Back in the summer of 2016, I made the fateful decision to strike out alone from the warm bosom of Ottawa and head to an uncertain future in Kenya. In the spirit of excitement and adventure, I told all my friends of my relatively unexpected life choice to relocate to East Africa. Most of them were full of surprise and well wishes, but some had offers of connecting me with people they knew in Kenya. In particular, my very good friend Honza who hails from Belgium and has travelled a great deal told me about a buddy of his who was living in Kenya.
“He’s great,” Honza told me, “he has this crazy car called Beast that he’s travelled all across Africa with! You should definitely call him!” In the hustle and bustle of packing and pre-departure training in Toronto, this all slipped my mind until a week after I had arrived in Nairobi, when Honza texted me and pushed me to get in touch with Ian. So I sent him a message introducing myself, and low and behold, he wrote back and suggested lunch the very next day. So it was with some excitement that I saw Ian roll up to my work in the mythical Beast. We chatted over Japanese food, where he told me he’d just flown in from Somalia the day before.
I asked him what he was doing next, and he said, “Actually, I’m flying out to Thailand tonight!”
“Oh really?” I replied. “For how long?”
“About three months. Wanna look after Beast?”
Beast and I
And thus, a beautiful three-way friendship between myself and both Ian and Beast was born. Ian’s plans fortuitously changed while he was gone, leaving Beast and I together for the past 11 months. Now you need to understand, Beast is no regular car. He is a 1980 Toyota Landcruiser that Ian found in a barn somewhere in Burundi, and slowly fixed up over time with the help of some local mechanics. Beyond the sex appeal, Beast has a number of interesting quirks, each of which has led to many stories.
Left Hand Drive
Because he is from Burundi, he is Left Hand Drive, like North American cars. But Kenya was a British colony, and therefore is full of British-style cars driving on the left side of the road. Normally this isn’t a big deal when I’m driving around Nairobi, but it becomes a serious factor when travelling outside the city. Kenyan roads and highways are full of very old trucks ridiculously overloaded with too much weight, and often travel up inclines at a speed roughly equivalent to a small child walking backwards. In such situations, passing becomes extremely important if you have any hope of arriving at your destination in the same calendar month. Unsurprisingly, people are often travelling at great speeds the opposite way, and passing a truck on the right when you are sitting on the left gets pretty hairy. A good co-pilot is required for road trips, someone who can appropriately judge oncoming distance and then yell, “GOGOGOGOGO” when passing becomes an option.
Burundi Licence Plates
Not only is he from Burundi, but Beast also has a Burundi license plate. This leads to a lot of stops by the traffic police, who never need much of an excuse to pull people over in the hopes of a bribe. Because Beast was built in 1980, he’s actually too old to get a Kenyan plate put on, even if Ian wanted him to have one. This leads to one of the other fun things with Beast, getting his foreign vehicle permit renewed. You’re only supposed to have a foreign vehicle in the country for three months, after which you have three options:
- Pay some guy to make the problem go away (because Kenya). Not the best option, because it’ll probably be very expensive, and you’re never 100% sure that it won’t come back to haunt you.
- Make a run for the border, and then come back in. This requires some artful stretching of the truth at said border, as you have to tell them on the way out that you’re not coming back, and then you have to tell them on the way in that you’re not leaving via the same border three months later. All in all, it’s surprisingly painless, but borders aren’t exactly a short drive from Nairobi.
- Convince the KRA (Kenya Revenue Authority) to give you an extension on your permit.
So when I first got Beast, I had only 4 or 5 days to figure out what to do, so I went with option 1. It was very pricey and definitely not sustainable for the long term. So when three months rolled around and it turned out I was keeping Beast longer, I resolved to find a more palatable way to keep him legal. After a number of hours on the phone with the National Transport and Safety Authority, I figured out that I needed to physically go to the KRA headquarters in downtown Nairobi and get them to stamp my form. So after hours and hours wandering around Nairobi getting constantly redirected, I finally end up at the KRA HQ, and get directed to the second floor. Obviously I have no idea where I’m going, so I just stand around in a cubicle farm looking lost and helpless until someone finally comes over and directs me to a random desk. Once I explain what I need, the woman at the desk tells me that I can’t get an extension, and that’s that. Well obviously it’s not, because Kenya, so I start bargaining, trying to find a way to convince her that Beast and I deserve to stay together in Kenya. After 30 minutes of this, I’m on a “but here are all the reasons why Kenya is awesome now let me stay” monologue, and warming to my subject. “I even learned how to make chapati…” I am saying, when she interrupts me.
“You. You know how to make chapati?” She asks incredulously.
“Why yes!” I reply.
“And you will bring me chapati next time you come?” She persists.
“Of course I would,” I reply enthusiastically.
With no more words spoken, she stamps my form than turns back to her computer, presumably dismissing me from her presence. Somewhat confused I slowly backed away from her desk and subsequently fled the KRA headquarters, still unclear as to how the act of making chapati got me what 45 minutes of pleading and cajoling could not.
But the story doesn’t end here. In fact it gets better.
Fast forward three months, and it’s time to renew Beasts’s foreign permit once again. This time I prepare and take time to cook up some chapati the night before. Thus armed, I set out to the KRA offices once more, this time with my best buddy Will, who is visiting for a week from the UK. A salient point, since we arrive at KRA, only for me to realize that I had forgotten my wallet, and they won’t let me inside without ID. I try absolutely every trick in my arsenal to convince them to let me in the building, but they won’t budge. I slowly turn to look at Will, and you can see the realization slowly dawn on his face.
“No man. No way.”
“William,” I say, “I know that you just set foot in Africa for the first time, and that you don’t know any of the local language, or any of the context about this, but I’m going to have to ask you to take these chapati, go into that government building, find a random desk on a random floor, and bribe them with these baked goods to stamp this form, or we need to leave the country so my car doesn’t get impounded.”
“Damn it.”
With good grace, Will accepts his quest and sets off with chapati in hand. He follows my directions and soon finds himself deep in the bowels of a cubicle farm. Now one more fun twist to the story; we obviously need to find the same woman I spoke to last time, but I don’t know her name or remember what she looks like. So based on my vague directions, William walks up to what is almost certainly the completely wrong person and says, “Hi! Can you stamp this form?”
The woman looks at him in some confusion and says, “What? No! It has already been renewed!”
To which William uses his ace card and says, “CHAPATI!” while throwing day-old muzungu-cooked chapati on her desk. Needless to say, this only enhances the poor woman’s confusion. Despite all this, Will somehow managed to score another three months out of this interaction, and so Beast stayed legal to drive another day.
Break Downs
An obvious side-effect of Beast being 37 years old is the reality that not all parts of him are going to be working all the time. From inside, the fact that Beast is literally held together partially by duct tape is obvious, and Ian said some wise words to me before he left.
“If you drive Beast for any length of time, I can guarantee you two things. First, he WILL break down. And second, you will be able to fix him with some guy on the side of the road, a rock, and a piece of twine.”
Wise words that proved to be prophetic of my Beastly experience. Within days of getting Beast the battery failed, which led me to learn the important life skill of the push-start.
I swear I helped to push too...
Then there was the time where two photographers from a well-known magazine came to do a piece on FarmDrive. I excitedly told them all about Beast, who we were taking on our trip into the field to see some farmers. They were equally excited to get the Beast Experience… up until it started almost falling apart on the highway. A quick stop at a garage on the highway and we were on our way once more!
After our forced hour delay, the photographers seemed slightly less keen, but we gamely headed off the highway to find the farms we were supposed to be visiting. Unfortunately it had rained quite heavily the night before, and there was a significant amount of mud, which resulted in us sliding sideways down a hill and into a ditch.
Luckily, Beast has some great 4-Wheel Drive, and we were out of the mud in a jiffy. The rest of the farmer visit went smoothly, and with a surprising lack of Beast-Drama. The photographers came back a few days later to do another field visit, but for some reason rejected my offer of taking them out in Beast again.
THEN there was the time where a group of friends and I took a road trip to an excellent music festival by a lake with Beast in tow. The theme of the festival was essentially “wear purple stuff” so we tried to get Beast in the spirit…
But it was the trip back which is the focus of this story. We decided to take a long way home and drive around Lake Naivasha to a restaurant to have lunch. The drive was beautiful, but the road got bad. I mean, really bad, to the point that we were probably moving faster up and down due to the bumps than we were moving forward. Beast was gamely toughing it out, when all of a sudden he just died. We were only 10km away from the restaurant, and my friends were coming back in their car to try and help. A random passerby helpfully ferried the rest of Beast’s passengers, and we called a random mechanic to help. While we were waiting, the three of us guys decided to pool our knowledge and stare at the engine, in the hopes of magically discerning what was wrong. My friend Amy was scathing in her assessment of the situation. “None of you know anything about cars! Why do you think staring at the engine will help?” Despite her obvious scepticism, we kept with it.
Every once in a while, one of us would say, “is that thing supposed to be like that?” Poking would result until we were satisfied that, yes, that particular thing was probably not the problem. Then, after 45 minutes of this inspection, one of us said “is that hose supposed to be connected to something?” We all peer into Beast’s innards, then turn to look at each other. “You know what? I think it is!” With the help of my Swiss army knife and some elbow grease, we cut off the damaged bit of the hose and get it back on to where it looked like it should have gone. Beast still wouldn’t start, so we thought we had failed, but then someone realized there was a pump-like device next to the hose. A few pumps, and suddenly we were back in action! We were very pleased with ourselves. Amy was less impressed. The best part is that we got to drive Beast via an alternative route to the restaurant through a game reserve. There is nothing like fixing a car yourself then driving it through a herd of zebras to lift your spirits.
I’m sure by this point you realize that I could go on and on with Beast stories. There was the time I fixed him with a can of coke, or the time I fixed him with a piece of sugar cane. Then there is a whole other blog post I could write about the numerous times I have been stopped by the police and the ridiculous lengths I have had to go to in order to not end up in jail.
Soon I head back to Canada for a bit to see family and then to a still-uncertain future. As I hand Beast off to the next lucky person, I wanted to take a chance to say goodbye properly by sharing some of our stories. He has been the best of companions during my time here, and I thank Ian for entrusting him to me while he was away. Ride safe Beast! I will miss you.
I'll miss you buddy...