us get our motorcycles out of the port,
but he couldn‘t promise that we would
have them before New Year’s Eve. Nev-
ertheless, on the first working day, De-
cember 27th, we started the process at
8am by picking up our Carnet de Pas-
sages (which finally arrived right on
time from Iran together with the Bill
of Landing) from a couriers office and
we finally finished … you wouldn’t
guess: at about midnight the same
day, by riding our motorcycles into
the streets of Mombasa! One long, but
well-structured and extremely pro-
ductive day was enough to go through
all the required procedures of han-
dling the paperwork with the port and
Kenyan customs administration and
retrieving our motorcycles. That was
an unexpected, but a very pleasant
start to our African ride.
Without any further delays, the
next morning we set off, heading west
– away from the tiring heat and hu-
midity of the Indian Ocean and into
the land of contrasts.
Plunging into Kenyan traffic on the
outskirts of Mombasa was an adven-
ture in itself. Pedestrians, motorcy-
cles, free roaming cattle, cars, trucks,
buses and the famous minibus-taxis
called Matatu (in Kiswahili meaning
TRAVERSE
17
“the threes” because of three seats
in each row, but in reality you would
never know how many people, chick-
ens or goats are actually squeezed
inside…) make the process of riding
there adventurous , to say the least.
Then, given the fact that Kenya was
the first country where we got to ride
our motorcycles on the left side of the
road, it must have been pure luck that
we actually made it through the first
few days without getting into any kind
of trouble. Eventually, after getting
used to the direction of traffic and sev-
eral specific rules of the “jungle law”,
riding on Kenyan roads didn’t seem too