What you encounter on the road from Mombasa as it unwinds southwards, all the way to Lunga Lunga, has become normal for me, if still surprising.
The road does not end there, let me be clear: it enters Tanzania and continues as far as Tanga, on the ocean, and then, perhaps tired of the coast, it bends westwards; but that is another story.

First of all, the traveller must know that the Road begins, as few other roads can boast, right where the sea ends - if it could ever end. Where the bulkhead of the barge that travels back and forth to the port of Kilindini touches land, there the Road begins.
The barge throws up carts, tuk-tuks, cars, parcels of people, and from there the Road is called upon to take care of them. What you encounter on the road from Mombasa as it unwinds southwards, all the way to Lunga Lunga, is a plain that turns from green to yellow at the first sun and from yellow back to green at the first rain.

The plain is cut by a concrete strip that is the Road and the lines, yellow in the centre - white on either side, come and go as they please.
On the left the Ocean rests behind the palm jungle, shy without ever showing itself. The traveller does not see Him but somehow knows He is there. Only He with His wind can ruffle the earth like this.

To the right nothing happens except the Shimba plateau rising rudely without much courtesy, but that too is another story.
It seems that someone from above has closed and opened his hand quickly - as if shaking crumbs from his fingers - thus scattering mosques, shops, cottages and canopies here and there. A pile here, a pile there until his hands turned white again.

Some mosques rise out of nowhere, it seems that someone forgot them there during a stop on the side of the road. They rest with their white or dirty yellow walls and their roofs and domes - modest and minute - green or orange or blue.
There you find the junctions, the rare spots where new roads - straight west - branch off the Road.

There life happens. Benches, planks, sheets, mangoes, cloths, motor taxis, avocados, minivans, soaps, canopies, chewing gum, peeling trees, live chickens, second-hand lounge tents.
People at the crossroads who go and people at the crossroads who stay.
You distinguish them from each other by the measure of haste in their eyes and in their hands.
Those who stay shout out bargains, destinations and prices.
Those who go bring with them not inconsiderable luggage.

Thirty metres later the Road returns alone and focused only on itself.
And so do the travellers. Silent, hoping to get home without expiring in one of the hundred overtakes that await them in the next thousand metres.
Resigned travellers, burnt by the heat, shaken by the vibrations of overcrowded vans, sweaty with worries, smoothed by the same journeys made too many times but heartened at every kilometre by the absence of alternatives for which to break their heads in indecision.

The Road is the only road.
The Road is the Road and travellers are grateful to you for your no-frills up and down.
Not a silly railway that might pollute less, not a beaten sand track that might be less busy.
Like a marriage that works and in which no lovers are required, so the Road begins in the sea and ends who knows where.