here we are in Lamu

Arrived yesterday afternoon. This is the busiest airport in all our travels. It isn’t really an airport, it is an airstrip. But it was busy. What they don’t tell you about Lamu is how you get there. Yes, I knew there was a boat, but no one said anything about walking down a boat ramp on to dried mud under the pier. The bags were carried in a wagon and then by man to the boat. It was very windy and rocky. In fact, all the rides over rocks in the Mara were good preparation for the three minute rush across the water. At one point it seemed as though we would go over.

Then, a walk from the pier to our hotel, Lamu House. Already I was in culture shock. We came from this very cared for environment, and suddenly we were thrust into a raw world. Lots of people and donkeys on the street. And unfortunately lots of donkey droppings too.

The hotel is  a new building based on a Swahili house. So it has the best of the old and the new. We walked though the old town in about 25 minutes, with stops along the way to look at the wonderful wraps that everyone, men and women wear. There was some sort of demonstration going on, with two fellows drumming on tin cans followed by a crowd of kids and a swarm of women covered in black. One curious thing though, even though they may be covered in black, some few wear a brightly colored scarf over the black. I’d never seen this before.

Nothing I’ve done before prepared me for this town-though my traveling companion swears it is like any other Arab or Israeli town.

I think the most noticeable thing about Lamu is the donkeys.

Shela is another story. It is a 45 minute stroll from Lamu and a world away. It is much cleaner, and therefore prettier. The beach is incredible and if you are inclined you can do all kinds of water sports, including snorkeling, kayaking,para-sailing or you can just do what we did. Find a shady spot on the beach among the palm trees and read.

We had lunch at the Stop Over restaurant, crab salad, grilled giant prawns, passion fruit juice and water. Then the patron showed us his guest house that is another modern building built in the Swahili style. Airy, spacious, and not nearly as expensive as our hotel.

We walked back again to Lamu. It hadn’t changed. At the hotel we were told to be careful of the tide. If the tide was in there might be a lot of wading to do. The water is like a bath, and clean, except where we might have to wade. There, all manner of garbage was on the beach.

Oh, even managed to see a few of the “cats of Lamu” in Shela. And to feed them a little rice from our lunch. They were, after all, sitting under our table.  

This is day one. For tomorrow, swiming.

Less than one week to go

I’m still doing my homework. Although I’ve left the pre-WWI colonial Kenyan set behind, most of what I’m reading is still American-European. I started with Bill Bryson’s tiny book, African Diary (2000), that he wrote as a fund raising device for Care International. There are some terrific word pictures about refugees, travel on light aircraft and on trains to Mombasa. We will be doing the first, and I am holding on to my valium. As for the second, Mombasa is not on our schedule.

A real find was Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s The Present Moment, (1987). She’s English, came to Kenya in 1954 as an Anglican missionary, stayed and married a Kenyan. The Present Moment is about seven African women living in The Refuge, an old people’s home in Nairobi. The women, from different ethnic groups, Kikuya, Seychelloise, Luria, Luo, and Swahili, all ended here because of the shattering of tribal support systems brought on by changes in Kenyan society over 50 years. Macgoye raises issues about Moslem and Christian conversions, the so called freedom fighters, and the roles of women in this developing society.  The book makes interesting reading about a non-European segment of Kenyan society.

  

And then there was the Jewish experience of Kenya. I didn’t even think about Jews in Kenya until I started to read Nowhere in Africa by Stefanie Zweig. I forgot seeing the film a few years ago. This is a different world from that of the pre-WWII European settlers. The German Jews who fled to Kenya were mostly from the cities little prepared for farm life. Zweig, as a child, appreciated the beauty of the country but her parents experienced  drudgery, isolation, hardship and strangeness. Worse, English anti-Semitism was not dead. And, not unlike the U.S., émigrés from hostile nations (Germany) were interned, though only for a short while.

My last effort before leaving is True At First Light, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous “fictional memoir.”  There are vivid depictions of  life in a safari camp during Mau Mau days–a lot of sitting around, psuedo-philosophizing and drinking. Also there was a constant search to kill a prize lion. It made me cringe. I never got why anyone would want to kill an animal just to say “ I did it.” But–there is an interesting tie in to a made up religion. Maybe even Hemingway couldn’t really justify the killing. Tribal conflicts between the Kenyans keep surfacing and of course relations between the white man, in this case Hemingway, and the natives, both men and women. He was a womanizer, no doubt. Must have been amazingly charming, though judging from this book I think alcohol also played a large part.

All these people, real and fictional  pasted their lives on to the countryside. I’m curious what my experience will be.