Owning a car is not for free either; a car, fuel and insurance need to be bought. There are many cars for sale, one can check the billboard of the shopping centres or visit car selling garages, in Nairobi or even in Mombasa where cars have come in straight from the port. Sometime there are sales of ordered cars that for some reason are not picked up. Those cars are ordered from Japan or Australia, where the people also are driving on the left side of the road. Since I work at ICRAF as a foreigner I have a kind of halfway diplomacy status. This allows me to import a car tax-free in to Kenya. First a car has to be ordered. In Japan there are internet actions of second hand cars. At ICRAF there is a man who helped me and checked this for the type of car I would like to have. This should not be too different from the type of cars the Japanese want to sell though otherwise it will be very hard or impossible to find. When the choice was made it did not took many days before an appropriate car was found and a number of images send to my email address. Soon after a received an invoice to pay a Japanese bank account, which I could do from my Norwegian with the money received for my former car at 09092008. An ice-blue Toyota Yaris diesel 2003 was changed into a silver Toyota RAV4 2005 including shipment. A date for shipping was set and delayed 10 days, because of extra high piracy risks, but it left Japan at 10102008. The name of the vessel that carried it was Grand Mark and the arrival date was scheduled to be 1st of November. According to my information it came to the port of Mombasa at 10th of November.
Then the paperwork starts. First a new invoice with the vehicle and engine number and a Pro1B form from ministry of foreign affairs need to be send to the clearance officer together with a sum of money of € 700, with help of the procedure office and the procedure officer who had issue certified copies of my passport, visa page and my personal identification number (PIN) of the Kenyan tax office. Also a temporary insurance was inquired with the ICRAF project manager. There after my passport was needed in Mombasa and I received it back after 10 days. Then the car was coming out of the port and has to be given number plates and an insurance certificate, and because the protocol officer at ICRAF is temporarily only one day per week at his office we had to wait for a few days for that, luckily not an extra two weeks to have new plates made. The certificate and plates were couriered to Mombasa so hired drives were able to drive the cars to Nairobi the following day. The same day the insurance until the end of the year was paid. ICRAF has a service to its employees for joint car insurance. This can be paid to an account at the campus CBA bank office, which I did at 0905 in the morning. The payment slip has to be given to a lady at the finance department to process it into a new slip telling it has arrived at the ICRAF account that slip has to be handed to the mail office, this was done at 1245 and upon I was given the insurance certificate personally. This I brought after lunch at 1405 to the ICRAF protocol office. There they need all the original papers of the car sale and registration as well as another copy of my passport and my PIN certificate, after I had made copies of all the papers for personal use. It is probably a lot of paperwork in every country to import a car, but here it feels like every page has to be turned personly to get through. In the mean time the car arrived at ICRAF late Friday evening. And although I was told I was going to be transferred Monday, I received a call that I was allowed to pick it up at Sunday. It has a large white sticker on the front window and white marker pen writings on the rear and the front window, but although it is dirty it looks good and complete. The sound of the motor is fine and all buttons I pushed so far have worked. It is kind of big, and the rear bumper view mirror has already become handy in the cramped Nairobi traffic.
Then the paperwork starts. First a new invoice with the vehicle and engine number and a Pro1B form from ministry of foreign affairs need to be send to the clearance officer together with a sum of money of € 700, with help of the procedure office and the procedure officer who had issue certified copies of my passport, visa page and my personal identification number (PIN) of the Kenyan tax office. Also a temporary insurance was inquired with the ICRAF project manager. There after my passport was needed in Mombasa and I received it back after 10 days. Then the car was coming out of the port and has to be given number plates and an insurance certificate, and because the protocol officer at ICRAF is temporarily only one day per week at his office we had to wait for a few days for that, luckily not an extra two weeks to have new plates made. The certificate and plates were couriered to Mombasa so hired drives were able to drive the cars to Nairobi the following day. The same day the insurance until the end of the year was paid. ICRAF has a service to its employees for joint car insurance. This can be paid to an account at the campus CBA bank office, which I did at 0905 in the morning. The payment slip has to be given to a lady at the finance department to process it into a new slip telling it has arrived at the ICRAF account that slip has to be handed to the mail office, this was done at 1245 and upon I was given the insurance certificate personally. This I brought after lunch at 1405 to the ICRAF protocol office. There they need all the original papers of the car sale and registration as well as another copy of my passport and my PIN certificate, after I had made copies of all the papers for personal use. It is probably a lot of paperwork in every country to import a car, but here it feels like every page has to be turned personly to get through. In the mean time the car arrived at ICRAF late Friday evening. And although I was told I was going to be transferred Monday, I received a call that I was allowed to pick it up at Sunday. It has a large white sticker on the front window and white marker pen writings on the rear and the front window, but although it is dirty it looks good and complete. The sound of the motor is fine and all buttons I pushed so far have worked. It is kind of big, and the rear bumper view mirror has already become handy in the cramped Nairobi traffic.
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