I feel like I’ve become a stranger to this blog, but now
that I’m done camping I’m going to try to update more frequently since I’ll
presumably have more internet access.
Let’s see how it goes…but for now, I’ll try to make up for my long
absence by writing a crazy long novel of an entry (feel free to simply glance
through it, it’s really not all that fascinating but like I said, I’m trying to
make up for lost time…)
SO, after our crazy fantastic overland camping trip ended in
Kenya on November 13th, we spent a couple nights in Nairobi saying
goodbye to our fellow travelers and figuring out our upcoming plans. We decided to go with Becs (our tour leader from the trip) for a few days to Mombasa, a city on
Kenya’s east coast. Becs has 8 days off before
she starts her next tour and she wanted a place were she could relax and feel
like she was on vacation before she went back to work leading a bunch of (often
clueless) tourists around Africa.
Michelle and I are planning on volunteering for 2 or 3 months in Kenya
so we thought it would be nice to have one last vacation off of the truck before
we stopped playing the tourist role.
Becs’ friend had taken an overnight bus to Mombasa a while back and had
raved about it as a fantastic beach town, so Becs thought it would be a great
place to unwind. Without doing
extensive research the three of us left our big backpacks in storage in
Nairobi, hopped on an overnight bus, and found ourselves in Mombasa early in
the morning without a hotel booked nor much of an idea about what Mombasa was
all about. Well, it turns out that
Mombasa itself is not a beach town, it’s the largest coastal port in East
Africa located on an island without any beaches, but if you travel north or
south of the city over its bridges you get to nice touristy beaches…this was
all told to us by one of the bus company workers, and was news to all three of
us since none of us had bothered to read the guidebooks in much detail. After this revelation we decided to
stay in Mombasa for one night and then find a beach that hopefully wasn’t too
far away. So after we checked into
a decent budget hotel we called up our tuk-tuk driver, Makau, who had offered
to take us around the city and show us the sites. Turns out that calling Makau was one of the best things we
could have done! He is probably
the nicest man we’ve met so far in Africa and we’ve more or less adopted him as
our kaka (brother), and he calls us his sisters. Makau is 25 years old and has been driving a tuk-tuk for 2
years, and he took us all around Mombasa.
While touring the city we talked to a Kenyan tour guide at a Hindu temple
(I’ll get to that…) who recommended a beach resort that was only 8 kilometers
north of the city (still haven’t figured out the conversion to miles…can’t be
bothered), had a nice dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant (again, I’ll get to
that…), and went to bed with the plan that Makau would pick us up in the
morning and take us to the 8-kilometers-away beach in the morning. But back to the Hindu temple and nice
Chinese restaurant in Kenya…
Mombasa is an incredibly diverse city, as tends to be the
trend in coastal port cities. Its
population is made up predominately of African Muslims, but there are “a
remarkable range of races and cultures here, from Africans to British expats,
Omanis, Indians and Chinese.” Yep,
finally got around to reading the Lonely Planet guidebook…there are plenty of
Muslim mosques and Christian churches, but also Hindu temples and even one
Jewish synagogue outside of town, which we visited since Michelle is, you know,
Jewish, and, you know, hopefully going to write about in her, you know, Jewish
blog…
Anywho, Michelle the Jew had been craving Chinese food, so
Makau took us to one of three Chinese restaurants in Mombasa, the New
Overseas Chinese-Korean Restaurant & Bar. As soon as we entered the restaurant we
felt like we had been transported back to a Chinese restaurant in the US of A,
specifically Chinatown in DC, where Michelle has been working for the past 4
years, complete with gaudy Chinese interior design and an ethnically diverse
clientele. There was a table of
Chinese diners, an Indian family, a group of Arab Muslims, us mzungu (white)
tourists, and a few other decidedly non-Kenyan customers. Mombasa is a great big melting pot!
But I digress…so the next morning we called Makau to start
our great adventure to the beach.
But first we had a few errands to run…we needed breakfast, we needed to
visit the Jewish synagogue, and we needed to set Makau up with an email
account! The previous day we had
exchanged contact information for future contact, but Makau only had a P.O. box,
and I decided that was not acceptable (pretty much because I don’t think I even
remember how to affix a stamp to an envelope…). So the four of us went to an internet café and while
Michelle and Becs went on facebook and checked email I sat with Makau and set
him up with a yahoo account. He
had never used a computer before, so I showed him how to use a mouse and it was
slow going for him to figure out where the letters on the keyboard were. It’s funny how it’s so easy to take
things for granted, watching Makau struggle to double-right click the mouse
definitely put things in perspective for me…
After internet we searched high and low for the synagogue
and eventually found it (again, I’m going to assume that Michelle will be
writing about it relatively soon and people can read about it on her
blog…). Then our great beach
adventure officially started. We
drove for a while down the main road, stopping at the Nakumatt grocery store to
pick up some water and snacks, and eventually found the Bamburi Beach Chalets
the tour guide in Mombasa had recommended to us. The place was pretty nice but it was pricier than we thought
it would be, we had almost decided to book it when we took a look at the beach
and saw that it was veeeery low tide and the sand was covered with
seaweed. We decided to travel
further along the coast to hopefully find a nicer beach, so we drove a bit
longer and looked at another place, but still the beach is crappy, so we drove
a bit longer and looked at another place, but still the beach is crappy…etc.,
etc. Along the way we picked up a
friendly Rasta (who is only Rasta in his heart and in his dreads, not with
weed, according to him…) who knew where the nice but inexpensive hotels/resorts
were and got commissions from the hotels/resorts for bringing them
tourists. We also got a flat tire,
which about 7 men who came out of nowhere helped change, and we took another look
at the Lonely Planet guide book which informed us once again that we were very
uninformed and during this time of the year the beaches north of Mombasa we
were looking at were covered in seaweed and not very lovely. By then we were feeling really bad for
Makau (and our uninformed selves), but he kept saying he was happy and enjoying
the company, and we kept yelling “ma-KAU!”, which never failed to make him
laugh. Finally, after over 2 hours
of driving around we settled on a super nice resort that we had stopped by
earlier and which had offered us a great discount but at the time we still
thought we could find a nicer beach…this, obviously, was before reading the guidebook. Checked into the resort (where we were
the only guests besides a group of school girls from Nairobi who arrived later
that night on a school trip), Makau gave Becs a tuk-tuk driving lesson (video
will be updated asap), then we bid adieu to Makau, got settled, and spent the
next 2 days relaxing by the beautiful pool and avoiding the ugly beach.
In the end the resort worked out great (thanks to the
beautiful pool), and Makau picked us up and spent our last day with us in Mombasa
before we caught the night bus back to Nairobi. And that, my friends, is my fascinating novel of an entry about Mombasa. Goodnight.
