From The White House Flickr stream via Love in the Key of Longbrake

Stay tuned for the final few posts wrapping up the Kenya experience.

What the guidebooks say:

“A incredibly romantic island, with a labyrinth of streets to get lost in the biggest Stone Town in East Africa. There’s only one car, and most transport is by donkey. You’ll fall in love with a culture that hasn’t changed for years and the friendliest people on the whole of the Kenyan Coast”

What I say:

The streets are pretty cool, but it doesn’t count as a labyrinth if all the streets are in a grid. Also, why didn’t anyone mention the open sewers? And donkeys = muchos donkey crap. Open sewers + donkey crap = Nasty smell. It smells worse than Venice, which apparently smells bad, although didn’t smell at all when I was there in July.

Additionally, there’s no way Lamu’s Stone Town is bigger than Zanzibar’s.

All that moaning out of the way, Lamu is pretty darn sweet. The people really are super friendly, and although they’ll try and persuade you to come ride their dhow, they wont become pushy if you refuse, like everywhere else.

Also, Shela beach is one of the more incredible phenomena on the Kenyan Coast. 12km of unadulterated deserted sand, and cool, deep blue blue water.

Overall, I give it 4 thumbs up.

Out of 5.

But make sure you fly there, unless you have a particular penchant for long cramped busrides on un-tarmaced roads with Islamic music blaring at full blast for 5 hours.

Ooooh i  want…

Movember

• My lucky streak, which allowed Honest Sammy to return my diving mask, my laptop charger to be found on the beach, and my camera to survive being dropped from a pick up whilst travelling at speed, has ended. In the past 7 days I have had my favourite flipflops stolen and my phone pickpocketed in Mombassa.
• Being sick in Kenya would be much more tolerable if the nearest toilet wasn’t an outhouse.

• Never play football in front of a large crowd and a man with a microphone bearing even the slightest resemblance to a premiership footballer, unless you absolutely have the skills to match. Sitting on your arse whilst a 12 year old dashes away from you whilst the commentator makes yet another joke about ‘Torres’ can be humiliating.
• 
• Driving a knackered pick-up truck along rain-washed dirt tracks with 20 kids crammed into the back is marvellous fun and absolutely terrifying in equal measure.
• GoKart races are more fun if you crash in the first lap and have to fight your way back through the field, despite starting in pole, than if you stay out front the whole time.
• Scuba diving never loses it’s awesomeness
• The tropics suddenly become a lot less fun when it rains for a week and all your possessions become petri dishes
• Yoga should not be attempted when not wearing underpants.
• Every now and then there comes along a newborn baby that genuinely is gorgeous, and not a crumpled, scrunched up heap of skin and grabby fingers.
• When wearing a dress for the purposes of entertainment, one should check the garment’s degree of transparency under flash photography before allowing many people to make permanent records of it on their cameras.`

I wish I could copy the whole thing in here, but I guess that would be stealing. Today’s word of wisdom comes from a rather super blog which i’ve only just started reading, but wish I did a long time ago.

The picture is a teaser. Go here

Yesterday, we made the 3rd ever sighting in Kenya of a particularly nondescript brown bird. Some people got quite excited indeed.

Here’s the story as penned by me (I’m working very hard out here as you can see)

Recently, I’ve been feeling a bit tubby. It all started when I was teaching in the summer school, never walking more than a hundred yards from classroom to staffroom, or bedroom to dining room. The lack of exercise coupled with the consumption quantity of saturated fats one can only find in a Diego Maradona’s lunchbox, or a cafeteria feeding 300+ teenagers, I arrived in Africa feeling somewhat sluggish.

Yet, with Kenya being somewhat famous for their athletic prowess, I sensed an opportunity. Settling in, I wasn’t disappointed, and found the beach lying a mere 50 yards from my house regularly populated with joggers. Soaking up the inspiration, I began to form some kind of routine, taking the 4-5km route up and down the beach after work every couple of days, taking on the quicksand, mounds of seagrass and ghost crabs as they came, depending on the state of the tide and degree of darkness.

As my social reach in the small town extended, I found myself invited to join in a regular aerobics class. So complete with vest and headband, I submitted myself to the tutelage of ‘Tony Fit’ and have begun to learn all sorts of new and wonderful things. Something called ‘Step’, and something else, monumentally more vicious, called ‘Circuits’. I have also discovered something else important about myself: That whilst I can bounce on one leg and do all sorts of kicks and stretches with the other leg all day, my core is a weak as cheese. Indeed, my stomach muscles still hurt from the excess of the session 4 days ago. The ‘Childbirth Crunch’ was particularly vicious.

All this meandering to get somewhere near the actual story of this blog. To surmise, I’ve started doing some exercise and am approaching some semi-state of fitness again. In addition, this week I’m housesitting for my boss, at his house a couple of km down the beach. This thus presents an extra opportunity, as instead of taking a ride in the car, I can run home and have the extra weight of my back pack to increase the intensity of the short work out.

So last night, I packed up my bag, threw in my laptop and a pair of trousers (the mosquitoes are 10 times more vicious at the other house), turned on my iPod and set off. I was a little later than normal, and the light was getting pretty dim, meaning that the ghost crabs were out in force, and by out in force, I mean that every 5th step you had to check yourself to avoid stepping one. Ten minutes later, I had reached my destination and jumped straight in the shower. However, rather unnervingly, I discovered that my bag was open, presumably unzipping itself during the run. Tipping everything on the floor, it didn’t take long to discover that my laptop charger was missing.

Reminding myself that I have a rather absent minded nature and lose/forget/misplace things all the time, I resolved not to panic and figured that I’d just left it behind by mistake and asked those coming up in the car to bring it for me. Alas, although their arrival brought several letters and packages containing many delights from friends, the charger was not amongst them.

Realising that the plug must have dropped out somewhere along the way, and that the dulcet tones of All Saints singing ‘Pure Shores’ had drowned out the thud as it hit the ground, I picked up my torch and despondently headed back to the beach. Fortunately the tide was still on it’s way out and wouldn’t have washed it away, but it still meant i had 2km of 30m wide beach to cover, and it quickly became clear that finding my tracks was going to be tricky. One advantage I thought I had was that the charger was white (another plus point for macs) and would glint in the torch light, but it turned out that every single ghost crab also glinted in the torch light.

So it was with some half-hearted prayers and without much hope that I continued down the beach, trying to work out how on earth I could reliably get a replacement sent out to Kenya. The moon had not yet risen, and so despite the resultant splendour distant galaxies, i found myself cursing the darkness. It seemed ridiculous to hope that i would be able to stumble across the exact same place I had run and dropped something over an hour before.

I had probably got a quarter of the way down the beach, and had just worked out the most clever plan to manage to get a replacement charger by Sunday, when suddenly it appeared, right in front of me. Not uncovered by a torch sweep to the left or right, it sat there, exactly in the middle of my path. With my despondency transformed into jubilation, I literally skipped, singing, back up the beach to the house to inspect the charger’s condition.

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of sand had found its way into the crevices, but that was easily sorted with a tissue or two. Slightly more surprising, was the apparent novelty the charger had been to the crabs. Right the way along the cord are tiny pincer marks, evidence of exploration by the inquisitive crustaceans, yet, fortunately, none had enough force to expose the wiring. So, as evidenced by the mere fact that I can upload this rather rambling account, everything works, and I’m back in business. It may be a while before I go running with a pack again, though.

It was somewhere out there….

It started with a bite. For some reason, every time I think of that line, Hot Chocolate’s ‘It Started With a Kiss’ comes into my head. Still, I never thought it would come to this.

Anyway, it started with a bite. And then another, and another. Which woke me up. Confused, I lay there a moment. Until I felt another bite, and something crawling along my arm. Reaching down, I located and crushed an ant, just in time to realise there was also one on my neck needing attention, and then one in my ear.

Grabbing my torch, a quick scan revealed a small cluster of ants on the bed, leading to a huge swarm on the window ledge. In my half-asleep state, the little blighters took on epic Indiana Jones-proportions and I panicked. I leaped out of bed, sprinted outside, and found a rock to perch on and inspect the ant-situation on the outside of our little sleeping hut in the half-morning light.

Rather alarmingly, I discovered 3 thick pathways of safari ants marching up and down the wall. If that wasn’t disturbing enough, their trails converged and formed a thick column surrounding the precarious rock i had chosen to use. I swiftly resolved not return to my bed and realised that I would be forced to sleep out the rest of the night on the veranda. Unfortunately, in my dazed panic, I managed to step off the rock, directly into the marching ant column. Anyone who knows something about safari ants, will know that is precisely the worst possible thing you can do. Upon being disturbed, the ants will immediately swarm and make a sprint up your leg heading for your genitals (I have no idea if that is actually their intended destination, but it sure feels like that).

So, no sooner had i put a foot down, i found ants excitedly crawling across my toes and beginning their rapid journey up leg. So I did what any other person would do in such a situation – I ran. Unfortunately this had no reducing effect on the biting that was being conducted. So I had to take the next logical step. And strip off my pyjama pants. That’s right. I ran (or rather hopped) down the path, struggling to pull off my pyjamas whilst simultaneously slapping at the little critters who were so joyously planting their fangs into my flesh.

Fortunately, by the time I had reached the sanctuary of the upstairs veranda, most of the insurgents were dead or stranded and lost, many metres from the herd. The left me to finish out the night lying on an assortment of cushions, procured from chairs in the vicinity, lying in mortal fear of a monkey jumping on my face.