Thursday morning, I awoke feeling like Gulliver. I was too tall for the bed and my feet were swaddled in the mosquito net and hanging off the footboard. An opportunistic mosquito had bitten me directly on the tip of my big toe. Awesome.
After a quick shower, we hopped in the truck and went for a bite of breakfast, where I began a love affair with chapatti, an Indian flat-bread which is just fire. I was also introduced to mandazi, which is basically a beignet without the powdered sugar, and a coastal dish called m’bazi; black beans and rice but cooked with coconut milk. It’s pretty darn good.
Post breakfast, we headed down the road to meet with the Ministry official in charge of agriculture for the region. The meeting was held behind a local army outpost (all the guys were hanging around holding Kalashnikovs) in a tiny office piled high with boxes and spider webs, which also substituted as a schoolroom. The walls were hung with maps of the area, painstakingly drawn by hand. The interview was actually quite informative, and the Ministry official very articulate. As a coastal city, Mombasa is quite vulnerable to rising sea levels, not to mention higher temperatures in general. The Agricultural Ministry is concerned with distributing hardier seeds that will withstand higher temperatures and less water better than the traditional seeds that farmers use. They are also focused on promoting native crops like cassava and millet, which are hardier than the maize that people rely upon. Traditions die slowly though, and the government is having trouble convincing farmers that the seeds they are promoting are better. In a demonstration field planted so that locals could compare government seed to local seed, the wrong variety of government stock was planted and the resulting maize only grew about a foot high!
Leah avoiding salesmen.
The interview was over, so part of the group went up the road to meet someone else, while Pat, Leah and I remained behind to go check out the beach. The beach was really nice, and the water would have been perfect to swim had anyone remembered to bring a suit. The downside of beaches here (and Mombasa in general) is that people roam up and down the shore trying to sell you stuff. Aggressively too. Everyone is selling the same stuff, and just saying ‘no’ one time doesn’t suffice, you have to say no to every single thing they have on their person. The list goes something like this:
1. Coconut
2. Snorkeling (everyone is a boat captain)
3. Ebony key chain (they’ll go engrave your name while you wait)
4. Sea shells
Extras (if you’re lucky you’ll see these):
5. Bag of freshly netted reef fish
6. Octopus
I don’t mind people trying to make a buck, but it gets a little annoying to walk down to the beach only to be mobbed. I’m not sure how tourists manage to relax.
We escaped the hordes of beach merchants and went for lunch at ‘Choma-Zone’ for nyama-choma. Contrary to my last post, I can stomach nyama-choma, though it definitely is not my favorite dish. However, it’s hard to enjoy food during the daytime because of the hordes of flies that assault you as soon as anything edible is sat down. It’s basically a race to eat your meal before the flies can carry it away. It’s not terribly pleasant. The flies are supposed to be worse in Maasai-land, as our half-Maasai driver told us. There, the joke is that when meat is set down and the flies go for it, if you try to fan them away, everyone will ask (insert accent), “Are you going to swat flies? Or are you going to take meat?” There’s no beating them, so eventually you just eat.
We reconvened for one more meeting at the Kenya Wildlife Station in Diani, with the regional head forester for Kenya Forest Sevice. Not a whole lot of new ground was covered, so after a 30 minute talk, the group split and Pat, Leah and I, along with another Kenyan intern drove back to Mombasa. During the daylight, it is easier to see the Arabic influence around the city, though I maintain that it looks French. Indeed, many of the main streets have large medians just like Canal Street in New Orleans. Also, three wheeled taxis, or tuk-tuks are in abundance. These drivers are just as crazy as matatu drivers, but without the size advantage. Driving through 5 o’clock traffic, I just knew we were going to run-over at least a couple.
Mombasa proper was not particularly dirty, but after passing through it and heading north along the coast, the massive roadside dumps started reappearing. Worse, piles of trash were burning, and plumes of smoke were drifting across the road where people were walking and we were driving. We sat in the back of the truck and held our breaths for most of the ride – there is no telling what kinds of chemicals are escaping into the air through those fires!
We arrived at the hotel where we would spend the next two nights, which in comparison to the last establishment was a Hilton! The best part about it, though, was the rooftop bar. We immediately made our way upstairs to enjoy a cold Tusker after the long day, and watch the sunset. As the day approached full dark, giant fruit bats started winging their way across the sky from their roosts near the beach. I have seen them before in the south Pacific, but it’s hard not to think about Dracula when you see those black shapes making their way across the evening sky. I went to bed exhausted, but happy to sleep on top of clean sheets – it’s way too hot to actually get under them.
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