “No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.”  Yet where we give car lengths, they give inches (or cm, depending on the system of measurement you prefer to use).   Where we have protected turn signals, they have massive roundabouts where anything seems to go.  

Needless to say, Kenyan cars keep close quarters and move in erratic patterns.  I find myself mimicking my mom when she was trying to teach me to drive: phantom braking, muttered prayers, sharp intakes of breath, yet with less yelling, since I can’t really tell the driver what to do.  So instead I try to distract myself or ride in the back of the car whenever I can.  It’s not as bad when you can’t see the matatu cutting in front of you or when you can’t tell that you are within handshake range of the tuktuk driver.  But it’s safe to say that you won’t see me getting my international driver’s license anytime soon.