The Road to Mombasa…

We were scheduled to take the 6:30 train from Nairobi to Mombasa, which travels overnight and arrives at 10 am Tuesday morning. However, when we arrived at the train station the agents said the train was “delayed” and would not be departing on time. How delayed you might ask? One agent estimated the train’s arrival at the Nairobi station for 9 pm, another agent said 10 pm, and a third agent said 11pm. When we asked for an explanation for the delay we were told there was an accident on the track, but everything was fine. Humphrey had warned us previously about unreliability of transportation in Kenya and the train is by far the slowest way to travel overland. The train trip from Nairobi to Mombasa takes 13 hours, the bus takes 8 hours, and traveling by car takes 6.5 hours. We were booked at an expensive 5 star resort on the North Beach of Mombasa and if we waited on the delayed train we would essentially arrive at sunset and have missed a full day on a beach resort, which would have been a huge waste of money. The railroad does not generally issue refunds, but there was a couple in line wanting to purchase tickets for the overbooked train so Marcus convinced the agent to refund us our money and sell the couple our seats on the train. Humphrey took us to the bus station and we hopped on the next available bus to Mombasa.

A word about bus service in Kenya. The bus is the most popular way to travel overland with Kenyans, because it is relatively inexpensive and fast. In sharp contrast to our greyhound experience in South Africa, the long distance buses in Kenya to not have bathrooms, hostesses offering coffee, tea, and cookies onboard. The reading lights did not work on the bus we were on and the gas stations we stopped at did not have attendants or granite trough sinks. That being said for $15 usd you can travel across the country on a reasonably clean quiet bus, leaving at just about any hour you like. The one disappointment was the horrendous bathrooms we stopped at along the way. I wasn’t expecting the beautiful slate floors like the shell stations on the garden route to cape town, but I also wasn’t expecting to have to roll up my pants to avoid soaking the bottoms in the four inches of standing liquid {which I really hope was water} on the floor or Turkish toilets without toilet paper, sinks, or soap.