Totally unnecessary jams
on A Serendipitous Journey (Kenya), 01/Feb/2010 12:34, 34 days ago
Today after work, I travelled from my place of work to Westlands to meet some friends for dinner. My matatu trip from work to town was hot and uncomfortable, but relatively uneventful. But the second leg of the journey from town to Westlands was absolutely outrageous!One intersection in particular was wreaking complete havoc because vehicles in each direction refused to allow those travelling in the opposite direction to pass, resulting in a complete gridlock with matatus, cars and buses all packed in so tightly that anytime anyone went to move it resulted in them hitting the vehicles surrounding them. (I must have seen at least 6 vehicles hit one another and I’m sure our driver hit at least 2 vehicles himself.)If people had just followed the basic traffic rules it would have been avoided, but instead everyone seemed to think only of themselves resulting in cars in every which direction– face to face, diagonally and many attempting unsuccessfully to drive down the complete opposite side of the road.Matatu conductors were trying to direct traffic (which was a hilarious scene and probably made matters worse), some people were shouting at one another, while others seemed to think it was funny and, surprisingly none of the cars who had been hit seemed the slightest big concerned about the damage. I would have done anything to have had a video camera to capture it all.At one point, I started to get irritated at the entire situation, but then suddenly burst out laughing uncontrollably at the ridiculousness of it all, which started a chain reaction of hysterical laughter within the matatu until the point that I had tears rolling down my face. It’s not something I want to experience often (or ever again for that matter) but for today it was pretty funny.