Travel Mombasa to Nairobi

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No trip to Mombasa is complete without a train trip on the romantic (i.e. old) Rift Valley Railroad to Nairobi. We got first class sleepers for the trip and had to accommodate a tight schedule.

The train only goes on certain days, and since we'd arrived on a Thursday, the next train out was on Sunday evening scheduled to leave at 19:00 and arrive at the Nairobi train station at 08:30. Hakuna Matata. Our flight back to Doha was on Monday afternoon at 14:20. Assuming the train would be 3 hours late arriving, (after all, this is not the German Railways) we would still have plenty of time to make it to the Nairobi airport.

We had a double compartment with four sleeper beds between the three of us. We could lock up the doors and have some privacy while we slept. The train left promptly on time. Surprise, surprise! We might be on time arriving too. We had dinner in the dining car (dinner and breakfast is included along with sheets and blankets in the sleeper tickets). During the journey, the train made some long stops at certain stations, but that's probably because the train takes 13 hours overnight to cover the same distance that a bus does in 8 hours or so. The Nairobi-Mombasa road parallels the tracks for most of the way.

We had breakfast around 06:00 the next morning and were informed that the train would not be arriving in Nairobi until at least 16:00 due to a derailment. YIKES again!

The train conductor talked with us, and contacted the station master at some different stations and made plans for us to get on a Matatu (vans that operate as shared taxis) to get to the Nairobi airport in time for our flight. To make a long story short, after some negotiation, we managed to hire a Matatu that did take us to the airport, with about an hour to spare, but we had frayed nerves most of the way since they kept picking up and dropping off passengers. The passengers with chickens did not bother us, but the Matatu operator had promised we'd get to the airport at noon, but we only got their at 13:30, just in time to clear security and board our plane home.

So this time, we could say Hakuna Matatu!

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