Nairobi Nights

What’s a night out in Nairobi like, you wonder? Well, if you don’t have the benefit of a car, you take a matatu if it’s before dark and a cab to your next destination or home later. There are numerous clubs, bars, movie theatres, and delicious ethnic food hotspots (Ethiopian is one of our favorites) from which to choose. On this particular night, we had rented a small car for our Mt. Longonot trip the next day and picked up our friends Carl and Olivia to start the evening off with yes, Ethiopian food. But we were so delayed in getting started (everyone is on Africa time here) that’s all we ended up doing- eating Ethiopian food. The rest of the night consisted of driving the dark streets of a city whose demons come out when the sun goes down.

First, we were pulled over by some bored cops at a routine police checkpoint (silent policemen, i.e. large spikes laid out across the road, are ubiquitous at these checkpoints) who gave us a hard time for not wearing seat belts in the back seat. The two lawyers in the front seats, Carl (who is Kenyan and knows his country’s laws) and Dave (who is quickly learning the local laws through incidents like these), could have disputed the policemen here as the law only requires those in the front to wear belts, but that would have been a stupid maneuver bound to get us into a further predicament with the cops. In fact, Olivia and I had tried to wear the belts, but the rental car had eaten the buckles at some point in its meager Nissan Sunny life, so we were left with no options. Upon seeing Dave’s ridiculous International Driver’s LIcense, the cop didn’t know how to proceed in extracting a bribe from us and let us go.

That was followed by a drive down Langata Road, basically an unadorned highway leading out of town. While driving down this dark and fast road, we noticed headlights heading right at us, which turned out to be a car on the wrong side of the median barreling into oncoming traffic. Whether the driver was drunk or an idiot or both, he realized his mistake and slowed down as we jumped into the adjacent lane. Phew! Another mishap avoided. At this point it was about 2am and we dropped Carl and Olivia off on the quiet streets near Langata. Before getting out of the car, Carl warned us about the hazards ahead: don’t take this road back to the highway, it’s dark and in terrible condition and you could get carjacked; don’t take the road behind you as it’s an unmarked exit only from the highway and the cops are waiting for someone to make this mistake so they can get a bribe; finally, take the road we just came down and head back the way we came in. At this point Dave pipes in, “You mean the road that has about 20 shisters standing around looking bored and waiting for some action to fill their nights? Great.” Needless to say, that was our best option. We made it home just fine but it wasn’t without a Nairobi night driving adventure.