Spring Break Travel - Malindi

Colin and his dad were with us on our flight from Lamu but we got off in Malindi and they proceeded on to Nairobi. We took a tuk-tuk to the hotel where every other group of students from our program has stayed at. For whatever reason, the guy at the reception was being a jerk and refused to budge on the price of the room. We ate lunch at the Italian restaurant at the hotel and then sampled almost all the flavors of gelato. We lugged our bags around the hotel town with us trying to find another hotel. We went to 3 other hotels which ended up all being more expensive than the original hotel. We grudgingly went back to the original hotel and ended up paying 5 times more per night than the guest house we stayed at in Lamu. $20 may not seem like a lot for a hotel room but with the cost of living in that area, those prices were really expensive. We were both feeling very frustrated that we were stuck paying such an expensive price for a hotel room so when we had to fill out the room registration form, Kevin filled it out under the name "Ben Dover." I don't think the people at the reception got it...

All of the prices for food at restaurants in Malindi were also much more expensive than anywhere else we've been in Kenya. Malindi is a very popular destination for Italian travelers. Since a lot of these travelers don't bargain down prices, everything becomes more inflated which ends up hurting the local people who live there. As much as Malindi is a tourist destination, the district is also one of the hardest hit areas for the famine Kenya is currently experiencing.

Malindi doesn't have nearly as much history or interesting things to see and anything there was to see, of course cost money. On Friday we took a matatu to see the Gede Ruins. Gede was a Swahili civilization first active during the 13th century. We went in the late afternoon because the guide book said that the lighting would be better as the sun went down and peaked through the forest canopy. Being the cheap college students we are, we chose not to have a tour guide and we instead just explored the area at our own leisure. I think Kevin and I were unusual tourists because we spent the majority of our time at Gede ruins taking photographs of these really unique flowers and monkeys. I got some cool videos of the monkeys eating and playing.

When we got back to the hotel, we rewarded our "hard" day with gelato, of course! On our last day in Malindi, we even had gelato for breakfast. We caught a matatu for the 2 hour ride back to Mombasa. To cap off our vacation, we spent the afternoon in the only air-conditioned place in steamy Mombasa, Dorman's coffee shop. We caught our bus around 6pm and spent the next 14 hours riding back to Kisumu. The only interesting thing to report was that I saw a baby elephant on the side of the road a few hours outside of Mombasa.

So now I'm back to reality in Kisumu. I have 5 more weeks at my internship before going back to Nairobi for a final two weeks of "research writing" and then I fly home April 25th.