Piki Piki

I think many of you are aware that my volunteer assignment came with the requirement that I drive a motorcycle. You may or may not be aware that prior to arriving in Kenya I had never driven a motorcycle. No problem, VSO offers motorcycle training to all volunteers who need it. So back in December I went to Machakos for a week of piki training with 3 other volunteers. It was a week of excitement, terror, questionable safety standards, and fun...

The plan was to learn both theory and practical driving skills so we could take our driving exams at the end of the week and go home with a licence. This seemed somewhat reasonable but there was a girl in our group (Esther) who was here for her second try so we all realized up front that this would take some effort.

We started with theory and though the concepts (other than the massively complicated 8 lane roundabouts) were pretty simple our theory teacher attempted to make them as difficult as possible. This guy was a nice man but apparently suffered through the very strict Kenyan school system that does not encourage critical thinking and it showed. His idea of teaching was to read us the notes then ask trick questions and laugh if someone got them wrong. This isn’t absolutely terrible and if I ignored him I was able to not confuse what I already knew.

However, he kept picking on poor Esther, the girl who failed last time. She has never even ridden a bicycle before let alone driven a motor vehicle so they had to start by teaching her to balance...can you imagine? Anyway, she was super-sweet and took it like a champ but for the rest of us who weren’t educated in the Kenyan school system it seemed like emotional abuse and made us uncomfortable enough that I had to say something. The response? He laughed at us and continued on. He completely lost his class after that and we opted to study on our own rather than get help from him and everyone did perfectly fine on the written exam.

The most interesting part of theory class was the Modern Model Town Table. This is a 3x4 foot wooden replica of an 8 lane roundabout complete with tiny toy cars. For a North American the concept of a roundabout is already a little foreign. Then throw in driving on the left side of the road and this was definitely the most challenging part of piki training for me. But even more of a challenge for Esther. As you move the toy car you have to narrate what you are doing and I can still hear her saying, “I change lanes, I change lanes, I change lanes” whenever she had to cross 3 lanes of traffic. She was very specific :)

Kenya is full of interesting road rules. I think my favorite is that if you enter a parking lot of angled parking the lot is considered full if someone has parked in the first space so you are not allowed to enter...even if all the spaces beyond it are empty. Bizarre.

The practical lessons vacillated between lots of fun and incredibly frightening. The first day we went out to an empty field and practiced starting, stopping and driving around without hitting any goats, cows, or children who came to watch the show. My instructor accused me of having a need for speed as everyone else was tooling around in first or second and I was seeing what fourth could do. However, that didn’t last long as I became suddenly ill later in the afternoon. I don’t know if it was the fumes or the hotel food but my stomach was not happy. I had to ride home in the truck while the others drove their pikis back to the hotel.

The next morning I was feeling much better so I was ready to go! The driving instructor said to simply pull out onto the highway and drive to the field. Stupidly I trusted him and pulled out onto the highway but then immediately panicked when I realized all the cars were going the wrong direction and I was on the highway on a motorcycle. So I wrecked and hurt my knee but fortunately didn’t hit any oncoming traffic. I got right back on the bike and drove very nervously down the road for our 45km ride through the country with rutted roads and steep hills. Upon reflection I wonder if a highway is the best road to start driving in traffic on and if dicey country roads are the best to follow up with. But there aren’t really many other options in Kenya so we press on.

The ride was beautiful and everyone wrecked or stalled at least once other than me so I was feeling pretty good. We stopped at a viewpoint on top of a massive hill and I dismount safely and walk back to one of the other volunteers. My vision was inhibited as I’m not used to wearing a helmet and I’d forgotten to take it off so I fell into a very deep hole... The volunteer I was approaching laughed so hard she fell down and took her  parked bike with her. It’s a good think VSO has some older bikes for us to practice on because they all got a turn in the prone position.

After 4 days of practice we headed to the testing center and completed the oral exam and practical test. We all passed, even Esther (though conditionally). And after 2 months of waiting our motorcycle from ICAP finally arrived! Unfortunately 2 months is a long time to go without practicing so I’m a little rough. Also, this bike is considerably bigger than the once I practiced on (a Suzuki 185) so it’s quite difficult for me to manuever. Throw Francis on the back and it is almost impossible. He says he’s only 70kgs but I’ve told him he needs to reduce!  We went for a practice drive in the forest the other day and the roads are so rutted it’s difficult to drive on them. At the weight of the massive bike plus Big Boy on the back and I wasn’t steering around the massive piles of elephant poop but driving right through them. The other challenge is determine which hills the bike can actually make it up. Not all roads are actually drivable here and it's best to determine if a hill is too steep before you attempt to summit.

Fortunately for the organization Francis also has his license so they are not dependent on me for transportation. I’ll probably just be driving when Francis isn’t available so my chances of dying on the road are slim. However, my helmet is definitely my new best friend and I find myself chanting the first rule of the road "just keep left, just keep left" over and over as I'm driving.