For $10, all aboard the cheapest safari in Africa

It’s a wild ride.

A few hours into your trip on Kenya’s 1½-year-old Madaraka Express, which stretches from capital Nairobi to the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, long after the cityscape has given way to African savannah, listen for the children.

They’ll be the ones on high alert: glued to the windows, eyes peeled for wildlife. After the squeals of “Elephant!” it’s the adults’ turn to beam with wonder.

The magnificent dust-red beasts, closer than you think they’d be, are going about their trunked business among the baobab trees and unreal hues of the African sky. Later, we passed zebras. Then giraffes.

The best part? My first class ticket on this train — traversing Tsavo National Park on a veritable train safari — was only 3,000 Kenyan shillings, or just $30. And my companion’s ticket, in second class — because neither of us were aware that we were supposed to buy the tickets way ahead of time or that the train is very popular among locals — was a mere $10. Heck, you can’t even buy a beer in Brooklyn for that.

Kenya is logging more tourists both domestic and international, incentivized further by the elimination of taxes on park fees and visa fees for children. In Nairobi, Radisson, Hyatt and Marriott have all announced properties and locally owned brands are expanding. Take the new Trademark hotel, which opened last year in the Diplomatic District by the owners of popular design hotel Tribe.

The railway was completed in 2017 primarily to ease the transport of the 22 million tons of goods that come into Mombasa’s port, but its building did not come without controversy. With a cost of $3.2 billion, it is the country’s most expensive infrastructure project to date, built by Chinese investment. Residents were displaced and wildlife was lost in the construction.

Time will tell whether economic growth will outweigh the price, but for now there are small victories on a citizen level: easing transport for those for whom a flight to the coast is cost-prohibitive, and building up the cities around the railway stops. A few short years ago, the trip from Nairobi to Mombasa would have been 11 hours or so by a bumpy and unsafe bus, or almost a day on the old colonial-era railway. The Madaraka Express cuts that down to a smooth five hours.

And for tourists like my friend and I, it was a chance to get to know locals. My $30 first class ticket bought me tranquil surroundings, a dedicated dining car, and seats in pairs with their own tray tables. But my seat partner, while pleasant enough, was traveling from exotic . . . Atlanta.

In second class, though, my friend found herself regaled with stories from a gregarious group of Kenyans going to Mombasa to invest in a timeshare.

Seats in second class are so close that there’s no choice but to interact, and the Kenyans gleefully did so, especially when talking to my single friend about their marriage customs.

In Kenya, the father of the bride sets a bride price, which can be money or, in rural areas, cattle. “In Kenya,” they told her, “the man pays to marry you.”

By the end of the train ride, while I had seen the giraffes, zebras and elephants of the Tsavo and was happily on my way to dip my feet into the luxurious Indian Ocean, she also had a promise from some new friends to find her a Kenyan husband, if she was amenable.

A safari and a husband? That’s quite a deal for $10.

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