Spring Break Travel - Lamu

During my week in Nairobi, I mentioned my travel plans to my host dad. In the time I've spent with my host family in Nairobi, I've found out that he seems to know just about everyone. Within 10 minutes, he called in a favor and got me 30% off my plane ticket for one leg of my journey. I definitely try to be a budget traveler as often as possible so 30% got me really excited. I haven't flown anywhere in Kenya so far and I usually choose the cheap but inefficient buses to travel East Africa. Several other groups of students from my program had made a similar trip to the coast that I was planning on doing and each group said that the road between Malindi and Lamu was just horrible.

I traveled with my friend Kevin from my program who is also working in Kisumu. We decided to take an overnight bus from Nairobi to Mombasa (8 hours) leaving Saturday night and arriving early Sunday morning. As I've mentioned I've done a lot of bus traveling, but this bus was the worst smelling bus I've been on. After 8 hours, the smell just kind of lingers with you. I am still amazed that as much development has occurred in Kenya, some of the roads are still in absolutely horrible condition. The Nairobi-Mombasa road has a section that you drive on for about an hour that barely resembles anything close to a road. There is supposedly construction on the road but nothing is of course labeled. The buses have to dodge huge potholes that more closely resemble craters in the lunar surface in addition to numerous diversions that often result in confused cars heading right at each other nearly avoiding head on collisions. At one point the bus came to a screeching halt because a group of hyenas were crossing the road. A few hours later, I got woken up by the bus honking and as I rubbed my eyes I saw an elephant standing on the side of the road waiting to cross.

All of us academic year students have come up with our own Kenya version of the saying "This is Africa (TIA)." Whenever something bad/interesting happens that you just can't explain through coherent logic, we just say "katiks" which has evolved from "Katika Kenya"- roughly translated as "Only in Kenya."

Kevin and I arrived in Mombasa around 5am. It was too dark out to safely walk around so we sat outside of the bus office and watched early morning Mombasa go by until it became light. Carrying our luggage we found a small breakfast place and ate chapatis and mandazi (fried dough) - an okay breakfast for 40 cents U.S. After breakfast we took a tuk-tuk to the matatu stage to catch a matatu to Malindi. The ride was about two hours from Mombasa to Malindi. We got to Malindi by 9:30am which was more than enough time to catch our flight at 2pm. None of the restaurants were open until 11am so we walked to the end of the pier and read our books for awhile. It was interesting watching people fish because two men would walk deep into the water with nets and then drag the nets to the shore by slowly walking. It didn't seem very efficient and the entire time we were there, we saw them catch 3 fish. We ate lunch at an Italian restaurant appropriately called I Love Pizza.

After lunch we headed off to the airport to catch our flight to Lamu. The flight only took about 25 minutes but I was so exhausted from the overnight bus ride that I slept the whole time. Lamu is part of the larger Lamu Archipelago. The airstrip is on an island across from Lamu island so we took a motorized boat for 100 KSH ($1.25). All of the guide books warned against the touts when you arrive on the island so we planned out a few guest houses that we wanted to go to. The guide books say that people will often to carry your bags and then escort you to the hotel/guest house of your choosing but then demand up to 1/3 of your night's stay from the hotel. The hotel then increases the nightly rate to compensate. Kevin and I both like bargaining so we went to the first guest house and got a good price but we thought we could do better so we went to two other ones. The first price ended up being the best so we went back and negotiated the price for bed and breakfast. The woman who owned the guest house said she was willing to work with us on a good price because we came by ourselves and not with touts. After some negotiating, we agreed on 500 KSH ($6.25) a night for bed and breakfast.

We did some walking around the town but we were exhausted so we went back to the room. Kevin fell asleep at 5pm and I fell asleep around 7pm and neither one of us woke up until 9am the next morning. I guess we saved some money by not eating dinner. Around 4am, I got woken up by a huge crash and I saw electric sparks. I turned on the lights to see that the support beam that had the ceiling fan on it had broken and came crashing down within 5 feet of our beds. There was nothing we could really do at 4 in the morning so we said "katiks" and went back to bed.

Monday was our first full day in Lamu so we did some exploring around the town which was really fascinating. A lot of the buildings are very historical and built in the traditional style. There are no cars on the island but people use some of the 3,000 donkeys on the island to get around or transport goods. We walked along the beach for awhile and took a lot of pictures of some wooden dhows stranded in the low tide. In the afternoon, we met up with one of our friend who works for Millenium Villages Project in Kisumu.

Colin, one of the other students in my program arrived Monday night in Lamu so Tuesday Kevin and I went on a dhow trip with Colin and his dad who was traveling with Colin during Spring Break. We sailed (with the help of a motor) for about an hour to reach the coral reefs near Manda Toto Island. We snorkeled for a few hours and then had a great lunch prepared for us by the dhow crew. We had fresh fish, chapatis, and a lot of fresh fruit. Even though I put on sunscreen my back got FRIED!!! I've been in extreme pain since Tuesday. I guess SPF 30 just isn't enough for equatorial sun.

On Wednesday we just did some more exploration of the island. We purposely got lost in order to discover the in's and out's of the different alleyways. We got lunch with Colin and his dad at a rooftop terrace restaurant overlooking the town and then headed to Shela Beach which is about a 10 km walk from Lamu town. We went swimming for awhile and then watched the sunset. Kevin and I decided to walk back to Lamu town around 9pm but we completely underestimated the tide. We ended up wading through waist-deep water for close to a mile and in the process cut up our feet.

Thursday morning we did some souvenir shopping and then caught our flight to Malindi at Noon.