This is Not About a Taxi Driver

It is not possible to get from where I was to where I wanted to be without a driver of some kind. With that in mind, I ditched Jeremy the taxi driver. I’m not so naive that I expect to get the best possible price – my bargaining skills are rather poor, I know that. But Jeremy wouldn’t strike a deal in the lobby of the hotel; he insisted we settle in the parking lot. “We’ll write it down; I’ll meet you at the gate.” “How much?” “No problem, we’ll set a good price, I’ll be out at the gate.” To make things worse, I’m pretty sure he’d been drinking; I could smell the booze on him. I sent him away and asked the receptionist to get me another driver.

Jeremy was replaced by Joseph, a wide-eyed, squat man with fat hands and a desire to talk politics. “How is America,” he asked me. “How is Obama?” I didn’t really know what to say. The problem was that  I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to look out the window at the crazy street side marketplace where goats grazed on piles of trash and a bizarre selection of things were on display, for sale.

A bed in the shape of a race car. Tombstones. Tall cone-shaped baskets. Signs that said Toilet No Parking To Let For Sale Security Sign Painting. Leggy sculptures of giraffes and, really, a frog playing a guitar, made from metal. I saw the carcass of a cow hanging in a shop window and crafts labeled as ‘Masai’. There were sheet metal storefronts painted yellow, bright blue, red, hand lettering above doorways saying R E S T A U R A N T or pictures of animals, a dog, a cow, a goat and the word F E E D.

Further down the road a tall, skinny man in a bright purple wrap guided a herd of cattle, and later, a tiny child did the same, carrying in one hand a staff, in the other a piece of black plastic netting. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to herd cattle on a busy city arterial, but I could not imagine where they were going. Perhaps to graze on the wicker furniture that stood just back from the roadside, repeated rows of armchairs, dozens of them, a few occupied by what I guessed were salesmen.

I was sorry, as we sailed past curious piles of produce or stacks of cloth, that I was alone. I did not feel assertive; I felt like I’d used it up dismissing Jeremy the inebriated taxi driver. As we rolled past a makeshift mechanic I felt a stab of envy as I watched a strapping white guy, clearly a tourist with his cargo pants and backpack, chatting with a cluster of locals. They stood in a dusty lot underneath a complicated wind chime of hub cabs, one of which had the letters PUNCTURES REPAIRED welded onto the surface. I wanted to be the person who plunged into that practically vibrating mess, but on this particular day, I was still feeling too new to Nairobi.

Instead, I joined the tourists at the tourist sites, and while I felt some regret for my inability to go all in, when I touched the leathery ear of a one month old elephant, I was okay with my choice. She was wiry and covered in a fine red dust, when I pulled my hand away, my fingers were dusted red too. There was nothing but a line of cable between me and six young pachyderms. At one point, one of the babies leaned along the line into the adoring crowd, leaned into the Canadian and German and Indian tourists and everyone let out a giant collective “Awwwwww….”

After more cows and corrugated metal buildings and corner stands selling roasted corn or sugar cane or cell phone recharging, I held my hand out while a giraffe licked giraffe attracting snacks from my palm. Her tongue was blue, and scratchy, like a cat, and her eyelashes were long and she was marked like a map to the places where giraffes live with pale roads between the dark areas.

I was not particularly adventurous. I rejected a cab driver and instead, I stared out the window, trying to catalog what I was seeing from the back seat of a battered and dusty white sedan. “We’re coming up to the election,” I answered Joseph, the cab driver, who proceeded to rattle off the names of Kenyan candidates and tribes and regions and things I couldn’t respond to. I wanted to make myself launch into some archetypal, somewhat clichéd yet insightful conversation with my taxi driver, but instead, I paid an admission fee and held my palm open so a giraffe could have snack. I looked at the remaining dust on my fingers, left there by a baby elephant. I petted an orphaned elephant, and she flapped her ears and then, I asked the driver to take me back to my hotel.

My travels to East Africa were sponsored by Intrepid Travel as part of their “classic journeys” campaign.” Most – but not all – of my expenses were paid for by Intrepid Travel