The Chinese Train

The Madaraka Express, a.k.a. The Chinese Train.  Note Kenya flag on front.

After a few days in Nairobi, getting my bearings and exploring Kenya's largest city, it was time to take in more of the country.  

My first venture out was toward the coast.  At first, I was considering flying or taking a bus.  Then I learned that a gleaming fast train had been put into service a few years before, running from Nairobi to the city of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean.  That settled it right there.  When I'm given a choice of transport over land, I prefer to go choo-choo.

Eventually I learned more about it, the train and the line.  The prime contractor was the China Road & Bridge Corporation, which supplied the engineering, the financing, etc., and hired 25,000 Kenyans to work on the project.  China also supplied the locomotive, the rolling stock, the training to operate the system, and more.

Furthermore, the Chinese are rebuilding the port of Mombasa to become a major cargo hub and connect into the new rail line, extending deep into the heart of Africa.  Part of the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative so much in the news, it's one of the projects that the Chinese are undertaking in approx. seventy countries worldwide.  That's correct -- seventy countries. 

What they're doing this all for, I'll leave to others to figure out.  I can tell you this though -- it was 360 miles (580 km) to the coast.  Cruising along in those new coaches, over that new rail bed at 80 mph, I've never had a more pleasant ride.  The cost was only 1,000 Shillings ($9 U.S.) and it arrived at Mombasa terminus at 8 p.m., on schedule to the minute. 

Snazzily dressed and courteous conductors welcome you aboard.

Inside of coach # 8, economy, the Madaraka Express.

Kenya flag on the left, Chinese flag on the right -- symbolizing the type of joint

venture that the Chinese are doing throughout the world.

Along The Way, The Tsavo Bridge

The new line that I was riding on ran alongside the old line completed during British Colonial rule in 1901.  The new was standard gauge track, the old was narrow gauge -- less stable and jerkier in the turns.  The old was called the Uganda Line because it extended through Kenya and on into Uganda.  It was also called the "Lunatic Express" because it chugged along so slowly and roughly and had so many stops that it supposedly drove people half nuts by the time it reached Mombasa.  

What took us five hours in the new train took the Lunatic Express twelve -- if all went well.  But veterans of the route will tell you, sometimes the old one took twenty-some hours to reach the coast.  I think that I'd be a little batty, too.  

Map of the old route from colonial times.

About three hours into my journey, I had struck up a conversation with a German trekker named Hendrik.  We were spotting elephants, giraffes, zebras and other big game along the way as the route cut through still-wild country.  For whatever reason, genes maybe, the elephants displayed a brownish color on their backs.  In the setting sun, they appeared copper-colored, like a shiny U.S. penny.  Quite a marvel to see.

Then crackled over the intercom:  Ladies and gentlemen, coming up on your left, the Tsavo Bridge.  This is where so many Indian workers building the old line in 1898 were attacked and eaten by a pair of lions...

What? I recoiled.  I had seen the movie on this a few years back; The Ghost And The Darkness, starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas.  It was a dramatized version of the man-eaters and the horrors that they inflicted the railway workers.  Despite studying up on Kenya before I left the U.S., I had missed this, that I'd be passing through the area.

As sometimes happens when traveling, I blunder upon places that I didn't even know were in my path!  This was one such occasion.

The Tsavo Bridge after completion in 1899.

Lt. Colonel Patterson and the "big lion" of the two; a male reputed to have killed and eaten dozens of railway workers over a nine-month period.  More than nine feet from nose to tail, it took eight men to carry it back to camp.  Patterson eventually shot the other lion as well.  Due to genetics, neither had the usual mane associated with male lions.  

 Man-Eater Fact vs. Fiction

When I returned to Nairobi a few weeks later, I visited the Nairobi Railway Museum there.  I wanted to get the story from the local angle, not after it had been processed through the U.S. and other Western media.

The Railway Museum.

 

The museum housed a few telling artifacts from the incidents -- a plastic box containing three of the claws from one of the man-eaters, for instance.  The official railroad logs of how many workers turned out missing for another.  But mainly the curator was a wealth of knowledge and facts about the attacks:

• Rather than the oft-reported 135 victims killed by the lions, the staff put the number at more like 35-40, with the bigger lion taking twice as many as the smaller.
• One night a lion did indeed jump onto the top of a structure and try to rip off the roofing to get at the workers huddled and trembling within.
• Another night, with one worker snatched by a lion and dragged off screaming, so many workers clambered up a tree to get away that the tree toppled over, spilling the terrified men off onto the ground.
• The hides off the lions eventually made their way to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago where they were fashioned to life-size and are on display there to this day.

Display at Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

Meanwhile, Back On The Express...

Hendrik, the German guy and I had reached an accord of our own, a joint-venture if you will:  He is an avid scuba diver and wanted to go underwater exploring off the Kenyan coast.  To keep his expenses down, he wanted someone to share an Airbnb rental in the beach town of Watamu.

Now at the time I didn't know Watamu from Kathmandu.  Nor did I know I know about an Airbnb rental.  But it took me about a second of deciding to tell him, "I'm in."  We decided to meet up in a few days and take it from there.

More often than I can remember this has happened:  I go off on these trips solo, only to join up with someone along the way.  It's gotten to the point where I expect it and my teaming up with Hendrik is a prime example.  As they say in German, the deal turned out to be sehr guts. 

 

Part II To Follow Next Weekend