From Silicon Valley to Swaziland, Rick & Wendy Walleigh [i love reading books .txt] 📗

heard above the frogs seeking mates. Wendy loved the frog sounds so much that she made them the ring tone on her cell phone. Strangely, just as she was complaining, we heard some faint frog sounds in the distance and Wendy smiled. She felt she was back in her element. The frog sounds stopped, but they came back for a while later in the evening and then stopped again. The next day we got an e-mail from our daughter saying, “I called your cell phone twice last night, but you didn’t answer.” Needless to say, Wendy became more attuned to her cell phone ring tone.

After finally getting outside of Nairobi, we decided to do it again for a weekend. We wanted to see the Kenyan coast, and friends had recommended Lamu, an island only a mile offshore. Lamu is a well-known, yet uncrowded, vacation spot. It doesn’t have large full-service resorts that cater to families and honeymooners, which is why it’s so peaceful and pleasant to visit.

For the Lamu trip, our fun started at the domestic terminal of Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport. As with many airports, the terminal for short, domestic flights in small planes is much more low-key than the ones for large jets. Wendy and I went to the airline counter, and after viewing our identification, the clerk wrote out our flight tickets to Lamu by hand and pointed us to the one gate for all of their flights. There were no signs announcing departures or arrivals, but since the departure lounge was small, the airline employees just yelled out the departures as the planes were ready. At the time when our flight to Lamu was supposed to take off, the attendants were calling out for the flight to Malindi. We were curious but just assumed that flights were backed up and our flight would be next. Finally, the gate attendant called out the last call for Malindi. Then she said, “That means all of the rest of you are going to Mombasa, right?” We quickly ran up and said that we were waiting for the flight to Lamu. She said, “Oh, the flight to Malindi continues on to Lamu.” No one had mentioned this previously. We scampered out to the plane.

After briefly stopping in Malindi, our flight continued up the coast to the Lamu airport, which is actually on Manda Island. Although we’ve landed on smaller and more primitive airstrips, Lamu Airport remains the smallest and least developed airport, with regularly scheduled flights, that we have ever visited (definitely less developed than Matsapha in Swaziland). At Lamu, the departure lounge is a concrete slab with a thatched roof, supported by four poles at the corners of the slab. Blocks of concrete serve as benches for waiting passengers. There is no arrival lounge. Arriving passengers just wait at a particular spot on the dirt to identify their luggage so that it can be loaded into hand carts to be hauled the two hundred yards to the dock. At the dock, luggage is loaded on to one of several small boats that take passengers to their destinations on Lamu Island.

Wendy and I stayed in Shela, about two miles from the larger Lamu Town. It was nearly the end of their tourist season. With the long rains starting soon, all tourist accommodations would close for two months. Because the tourist traffic was low, we were able to get a very nice suite at a reasonable price. Our beachside suite had a bedroom upstairs and a sitting room on the ground floor. Our upstairs bedroom flowed into an enclosed balcony overlooking the bay between Lamu and Manda. The architecture was very much like the Moorish style we had seen in southern Spain, except for the very distinctive front door. Traditional doors on Lamu are carved wood with a large latch and padlock on the outside. The whole ambiance seemed very exotic.

After we arrived and unpacked, our first thought was for lunch, so we walked across the guesthouse courtyard to the dining room. As we walked, we heard a strange noise and noticed two large (approximately two foot long) turtles copulating. It captivated my attention, and I went back to the room to get the camera for a picture. Since turtles are slow at everything, I had plenty of time to get the camera and take pictures. Then we had a nice leisurely lunch. As we walked back, the turtles were still at it!

Lamu Island has no buses or taxis, so from a dock near our guesthouse, we took the short boat ride to Lamu town rather than walk two miles on the road in the blazing sun. Disembarking at Lamu town, we climbed an old staircase, crossed the wide, open, and busy walkway along the waterfront and immediately inserted ourselves into the narrow passageways that threaded through the town. Walking in the town felt as if we were in a rabbit warren or a maze. Fortunately, the town was built mostly on a grid. I was able to remember how many times we’d turned and in which direction, so we kept our orientation and found our way around. We still had to avoid the omnipresent donkeys, which were the trucks of Lamu.

Lamu was unique in many ways. The Kenyan coast was known for the Swahili culture, a mixture of African and Arabian traditions, dress, food, etc., which originated from the Arabian traders who sailed the east coast of Africa for thousands of years. Lamu was the best example of well-preserved traditional Swahili culture. In Lamu, the Swahili language was dominant; there were more Muslims and people of mixed-raced backgrounds, and it wasn’t uncommon to see black African women in full, traditional Muslim dress.

In fact, Lamu town, on Lamu Island, seemed like a two-hundred-year-old town from the Middle East. Houses were mostly built from stone and dead coral, harvested from local waters. Many houses were multistory and built facing each other across footpaths barely wide enough for two people to pass. The major thoroughfares were wide enough for two loaded donkeys to pass, but their saddlebags would brush against each other. No streets were accessible to cars, but that was not a problem since the only car on the island belonged to the district commissioner.

In addition to a tour of Lamu town, the other compulsory tourist activity was to take a sundowner cruise on a dhow. Dhows are the sailing boats that Arabian traders have used for over a thousand years along the coast of Africa. They look like the pictures in history books of ancient sailing ships on the Mediterranean. I wasn’t that interested in a slow sail around the harbor, but Wendy twisted my arm, and so I agreed. The first part of the sail was uneventful. We saw the sunset, had our cocktails, took pictures, then we set sail to go back to our hotel. Of the two crew members handling our dhow, the younger one now took charge of the sailing. Because of the direction of the wind, the boat set off toward a point up the coast from our hotel. I assumed that at some point, it would tack back in the other direction. I was wrong. Our junior captain headed us straight into the beach about a mile from our hotel. When he realized what was happening, it was too late. We ran aground on the beach. With help from his crewmate who jumped into the shallow water and pushed, he was able to get us freed from the sand. However, the wind was blowing directly onshore, making it impossible to sail the boat. The young crew member began poling from the deck and the other stayed in the water and pushed. After about an hour of this activity, we came upon a dock only a quarter mile from our hotel. We jumped out on the dock and walked the rest of the way. We had a great time, but a message from the U.S. embassy, later in the summer, made us think twice about going back.

Warden Message: Alleged Threat to Kidnap American Citizens Inside Kenya

U.S. Embassy Nairobi has received information that Islamic extremists in southern Somalia may be planning kidnapping operations inside of Kenya. There are indications that Islamic extremists based in Somalia may be planning to target Westerners, especially American citizens, in the Kiwayu Island tourist area and other beach sites frequented by Western travelers on the northeast coast near Somalia. All U.S. citizens in these areas should exercise extreme caution and remain vigilant at all times.

Lamu Island is in the area referred to in the communication. We hadn’t been planning another trip there, but this made it certain. Lamu is a wonderful vacation spot, but I didn’t want an extended vacation in Somalia.

Later in the summer we had another great experience spending a long weekend with a small group of acquaintances in Tsavo National Park. Someone had discovered that the Kenya Wildlife Service had excess residences within national parks that rented out for nominal fees and had made the reservation for our group. We stayed in the old warden’s house, a large, reasonably comfortable but spare facility. It was fine; we weren’t expecting a five star.

Tsavo is located southeast of Nairobi on the road to Mombasa, Kenya’s major port. The long ride gave us an opportunity to make a number of observations. Since it’s one of the most heavily traveled roads in Kenya, one might assume that the Nairobi-Mombasa Road would be well maintained. That would be a bad assumption. There were sections of highway in the middle of the journey that were not bad and allowed driving at the speed limit. There were even sections of four-lane dual carriageway (divided highway). Evidently, the entire highway was supposed to have been dual-carriageway, but for some reason, the money disappeared before the project was completed. Things like that seemed to happen a lot. Often the situation was just ignored. Sometimes the perpetrators were publicly exposed with accompanying outrage, but then things would just blow over and there would be no consequences, even when there was significant evidence of criminal activity by politicians. For example, read It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower by Michela Wrong.

In contrast to the reasonably good stretches of road farther away, the sections near Nairobi were terrible. In addition to the standard broken pavement and potholes, another phenomenon could be observed. In cross-section, the rutted pavement looked like two capital letter Us side by side, connected by a convex curve in the middle. This pattern had obviously been generated by overloaded trucks and an underconstructed highway. Someone probably made money on underbuilding the highway, and someone else was probably continuing to make money by allowing overloaded trucks to travel it. Without even careful observation, it was obvious that Kenya imported heavier goods (machinery, vehicles, and equipment) than it exported (flowers, coffee, tea). The road ruts were much deeper on the highway coming into Nairobi (sometimes a foot deep) than they were going out to Mombasa.

Despite the road, we were looking forward to visiting Tsavo, which is a large but lesser visited game park. It was made somewhat famous by the movie The Ghost and the Darkness with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. The very scary movie, based on the book The Man-eaters of Tsavo, tells the true story of a pair of lions at the turn of the twentieth century who sought out humans to kill and eat. During this period when the Trans-Kenyan Railway was being built, these lions killed over one hundred people. Since the period described in the movie, the lions from Tsavo have been involved in numerous other killings. Some people have speculated that these lions are a different and more aggressive subspecies. Studies have supposedly shown that