School is out, the semester is over, my last exam taken. What better way to conclude the indescribable experience that I have had over these last four months than to go to the beach to unwind and celebrate.
For our last excursion together as a group and our last 5 days together, we went to the Kenyan Coast. I was looking really forward to this trip for many reasons: The semester was over so this would be vacation time: no more homework to do, work to do, grants to write, I would get to just relax on the coast with the ocean and spend one last week with my friends who I have shared this opportunity with. My other reason I was excited for this trip is because this was the first time I had seen a beach in almost four years, and that is far too long for anyone to go without seeing the ocean and enjoying the beach. To get to the coast we took a train to Mombasa (yes Mombasa has made some international headlines in the last couple weeks due to the pirated US ship that was since reclaimed by the US and the situation was resolved in Mombasa port… more on that later). It is roughly a twelve hour train ride to Mombasa from Nairobi, but this added to the fun at the beginning of the trip because it was an overnite sleeper train with four beds per compartment and dinner and breakfast on the train. I had not been on an overnite train since traveling in France with my family, and all I remember was that it was fun and kind of an adventure. This was equally as fun as we hung out with each other on the train and I got to fall asleep that nite to the gentle swaying of the train as it moved along. When I woke up in the morning, we were in Mombasa.
Mombasa is an interesting looking town that is a fusion of many cultures, architectures, and history. It is much older than the rest of Kenya, and has Arabic influence and settlements going back to around the year 1000 AD or before. The first European influence was the Portuguese in the 1500s, and now it is Kenyan. So along with being a Kenyan city, it has the feel of a cross between an old European city as well as having a lot of Muslim/Arabic influence. The pace of life is slower and more laid back here, and it is much more humid than in Nairobi. The food is different here, and is more influenced by the Swahili people. The food is really really good as well, and seafood is much more prevalent as well as cooking with coconut oil and coconut. Tamarind is also found in a lot of foods (Tamarind is a sort of candyish thing that I'm not sure what it is exactly, but it is in tea Masala (which is drank throughout Kenya), and other masala cooking.
After we arrived at our hotel, we had about six hours free time to explore the city and do our own thing before an exciting dinner that nite. So, with it being extremely hot and humid, and the sun out a group of us decided to go swimming. We found this Olympic style pool that was more or less deserted, and spent most of our time relaxing, swimming around, and decompressing after a semester of school work and internships. I had only had one other opportunity to go swimming during the semester, so this was a welcome relief and made me realize how much I miss swimming. I was excited because I knew that this would be the dominating activity of the whole week. That nite we were in for an awesome treat as dinner would be a dinner cruise on a dhow and with a real, full meal with courses. It was on this dinner that I first was able to sample the Swahili food. My first course was an artichoke appetizer that was good but was not really Swahili, but the dinner course certainly was. This was many mixed fish with a coconut milk that was extremely good. The desert course was a collection of tropical fruits (bananas, mangoes, other ones that I can not remember), and an extremely strong coffee (Swahili/Arabic style) to end the food. The atmosphere was very amusing as well, as a band played reggae/ coastal Kenyan covers of popular American songs from the 70s (think like a wedding reception). It was just all to funny but somehow added to the experience of being on a dinner cruise to celebrate the end of the semester on the Indian Ocean.
The following morning we went on a tour of Old Town Mombasa. This part of the city really shows the eclectic influence of out side cultures fused with Kenya, as there are many mosques, Hindu temples, as well as old cobblestone streets and other features that make the city feel like an old European city. It really reminded me a lot of old town Quebec City (one of my favourite cities in North America), with the interesting contrast between the new, industrialized area of the city with the old, semi-preserved historical feeling area. The biggest part of our tour was of Fort Jesus. This Fort is made out of mostly coral and stone, and is shaped like a man (or Jesus as he was crucified on the cross). It was build as a fort and monastery by the Portuguese in the early 1500s, but then was captured by the Moorish Arabs in the 1600s and was turned into a slave holding area for their slave trade based in Mombasa. In the 1800s, it became a prison, and in the mid 1900s became a national historical site. The best way that I could describe this Fort is think something like the prison in The Count of Monte Christo, meets a place with slave caves, as well as being a military fort with cannons positioned facing the ocean and gun turrets. It is an eclectic mix but made for a very interesting place to see. The other big event of the tour of Old Town was seeing an exclusive sect of Hindu (I don't remember which one) place of worship. It was very very shining white on the outside, but on the inside very bright colours. It honestly looked like an Easter egg explosion of colour on the inside of this house of worship.
After our tour of Old Town Mombasa, we began our drive to the place that would be our next and last destination on this trip, the south coast of Kenya near the Kenyan-Tanzanian Border. This is the resort area of Diani Beach. To get to South Coast, you have to take a Ferry across from Mombasa Island to South Coast. From the Ferry I saw Mombasa Harbour and the Kenyan warships, along with the now famous USS Marist Alabama as it was preparing to leave the harbour, the ship that pirates hijacked and the Captain was held hostage until snipers killed the pirates and freed the captain. It was interesting seeing this ship, but I must confess all of you American readers probably know the story better than I do. While it was front page news and dominated CNN and the news cycle during the Easter weekend, in Kenya this story was not very big and not even in the top 8 or 9 pages of the newspaper and those stories contained limited information. It was essentially a non-story here in Kenya.
When we got to Diani Beach and resort in the early afternoon, we had the rest of the time of the time to have fun on the beach and go swimming and enjoy being on the beach. My first impression of the Indian Ocean was that it is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world. I think swimming in the Great Salt Lake in Utah may have this Ocean beat, but it is extremely salty. It is also calm mostly with not that big of waves. This did nothing however to take away from me enjoying the sun, palm trees, ocean and waves for the first time in a few years. The resort was nice too, and had many animals running around. Walking to the ocean from my room, I would usually pass many wild monkeys playing around. I also had a couple personal experiences, as while spending time on my balcony on my first nite there I see a monkey swing down from the drain pipe and the roof and land on the barrier. As I walked towards it, it jumped back up on the roof. We also had bush babies in our room a couple of times while we were not there, as we forgot to close all the windows. It was overall an amusing time there.
Speaking of monkeys, the next morning we went to a place to see many of them. We went to the Colubus Trust, an organization created to rehabilitate and protect Colubus Monkeys in the area. It was so fun and entertaining watching these monkeys play around and they are so fast and quick. The next place during that day that we went was a sacred forest to a couple of the Coastal tribes. It looked like an enchanted forest with many old, gnarled trees and vines everywhere, and has a sacred graveyard with some sort of relic that the coastal people who live there represent. I was happy to have the dense cover of trees as it began to downpour when we entered the forest. The rain continued for a few hours, but this did nothing to deter our free afternoon at the beach, as the rain made the winds heavier and for actual waves to body surf on and it was quite enjoyable actually. That nite, we had a bonfire at the beach. It was difficult to lite, as the beach is extremely windy at nite with an estimated 30-50 mph winds constantly, but some jet fuel and some bonfire architecture done by our Assistant program Director Victor, my programmate Brian, and I made it so we had a bonfire for a short time before the wind blew it out.
The next day we had a journey even further south to an area very near the Tanzanian border. On the mainland, we got a tour of some coral caves that were used as slave holding areas during the Arab slave-trade business. I think the last time I was in a cave before this was in Hannibal Missouri at the Mark Twain cave. This one was much different as it was made mostly of coral and near the water. After the cave, we went to an island off of the coast for another tour of a place that the women who lived there was
“unlike anything seen anywhere else in the world”. She was right too. On this island, twice a year the tide comes up far enough inland that it has created this coral area that looks like a coral version of Stonehenge. It really reminded me of something of a cross between Stonehenge and the landscape of New Zealand found in Lord of the Rings. We had a Swahili lunch on the island, with much more fried fish, crabs, coconut, and fried rice, and pilau (another coastal staple that is everywhere in Kenya, and is a rice with tamarind and cinnamon and other spices, a spicy rice that is really good). We had the evening free to do more beach swimming, and then a bbq dinner on the beach that nite. I was really surprised when desert came in the from of a birthday cake, celebrating the early birthday (program birthday) of me and another girl on the program, whose birthday is two days after mine. I got cake and was sang to and it was unexpected and very nice. After dinner some of us had a crab hunt on the beach which was amusing, as I was chasing around crabs. They are quick as well and the way to capture them is to run them out until they get too tired to run. It made me think of going on a crab hunt with my brother and cousins in Dolphin Island Alabama when I was very young and how much fun I had doing that. I could not get enough of the ocean, and I got up with a couple more friends the next morning for a sunrise swim in the ocean before we left the coast.
We flew back to Nairobi, and the highlight of the flight was getting to see Mt. Kilimanjaro from the air. That was one of the things that I was most excited to see in Africa, and thought I was going to be disappointed because I thought I would not get to see it, but did. It was a funny encounter because the girl who pointed it out to me prior to pointing it out asked another program person if it was a cloud or a mountain. It looks very majestic and big, and I am really happy I got to see it. It was sort of a climatic moment of the coastal trip, and the I could not have asked for a better last week to being apart of AU Abroad Kenya Spring 2009. This truly has been an amazing experience that I am just beginning to really realize and reflect on, and this could take some time.
On that note, I want to tell you that this post will be the last post I have from Kenya. I plan to right an Epilogue post in a week or two from the US as a final word and reflection on my trip. Please check back then for my final post from this stint on An American Abroad.
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