“Kalli!!” I bellowed into my phone like a man trying to hail a submarine from a mountaintop—because somewhere deep in the imploding jungle of my logic, I’d decided that volume was a valid substitute for poor network reception.
8,000 kilometres away, in a land where traffic was safe and paperwork didn’t come with a risk of rabies, poor Kalli—my trusted aviation mechanic, involuntary life coach, and emotional punching bag—was either enjoying a well-deserved coffee break and cigarette number 49. Or maybe—far more likely—he was trapped in the hangar, enduring yet another airborne sermon from a pilot explaining the spiritual significance of altocumulus cloud patterns, how he once forgot to file a flight plan and lived to tell the tale, or that time he courageously descended to 1,500 feet over Schleswig-Holstein potato fields without wetting himself.
Kalli, to his eternal credit, had the rare talent of appearing mildly interested while mentally preparing for his own funeral. He radiated the calm resolve of a man who had long ago accepted that the only cure for pilot arrogance was meteorite impact. He’d concluded—correctly—that the world would be a better place if it came with fewer pilots, and even fewer stories involving them.
And yet, there he was. Somewhere between reanimating a crumpled Cessna, stripping screws with holy rage, and asking himself for the thousandth time why pilots consistently displayed the cognitive resilience of whipped cream in a sauna.
But not today.
Because now, his phone vibrated off the workbench like it was trying to escape the conversation. It flailed across the surface like a possessed pancake, clearly desperate to flee the incoming catastrophe screeching down the line—me, in full-blown nuclear panic mode.
As I screamed into the receiver with the sheer unfiltered panic of a man whose hair was on fire, whose pants had vanished, and who had just realised that his aircraft paperwork had been accidentally fed to a camel named “Captain.”
“I need your help!” I shrieked—because nothing says casual cross-continental favour like roaring down the line like you’re being mauled by bureaucracy in a back alley.
“Can you please call the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt and tell them to ACKNOWLEDGE my license? I’m standing at the KCAA and they’re looking at my paperwork like it was printed on pharaoh’s toilet papyrus and faxed in from Narnia’s DMV.”
There was silence. A long one. The kind of silence that thickens the air, curdles your optimism, and makes distant galaxies go, “Yikes.”
Then—plunk.
I’m fairly certain his cigarette dropped into his coffee mug. Followed by the faintest sizzle, like the dying breath of hope. I could also hear him rolling his eyes so hard they might’ve developed friction burns. Possibly—just possibly—he whispered to himself:
“Why me, Lord? Why always me?”
Somewhere on his end, tools stopped clinking. A wrench paused mid-air. Possibly a pigeon burst into flames. It was the audible sound of a man whose mental hard drive had just blue-screened from sheer exposure to my existence.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t curse. He didn’t hang up.
He simply… processed.
Like a veteran bomb technician staring at yet another suspiciously ticking suitcase marked "URGENT: FROM MARCEL."
And then, finally, in the slow, emotionally injured tone of a doctor informing a patient that licking power tools will not regrow neurones, he spoke:
“Marcel… what the hell did you do now…? I’m actually rather busy at the moment—with my head jammed inside an engine compartment the size of a beer crate, one hand holding a wrench and the other acting as an oil filter. Can we maybe, perhaps, talk later?”
“Don’t be silly, Kalli,” I chirped, chipper as a brain-damaged canary and utterly oblivious to the fact that he might be engaged in something more urgent than my 37th existential meltdown, brought to you by poor planning and newspaper activism.
“I’ll make it quick!” I beamed, with the serene confidence of a man live-tweeting his own mugging.
Somewhere on his end, I imagined him pausing mid-wrench, staring into the darkness of the engine like it was a metaphor for our friendship. Perhaps, for a fleeting second, he wondered if diving face-first into a running propeller could be classified as ‘occupational self-care.’
But I, naturally, carried on—basking in my own radiant, award-worthy incompetence like I’d just been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Catastrophic Optimism.
“These banana republic aviation baboons"—I could practically hear vertebrae snapping as heads spun around behind me. I was, after all, standing directly outside the KCAA headquarters, yelling into my phone with the poise of a malfunctioning vuvuzela at a UN peace summit during a moment of silence.
The concept that they might be offended? Completely alien to me. Subtlety, after all, had never been my strong point. Not when there were volume knobs to break and international incidents to summon.
To me, this was just Tuesday.
To them?
Probably grounds for deportation—plus a complimentary padded helmet fitting and a psychiatric evaluation printed on recycled banana leaves.
“They want some kind of proof that my license is valid. You know—like a confirmation, or a scroll, or a blood oath—whatever the Germans use these days. Just call the Luftfahrtbundesamt for me, tell them I’m a licensed pilot with moral superiority, rugged good looks, and a mild saviour complex—and that I’m currently trying to navigate this KCAA paper swamp before they revoke my oxygen privileges. Email, fax, carrier pigeon—I don’t know, Kalli, you’re the adult here!”
I heard nothing. Just the distant clatter of a spanner hitting the floor. Possibly followed by a soft, resigned whimper. He was probably reaching for a drink—or a defibrillator.
Only a few hours earlier, I had started the day as cheerful as a toddler on Christmas Eve—one who had just discovered that not only was Santa real, but he also owned a toy store, accepted bribes, and occasionally handed out helicopters.
At that time, I was still living in Shlomi’s guesthouse—though “guest” was a generous title for someone whose continued presence now qualified as squatting. My housing situation had escalated to DEFCON 2, especially after Shlomi threatened—on no uncertain terms—that if I didn’t find a new place soon, I’d end up sharing a bed with his 70-year-old mother.
A woman, I might add, who snored like a rhino with bronchitis and farted with such relentless conviction that, according to Shlomi, she’d be evicted from a hippo pool for violating environmental standards.
Now, I might be a slow learner, but even I understood that message without subtitles.
So the agenda was simple.
- Drive to the KCAA.
- Harass Jonathan—the undead front desk zombie—into surrendering my new pilot license, hopefully just to be rid of me forever.
- Head to Limuru to check out some guy’s airstrip.
- Improvise from there.
A flawless masterplan.
So—giddy and delusional—I launched myself into the ProBox, a vehicle so tragically underwhelming it made a Bombay rickshaw look like a stretch limousine for Saudi royalty. Gabby, the neighbour and part-time safari wrangler, had lent it to me under the condition that I “don’t drive it into a crater or an embassy.”
The engine whimpered.
I roared.
And off I went—towards the sacred halls of Kenya’s Aviation Vatican, completely unaware that by sundown, I’d be screaming at phone poles, assaulting inboxes, and nearly starting a diplomatic firestorm in the KCAA parking lot.
But for now?
I was radiant.
Unstoppable.
And—as always—profoundly under-qualified for what was about to happen.
“Hi Jonathan, good to see you again!” I bellowed with the cheerful desperation of a man auditioning for a survival reality show—where the goal was not to outlive wild animals, but to outwit East African aviation paperwork.
“It’s me, Marcel. And I’ve got all the documents right here—freshly printed, alphabetised, and probably still smouldering from the printer.”
Jonathan nearly ejected himself from his office chair, clearly unprepared for this early-morning ambush. He—and the entire supporting cast of brain-dead furniture impersonators around him—hadn’t expected anyone to storm this place before noon, let alone someone with pulse, purpose, and a file folder thick enough to choke a hippo. The double doors had been pushed open with the grace of a bank robbery, and I’d thundered up the stairs like a caffeinated IRS agent chasing a tax fugitive.
Jonathan, who possessed the resting vitality of a sedated manatee and moved with the elegance of industrial rust, now regarded me with the weary disdain of someone who just realised the “difficult client” was back—and breeding forms. His coworkers, meanwhile, resumed their sacred morning ritual: gazing into the middle distance like war survivors trying to forget. Jonathan rose. Slowly. Shoulders sagging. One eye on me, the other pleading with his unconscious colleagues for divine intervention. He slumped to the counter like a condemned priest preparing to hear the confession of Satan’s intern.
I handed him my sacred checklist like it was a peace offering—though we both knew it was a declaration of war:
- Written Test? Check.
- Medical? Check.
- Headshot? Check—although it looked more like a mugshot of someone arrested for smuggling goats.
- Copies of the last six pages of my logbook—which, through divine inspiration and moderate Photoshop sorcery, had miraculously multiplied overnight from 3 to 7. Check.
- Official KCAA fee, plus an unofficial “expedited appreciation token” of $20 stuffed discreetly between the pages. Double check.
Then—with the malevolent joy of a DMV clerk announcing the death of your vacation—Jonathan raised his stubby little finger and tapped item number six:
The confirmation from the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt.
The mythical scroll.
The holy grail in this bureaucratic treasure hunt.
“So sorry, Boss,” he grinned, baring teeth that hadn’t seen joy since 1987. “But that confirmation email hasn’t arrived yet. Maybe next week. Or month. Or… who knows?”
He shrugged with the carefree fatalism of a man who just condemned your soul to another round of bureaucratic limbo—and loved it.
I stared at him.
Blink.
One long, solitary blink.
The kind that said “If I had a grenade, you’d be gone by now.”
“Back in a sec,” I chirped with the delusional confidence of someone who believed crop circles were made by diplomatic lizards and that planes stayed up because God owed them a favour.
“I’ll just make a quick call—sort this out. Won’t take a minute.”
Spoiler: It did.
That’s how I ended up—yet again—tormenting my unfortunate friend Kalli. A man who had already endured more emotional damage at my hands than a therapist could fix in a decade.
And now? Now he had the divine pleasure of contacting the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt—Germany’s official Ministry of No.
I imagined the scene as clearly as if I were there:
Kalli hunched over his desk, head in hand, chain-smoking into the receiver like a hostage negotiator running out of hope.
“No sir, please,” I could almost hear him pleading, voice cracking under the weight of yet another Romdane-related breakdown. “We need that confirmation email. Yes, that one. The one that proves he’s not some flight-obsessed lunatic who forged his license in a cereal box factory. Please, I’m begging you—for the collective mental health of every aviation official between Hamburg and Nairobi—just… send the damn email.”
A pause.
More grovelling.
“Yes, I know he sounds insane. Yes, I know he probably is. But if you don’t send that confirmation, he’ll come back. With more forms. And questions. And… plans. Plans involving elephants and helicopters. Please. I have a family.”
By this point, I could practically hear a stunned silence on the other end.
Some poor German clerk blinking into their headset, wondering how their peaceful morning of form-checking had morphed into a Kafkaesque plea to exorcise a rogue pilot from the global system.
And still, I stood proudly in front of the KCAA, grinning like a man who believed he was one email away from international aviation glory.
Oblivious. Radiant.
A bureaucratic fever dream wrapped in sunscreen and denial.
“Ping.”
That infernal, ancient sound—like a toaster having an aneurysm—rang out from Jonathan’s fossilised desktop setup, still proudly powered by what I could only assume was Windows 95, Service Pack Never.
“You’ve got mail.”
The office froze.
Not in the metaphorical sense—literally. Froze.
If his coworkers hadn’t already been mid-gaze into the metaphysical abyss, they might’ve gasped. But since their souls had long since vacated their bodies around 2003, they just sat there. Fossils.
Jonathan, however, moved.
Or rather, he jolted—like a tranquillised ostrich hit with a second dart.
His head snapped toward the monitor.
Then to me.
Then back to the monitor.
Back to me.
A flicker of genuine fear crossed his face.
Not confusion. Not annoyance.
No—existential dread.
He staggered toward his ancient terminal like a man approaching a cursed scroll.
His fingers hovered above the mouse.
Click.
The screen lit up with the unholy glow of Microsoft Outlook’s revenge.
“There… there’s a message,” he whispered, voice cracking like a cursed priest reading the final chapter of Revelations.
“From… your German aviation authority…”
He turned pale.
Like ghost-meets-laundry-bleach pale.
His jaw twitched.
A tremble.
I swear, one of his colleagues tipped over in slow motion.
The coffee machine shorted out.
The lights flickered.
Somewhere, a goat probably screamed.
I smiled. Beamed, actually. Like the Antichrist unwrapping a fruit basket from Lucifer himself.
“Let me guess…”
I stepped closer, savouring the collapse.
“My confirmation?”
He didn’t nod.
He didn’t speak.
He simply stared—wide-eyed and broken—like he had just witnessed either a miracle or a bureaucratic apocalypse.
Either way—victory was mine.
I had a déjà-vu so intense it could’ve qualified as a full-blown time loop. Nine months earlier—give or take a few inter-dimensional meltdowns—I had just finished my check ride and been officially unleashed on the unsuspecting flock of aviators. Enrico, my instructor and soon-to-be trauma survivor, had tried to prepare me with his usual deadpan realism.
“Within two weeks,” he said, “your license should arrive in the mail.”
I looked at him the way one might look at a man offering beachfront property in Wyoming—equal parts concern and suspicion.
“Hold it, Enrico. Two weeks? Their office is 100 kilometres from here. What are they doing—carving it into stone tablets?”
“Yep,” he replied.
Straight-faced.
Dead inside.
“Shortest I ever heard was ten days. But that was only because the guy processing licenses was the pilot’s cousin. Family discount on efficiency.”
I blinked.
Nodded solemnly.
And then, like a caffeinated cult leader at a town hall with no attendees, I raised my arms and declared:
“Watch me, Enrico. It’s Friday. I’ll have my license by Tuesday.”
Enrico stared at me like I had just announced I was the reincarnation of Charles Lindbergh and would now attempt a solo circumnavigation on a bicycle.
“Not in my lifetime,” he muttered.
Which, in his case, was a realistic estimate.
Cut to Monday, 08:00 AM. I was on the phone with the licensing officer—armed with nothing but optimism, charm, and the self-delusion of a man who thinks bureaucracy is optional.
“Yes sir, good morning, Marcel Romdane here. Yes, that one. Oh? You know the check ride examiner? Yes, she was lovely indeed. Listen, I’ll be in town tomorrow, just by divine coincidence—would you be so kind as to issue my license today so I can pick it up then? No no, not today. Let’s not rush perfection. Tomorrow’s fine. Thank you so much, you're a national treasure.”
Tuesday. Midday.
I snapped a photo of my freshly minted license and sent it to Enrico.
Phone rang instantly.
“Marcel,” he said, voice trembling like a priest watching an exorcism in reverse, “Are you telling me… you walked into the licensing office and they just… gave it to you? In two days?”
“No, Enrico,” I chirped—like a deranged canary on a meth bender, dipped in espresso and wrapped in blind optimism. “I could’ve picked it up yesterday, but I didn’t want to seem impatient. I didn’t want to rush him…”
Enrico hung up.
No goodbye. No further comment.
That was the day he stopped trying to understand cause and effect.
That was the day he learned about the Romdane Way™.
Where logic comes to die.
And paperwork fears my name.
Thirty minutes later, I emerged from the smouldering ruins of the KCAA licensing office, clutching my freshly minted Kenyan Private Pilot License like it was a golden ticket to the stratosphere. I was beaming like a turkey that had survived Thanksgiving, unaware—or perhaps completely aware—that I had just triggered a bureaucratic event horizon.
The entire ordeal, from existential collapse to paper-based resurrection, had lasted about three weeks.
Painfully slow for me.
But as I would learn in the years to come, this was light-speed by East African aviation standards—a pace so unnatural, so utterly heretical, it would only be whispered about in dimly lit hangars under a full moon.
“There once was this Muzungu…” they’d mutter.
“Did what others do in six months… in under three weeks.”
“He must have bribed Lucifer, or threatened someone’s goat.”
Inside the KCAA office, I left behind a scene of emotional carnage. Jonathan looked like he’d aged 17 years. His colleagues—once frozen in existential limbo—now stared at the exit as if considering whether defenestration was a valid retirement plan. One of them might have even climbed onto the windowsill, whispering:
“If that lunatic comes back… I’m gone.”
And just like that, I disappeared into the Nairobi sun—license in hand, chaos in my wake—a one-man aviation apocalypse with a mild sunburn and an Airstrip to locate and a Land Rover to find.
The day I broke Germany's Bureaucracy / KCAA is still smouldering / KCAA Proudly Presents: PPL converted inside of three weeks...
The Land Rover (or: Size Matters in Nairobi)
“Marcel,” Shlomi said with the solemn gravity of a UN weapons inspector discovering plutonium in a preschool, “You need a car.”
I nodded, smiling like an idiot on his first day at clown school, fully expecting that this generous proclamation meant he was about to toss me the keys to one of his glorious Land Cruisers. Or at the very least, his personal driver—armed, air-conditioned, and ideally carrying snacks.
But instead, he pointed next door with a grin that could curdle holy water and said,
“Gabby knows you’re coming. She’ll give you a great rate. Plenty of cars.”
Then—without warning—he shoved me off his property like a Jehovah’s Witness during tax season.
Now, Gabby, high priestess of safari logistics and CEO of Sun World Safaris, ran an impressive fleet of vehicles next door—mostly hulking Land Cruisers designed to bulldoze through everything from muddy riverbeds to existential crises.
So I strutted over there, chest out, chin high, deluded with visions of myself thundering through Nairobi in a lifted V8 off-roader, windows down, aviators on, soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. A muzungu marauder. An urban gladiator.
And then it happened.
Gabby emerged with the calm expression of someone about to commit a minor act of psychological warfare. She handed me a key that looked like it belonged to a broom closet in a Romanian orphanage.
“That’s for the ProBox,” she said, pointing to what I assumed was a joke. A prank. A discarded prop from a Soviet sitcom.
But no—there it was.
The ProBox.
A car in the same way instant noodles are considered cuisine. It looked like a toaster oven on plastic wheels. Manufactured by… nobody knows. Possibly built by an underground cult of depressed, Russian lawnmower engineers. Its entire existence screamed “death trap for the emotionally unstable.”
“It’s for you,” Gabby explained with what I now realize was thinly veiled pity. “Shlomi said you love these cars. I don’t get it, but hey, knock yourself out—forty bucks a week, and you’re mobile.”
She leaned in. “Just… be careful, yeah? This thing gets ignored by literally everything. Cars. Bikes. Children. Donkeys. God.”
I stood there like a rejected contestant on Top Gear for Orphans, trying to swallow the metallic taste of pride collapsing in on itself.
Meanwhile, Gabby—clearly proud of her humanitarian efforts—turned around and walked away, leaving me alone with my new fate.
The ProBox. A box-shaped disgrace to engineering. A metal insult on wheels. A vehicle so underwhelming it made an airport trolley look like an intercontinental ballistic missile. So underpowered, it needed encouragement. And probably therapy. So invisible, I suspected it came factory-installed with a cloaking device.
As I slid behind the wheel, knees touching my chin and self-worth vaporising by the second, I had only one thought:
This is how reputations die.
Not with a crash. Not with a bang.
But with the "tick-tick-tick" of a one-litre shame wagon named ProBox.
And thus began my tragic, mildly humiliating, and utterly ridiculous courtship with the least aerodynamic object ever to grace Nairobi’s roads.
I was barely out on the road when a hulking blur of steel roared past me—some mid-range Volkswagen, I think—but from my pitiful seating position, which was roughly equivalent to being folded into a children’s potty chair, it may as well have been a battleship doing 90 knots through rush hour. It nearly obliterated me. From inside the ProBox, the sonic boom nearly liquefied my internal organs. To anyone else, it was a casual overtake. To me, it was Dunkirk in traffic.
I clutched the steering wheel—a brittle excuse of plastic that felt like it had been moulded out of recycled Happy Meal toys—and squinted at the world above me, because I was now effectively part of the asphalt. The average bicycle courier towered over me. Hell, toddlers on tricycles looked like traffic cops from my perspective. I stared in horror at my own reflection in the rearview mirror: a grown man in a glorified tuna can, clinging to sanity by a seatbelt made of communist shoelaces.
Then came the real humiliation.
I turned onto the main road with the sluggish commitment of a government employee nearing retirement. Pedestrians actually paused—paused—to gape at me. They pointed. They howled with laughter. They whipped out their phones faster than paparazzi spotting a Kardashian in the wild. One guy nearly choked on his mandazi. Another clutched his ribs, doubled over, and fell into a ditch. Children chased me, took selfies, and asked if the circus was in town. Somewhere behind me, a rooster crowed out of sheer disrespect.
It was like being the punchline of an international slapstick film no one asked me to star in.
And it got worse.
At every traffic light, I got annihilated by retirees, delivery scooters, and at one point—I kid you not—a nun jogging. One old woman overtook me using a walker. The ProBox didn’t accelerate. It mournfully negotiated with physics while everyone else treated red lights as vague suggestions and my presence as an optional illusion.
But nothing prepared me for the Nairobi Roundabout Death Olympics. Unlike the charming little merry-go-rounds in Scandinavian countries where drivers yield, smile, and pretend to care—Roundabouts in Nairobi are not traffic features. They are open combat zones. There are no rules. No mercy. Just a chaotic, four-lane demolition derby where hesitation equals death and the only driving philosophy is: May the biggest bumper win.
And I was in a vehicle that would lose a staring contest with a shopping cart. A car so laughable it could’ve been sold in toy stores.
As I attempted to enter the circle, a matatu (Kenyan public transport van, often held together with prayer and duct tape) sliced across my bow like a torpedo. A Land Cruiser loomed behind me, revving its engine like a mechanical demon. The driver was on his phone, probably texting his lawyer that he might need bail if he accidentally obliterated a ProBox-shaped speed bump.
On the other side, a lorry—built sometime between World War I and the Big Bang—plowed toward me with the indifference of an ancient god. It didn’t slow down. It didn’t blink. It knew I was there. And it chose violence.
Panicking, I yanked the wheel and swerved directly into the median—narrowly avoiding vehicular obliteration and instead joining a group of equally shocked Maasai goats who looked up at me with a mixture of curiosity and judgment, clearly wondering what this wheeled embarrassment was doing desecrating their lunch spot. One stared at me for a solid 10 seconds before shaking its head in visible disappointment. Another chewed my side mirror.
And the ProBox?
It coughed.
Not the mechanical kind.
It coughed, sighed, and emitted a low, haunted whimper like a prisoner who’d just been told there was no Geneva Convention.
I swear—I swear—the dashboard display flashed something. Not kilometres. Not engine heat. It just read:
“WHY.”
I sat there, goats munching on my dignity, a line of honking traffic behind me, and my pride disintegrating like the ProBox’s brakes.
And still, somehow, I whispered to myself:
“This is fine.”
Every single day began the same way: me squeezing myself into what could only be described as a vehicular cry for help. The ProBox—Satan’s idea of a practical joke—looked like a melted toaster had mated with a Tupperware drawer and spawned something even a scrapyard would reject on moral grounds.
Driving it wasn’t transportation. It was a humiliation ritual.
This plastic shoehorn of a car had the off-road capability of a hairdryer, the acceleration of a tranquillised cow, and the dignity of a wet sock in a diplomatic meeting. If you squinted, you’d think I was riding a lunchbox. If you looked closely, you’d start crying. Even pedestrians slowed down to get a good look at the tragedy on wheels I was commanding—and then laughed so hard they needed CPR.
As I juddered into yet another roundabout—known locally as The Circle of Death—I was greeted by a biblical traffic pile-up: a matatu bouncing on three wheels while blasting reggae, a cement truck with a crucifix taped to the front grill (because Jesus takes the wheel when brakes are optional), and a goat. Just staring at me. Judging me. Possibly tweeting about me.
That’s when I made a solemn vow:
“I will acquire a Land Rover. Or die trying.”
There was no middle ground. The next collision wouldn’t be survivable—not for me, not for the goat, not for this plastic disgrace masquerading as a car.
And so I did what all great fools do:
I summoned the universe. I pleaded with any deity who might be open for business. I begged. I bribed the gods with imaginary sacrifices. I offered my soul, my logbook, and half a bottle of contraband whisky if they’d just get me something vaguely resembling an actual car.
And like always, the universe listened.
And then proceeded to dump napalm in my cereal.
My phone rang.
“Marcel, it’s Shlomi!”
He sounded suspiciously enthusiastic—like a mortician who’s just discovered a coupon for free embalming fluid.
“Hey Marcel! You still want a Land Rover, right? I’ve got one for you. I’m looking at it now. It’s… great. I mean, for a Land Rover. You sure you don’t want a Land Cruiser instead?”
“Land Cruiser?” I hissed, offended to my core. “I’m not going to liberate elephants—or Africa—in a goddamn Toyota. That’s like storming Normandy in a Prius. I want British steel. A Land Rover. The Queen had one!”
Oh how the gods must’ve laughed. Because this? This was the exact moment I sealed my doom. Shlomi meanwhile, paused. Maybe to consider if I was beyond saving. Maybe to Google the number for psychiatric emergency services.
But I was already inflating with pride.
In my delusional movie trailer of life, the Land Rover was my noble steed. I was the renegade bush pilot, safari messiah, whiskey-fuelled chaos agent on wheels. Dust flying. Aviators on. Shirt open.
Cue slow-motion elephants trumpeting in the sunset while the soundtrack of freedom played.
So when Shlomi dangled the keys to destiny, I lunged like a starving raccoon at a McNugget.
What I didn’t realize—what I never realize—is that my understanding of off-road vehicles ranked somewhere between “completely wrong” and “danger to society.” I could barely tell a Land Rover from a garden shed. My automotive knowledge made Paris Hilton look like a diesel mechanic.
But did that stop me? Absolutely not.
I was deliriously happy. I was delusionally optimistic. I was willingly driving a ProBox and still thought life was trending upward.
“Where are you now?” Shlomi asked.
“Hard to say,” I said, honking at a herd of herbivores mating in the middle of the road. “I’m wedged between a matatu on fire and what I believe is a coffin delivery truck. I’ll be there in… I don’t know. Four hours. If the cows let me out.”
And that, dear reader, was how I marched—gleefully and moronically—into the next catastrophic chapter of my life.
On a collision course with British engineering.
And reality.
“Hi, I am Mar—”
I shouted into the room like a deranged game show host introducing a prize nobody wanted.
Not even as a joke.
Addressing the empty chairs where spectators—or at the very least, emergency exits—should’ve been installed by law.
“I know,” croaked a voice from the shadows.
Gravelly. Accented. Laced with the vague menace of a rusted accordion being played during a sewer stabbing.
“You must be Marcel.”
“Oh.”
I beamed—like a moron who thinks the firing squad showed up just to hear him sing karaoke.
Finally—recognition.
Things were upwardly mobile already.
My ego inflated like a birthday balloon at a funeral.
“Where’d you hear of me? Dr. Gatabaki? Chris from Yellow Wings? I hope not Jonathan from KCAA...”
Silence.
The kind of silence that makes car alarms nervous.
The kind that suggests someone is deciding whether to kill you or adopt you as a pet.
Then finally:
“No. Shlomi said you’d come.”
Like a prophecy. Or a death threat scribbled on a napkin.
“Ah. Right.”
My ego popped like a champagne cork in a crematorium.
Just like that—deflated again.
Still hissing.
“You here for the Land Rover.”
It wasn’t a question.
It was an obituary.
Written in past tense.
For me.
The air had texture.
Thick—not with smoke—but with danger-flavoured marinara.
My spine stiffened. My instincts held a union meeting and voted for mutiny.
My hand twitched, half-expecting a switchblade. Or at least a waiter with a final meal menu.
“Err… yes,” I squeaked, still nursing the wound of not being recognised.
What had I expected—confetti? A marching band? An oil change?
My voice cracked like a puberty memoir written in Comic Sans.
“Where’s Shlomi?” I asked, just to keep the room from killing me.
“He left…”
The voice slithered out of the shadows like the opening monologue of a Bond villain who also moonlights as a mortician.
“…about five hours ago.”
“Ah.”
I nodded. As if being abandoned inside a potential mafia front made perfect logistical sense.
“Got held up in traffic. Herd of cows,” I mumbled, clinging to my last shred of dignity like a motivational sticker on a wet watermelon.
“Couldn’t push through…”
“Why not?” the voice asked, genuinely offended. “Usually they move. What were you driving—a scooter?”
I hesitated.
Then confessed.
Like a man revealing a war crime under poor legal advice.
“No… a ProBox.”
There was silence.
A silence so sharp it shaved my ego clean off and stapled it to the wall with rusty upholstery nails.
“Oh,” said the voice.
Not in anger.
Not in surprise.
But in the same tone one might use when discovering someone has shown up to a gunfight… with a banana peel.
My surroundings slowly swam into view.
I realised I was standing in what must’ve once been an Italian restaurant—back when Mussolini still had fans.
Now it looked more like the witness protection program for expired pizza chains.
Red-and-white tablecloths stolen directly from a B-grade mafia film where even the extras demanded hazard pay.
Furniture that looked suspiciously like it had been liberated from a bankrupt cathedral.
Lighting so dim it could conceal atrocity. Possibly several.
And the kitchen...
Oh god, the kitchen.
It radiated pure Cold War nostalgia.
A kebab stand that had defected from East Berlin and lost its paperwork halfway through Checkpoint Charlie.
Then I saw him.
A small man.
Hunched over a table the size of a helipad—perfect real estate for either a gypsy wedding or a Satanic sermon, depending on the lighting and whether the goat showed up.
He didn’t rise.
He didn’t smile.
Just stared at me with the calm intensity of a snake waiting for the heat to fade from your corpse so it can digest you without indigestion.
“I am Davide,” he said at last.
The words didn’t land so much as ooze out of his mouth, each one soaked in an accent that reeked of saltwater, tax evasion, and regret. The kind of accent that’s usually followed by cement shoes or a very polite but permanent disappearance.
His voice had the texture of smoked glass and back-alley betrayal.
He looked like he’d done things.
Unspeakable things.
Possibly with parmesan.
“I’m a friend of Shlomi’s,” he continued, flipping through a book that might’ve been a ledger, a cookbook, or a kill list annotated with wine pairings.
“He said you are interested in buying a Land Rover. It’s outside. In front of the restaurant. You must have seen it when you parked.”
I swallowed hard.
Land Rover? Outside?
That felt like a trap.
“Must’ve missed it somehow,” I said, voice cracking like a squeaky toy in a hostage video.
“Must be loads of cars out there, right?”
Davide blinked once.
A slow, deliberate blink.
The sort of blink that suggested patience… but only because even blinking burned three of his twelve daily calories.
He was rail-thin—the kind of man who looked like he was renting his shadow on an hourly basis. If the wind so much as sneezed in his direction, he’d need mooring cables to remain in the same postal code.
“Actually,” he finally said, each syllable sliding off his tongue like rancid olive oil, “it’s only three parking spots. Total.”
He paused.
His eyes narrowed, sharp and oily, boring through me like I was a typo on a mafia menu.
“You probably parked right behind it.”
Then came the silence.
Not just any silence.
The silence.
The silence of a man watching a sock puppet parallel park a ProBox.
Legally.
With confidence.
And hazard lights.
He sighed.
Not like a man annoyed.
But like a man who’s seen this before.
Like this wasn’t his first banana-peel-at-a-gunfight moment.
“Okay,” he said at last, rising with the grace of a skeleton covered in spite,
“Let’s go out and check.”
Giddy.
Giddy—like a marbled dairy cow en route to a Texas BBQ, waving its own monogrammed napkin and RSVP’ing “extra crispy.”
I followed Davide into the Nairobi sun, blinded by hope, mechanical illiteracy, and the kind of optimism usually found in cult leaders and toddlers approaching electrical sockets.
My eyes were locked—hypnotically glued—to Davide’s bald dome, which glistened like a freshly waxed bowling ball at a gangster retirement home.
That head had seen things.
Murders.
Bribes.
Maybe a lasagna-related vendetta.
I, however, had seen nothing.
Not a carburettor. Not a brake disc. Not the truth.
My mechanical knowledge was on par with a soft cheese.
A French one.
I couldn’t have told a crankshaft from a churro if my life depended on it.
Which—soon enough—it would.
I wasn’t just excited.
I was clinically unhinged.
Like a vegan at a lion enclosure wearing tofu-scented underwear and humming The Circle of Life.
Because finally—finally—I was about to rid myself of the ProBox:
That tragic excuse for a car that looked like someone had stapled four wheels to a microwave and asked it to survive Nairobi traffic.
I had been mocked.
Overtaken by wheelchairs.
Nearly eaten by matatus.
Once, a child pointed and asked his mother if I was homeless.
I needed this.
I deserved this.
Or so I told myself, while internally narrating the cinematic trailer of my new life:
“In a world of chaos… one man… one Land Rover… and absolutely no mechanical competence.”
I could already taste the imaginary dust clouds of heroic travel.
They tasted like redemption. And tetanus.
Davide gestured ahead.
“There she is.”
She.
Oh, how he said it.
Like introducing a mistress who doubles as a lawsuit.
Parked directly in front of my ProBox—which I had somehow failed to notice, despite parking six inches behind it like a lobotomised hamster—was a battered green Land Rover.
Now—had I known anything about Land Rovers—or anything at all that couldn’t be Googled in a moment of regret—I might’ve recognised what I was staring at:
A decomposing relic.
A fossil on wheels.
A mobile sarcophagus with an identity crisis.
But to my delusional city-boy soul?
It was Excalibur with a clutch.
“Care for a test drive?” Davide purred, oozing used-car-lot energy with a suspicious side of KGB informant turned Airbnb host.
He smiled—no, bared his teeth—like a great white shark offering complimentary dental work to a bleeding seal.
“Absolutely!” I replied, because by that point my inner monologue had been replaced by a timpani roll and a full orchestra belting the theme from The Great Escape.
Davide gestured magnanimously toward the cabin of doom.
“Hop in. I’ll back us out. You drive once we’re clear. Brakes are… British.”
“British?”
“Yes. As in fragile, colonial, and mostly ceremonial.”
I laughed like a helium-huffing donkey watching its own funeral.
Because what else do you do when your brain’s been hijacked by Hollywood delusions and the ghost of Karen Blixen whispering, “You’ll die out here, darling. But fabulously.”
I didn’t ask about the mileage.
Didn’t ask about the service history, the VIN, the rat colony.
Didn’t even ask whether it had served time as a UN field latrine.
I was too dumb to realize I was being eaten alive.
Davide inserted the key.
Twisted.
And then—
CLICK.
Silence.
Absolute. Biblical.
The kind of silence that makes priests reconsider their faith.
I blinked.
No engine.
No dashboard lights.
Just a single click—like a dying typewriter giving up mid-suicide note.
He tried again.
Click.
Still nothing.
Not even the ghost of combustion.
Not even a cough.
“Must be cold,” he muttered, like a war criminal blaming the weather.
“Oh yeah,” I nodded—eagerly. Idiotically.
Like a man who thinks Titanic was just bad parking.
“That might be the problem.”
We were in Nairobi.
It was 29°C in the shade.
Hotter than sin in a confession booth.
I was sweating through my IQ.
And I had just blamed the chill.
At this point, any normal person would have excused themselves politely and set themselves on fire out of shame.
But not me.
No. I leaned forward—eager, hopeful, clinically unwell—and said:
“Maybe we just need to push-start it?”
Push-start it.
A Land Rover.
A two-ton fossilised relic that hadn’t moved since the first Bush administration.
A mechanical corpse so old it probably remembered the Berlin Wall—and missed it.
I was about to buy a metal crypt that couldn’t start, couldn’t brake, couldn’t move without divine intervention—and my main concern was whether or not it had a cupholder.
In that moment, I wasn’t a man.
I was a walking red flag.
A full-blown cautionary tale in flip-flops.
A TED Talk titled:
“How Not to Buy a Car in Africa: The Romdane Doctrine.”
Sponsored by Regret™, powered by Bad Decisions Inc., and now screening nightly in the charred IMAX theatre of my nightmares.
And I was only just getting started.
Because once we cleared the parking lot, the delusion kicked into overdrive.
This—this—was what I had been dreaming about.
No more bullying from matatus.
No more shame of driving Nairobi’s answer to a microwave on wheels.
The ProBox had always been a paradox—bigger on the inside than the outside.
By all known laws of physics, no adult should’ve fit in there.
Maybe an amputee.
Maybe two circus contortionists folded like origami and stacked vertically.
And yet, day after day, I had crammed myself inside like discount luggage in a Ryanair overhead bin.
But now—now—I was up in a Land Rover.
A vehicle that actually gave me altitude.
A throne on wheels.
For the first time, I could see the road.
I could even see the potholes before they opened like demonic mouths to devour me.
I was drunk on height. On delusion. On ego and exhaust fumes.
Other drivers actually made room.
Parting like I was Moses with a head gasket.
We gloriously glided 500 meters through the chaos.
A cinematic float.
A hero’s arc.
We made a left onto some quiet road—
—and then the Rover died.
Not stalled. Not struggled.
Died.
No click.
No groan.
No ghost of a dying starter.
Just the mechanical equivalent of a swan dive into an open grave.
Performed without flair. Without warning.
Without even one last dramatic cough.
I turned to Davide.
He looked at me with the calm glee of a man who’d just watched another sucker fall into the pit trap he resets every Tuesday.
“No problem,” he chirped, cheerful as a funeral clown.
“This happens sometimes. Probably bad fuel. Or a loose cable. I’ll check. Wait here.”
Wait here.
That should have been my divine cue to evacuate—
To walk back to the ProBox, kiss its dented microwave-shaped hood like a war bride at a train station, and start hunting for a Toyota Land Cruiser.
Something built for minefields, not mimosa brunches.
Something you can drive through civil war zones and still use as a shelter.
Hell, even a beetle on stilts would’ve had better odds.
Or a donkey with anxiety.
Or a shopping cart with hope.
Anything but this British relic—
This rusted middle finger from an empire that had lost India, lost Africa, and was now actively losing the will to combust.
But no.
I stood there.
Nodding like a televangelist mid-concussion.
Because I had already fallen in love.
And this Land Rover—this coffin on wheels—was whispering sweet, oily nothings in my ear.
But of course, I didn’t.
No. I stood there, nodding like a lunatic groomsman at a shotgun wedding, smiling with the kind of confidence usually reserved for lobotomy patients and cult leaders.
Because in my deranged brain, this wasn’t a vehicle.
It was destiny.
A soulmate forged in rust and historical trauma.
The kind of relationship where your friends stage interventions, your family blocks your number, and complete strangers eventually build a roadside shrine out of used brake fluid and dashed hopes.
Instead of leaving, I unfolded myself out of the Rover’s cabin—like a giraffe attempting yoga inside a washing machine—and joined Davide, who was already under the hood.
Only, it wasn’t a hood. It was a war crime in sheet metal.
What lay beneath didn’t resemble an engine compartment so much as a bomb disposal test site for ADHD mechanics.
Wires led nowhere.
Hoses dangled like rejected intestines from a butcher's bin.
Random bolts lay scattered like the wreckage of an argument between gravity and God.
Davide poked at it with the nonchalance of a man stirring soup with a live grenade.
And then—five minutes later, against all known laws of physics, necromancy, and post-colonial automotive despair—the Land Rover coughed back to life.
Not “running.”
Not “fixed.”
Just… animated.
Like a zombie with irritable bowel syndrome, fuelled by spite and bresaola fumes.
And so—naturally—we climbed back in.
Me, high on delusion,
Davide, still chewing like nothing had happened,
And the Rover… rumbling forward like Satan’s Uber toward his pizza joint/Italian restaurant/possible money-laundering front…
“So, how was it?”
Shlomi looked at me the way a parole officer looks at an inmate who might either be released… or shot with a tranquilliser dart on the spot.
“Oh, she’s hot!” I grinned, puffed up with the deranged pride of someone who had just discovered that cars are called she and now thought he’d unlocked the secrets of mechanical enlightenment.
I was beaming—no, radiating—like a poodle humping a Tesla charging port during rush hour.
“I love it. What a ride. Thanks for the tip!”
“Hot?” Shlomi repeated, slowly, like the word itself was a toxic spill. His eyes narrowed. He looked at me as if I’d confessed to a sexual awakening involving Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and a jar of mayonnaise.
“Did you buy it?” he asked carefully, leaning back as though his wicker fauteuil might absorb the blast radius of my incoming idiocy.
“Oh yeah,” I nodded so hard my neck cracked and half my brain cells defected to Botswana. If stupidity had a Richter scale, I’d have triggered tsunami warnings in three countries and split Japan into confetti.
“Cool. Well… where is it?”
I froze. Like a man on trial being asked when he last saw his pants. My hand clutched my glass as if gin could provide legal representation.
“Errr… I’ll pick her up in a few days,” I muttered, my voice suddenly as fragile as a condom in a cactus patch.
“Some paperwork still needs, you know… processing.”
Shlomi squinted.
“This is Nairobi. There is no paperwork. He should’ve handed you the keys, grunted something about the clutch, and disappeared into the night. That’s it.”
“Well…” I inhaled like a scuba diver about to dive headfirst into a septic tank. “There are just a few minor issues that need… handling.”
Shlomi stared. No blinking. His gaze sharpened like a tax auditor who’d just sniffed out a fraudulent shoelace claim.
“Like?”
I swallowed. Hard.
“The car needs to be… serviced.”
A pause.
“It kind of broke down. We did get it started, eventually. And made it back to the parking lot. But then it locked up. Then it may have fused with the pavement in what scientists are calling a permanent geological bond.
Mechanic says it could be the starter. Or the alternator. Or the battery. Or possibly time itself.
Maybe the brakes are haunted.
Or the steering column entered a vegetative state.
Anyway—it will be great.”
I added this last bit with the unearned optimism of a Labrador proudly presenting a half-rotted pigeon to royalty.
Shlomi said nothing. He didn’t even blink.
He just absorbed the sentence like a man processing the phrase:
“I bought a Land Rover that doesn’t move and I’m still calling it sexy.”
“How much did you pay. DID you pay already?”
“No, not yet,” I chirped. “But I will haggle. I’m good at this.” I puffed myself up like a walrus applying for an MBA. “He probably wants $8,000. I’ll push him down to $7,500!” I announced this with the conviction of a religious zealot preaching to an empty fridge.
“Trust me. I’m a businessman. I did this for a living. $7,500 is all he gets or he can walk.”
I leaned back, arms folded, radiating the smug energy of Gordon Gekko on holiday in clown shoes.
Shlomi just looked at me. Finally, he deadpanned, dry as a vulture’s cough:
“I believe he only asks for $6,000.”
I paused, blinking like Windows 95.
“Oh,” I squeaked—like a deflating pool toy at a funeral.
At that moment, I wasn’t just stupid.
I was the Archbishop of Idiocy.
The Supreme Pontiff of Dumb.
The High Priest of Buying Broken Dreams Abroad.
Shlomi slowly nodded, his expression saying: So this is how civilisation ends. Not with war. Not with famine. Not plague. But with a muzungu buying a haunted Land Rover in broad daylight, calling it “hot,” and insisting it just needed “a little push.”
And somewhere in the distance, muffled by rust and malice, the ProBox laughed. Not a chuckle. Not a giggle. But a full villain’s monologue—mocking me in Swahili, echoing down Nairobi’s streets like the soundtrack of my personal apocalypse.
Marcel Romdane,
signing off… professional hostage of his own chaos.
The Beginning of the End. The Land Rover: British revenge on wheels. The Queen had one. So what? She didn’t have to drive it...
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