This Could All Go So Wrong, But We're So Happy

The day after my last blog entry I awoke to find my right ankle swollen up rather horribly because of my silly tendancy to run into large rocks in the sea, and so I rather reluctantly took a matatu 2 minutes up the road to Palm Beach Hospital (bringing my Kenyan-hospital count up to three). This was by far the prettiest of all the hospitals I've visited before, but pretty shocking in every other way. They told me the cut on my leg was infected, did some nasty things to my leg which hurt SO MUCH, gave me a tetanus injection, antibiotics, and took an x-ray (exciting!) to check it wasn't fractured (it wasn't). They then presented me with an enormous calculator displaying the equally enormous amount they wished me to pay for the privilege of having my leg tortured for an hour, and I almost cried. I have NO MONEY.

This was still in the place South of Mombasa, and we didn't do much else there during the day other than eat lots of food by the beach and make friends with a hilarious Kenyan woman named Mamasofia, who came and plonked herself onto the sand in front of us with an aching back and entertained us with impressions of waterskis and giving us multicoloured hats for us to try on for about half an hour.

However, the nights in this place were amazing. One night we went to a bar called Forty Thieves, literally on the beach, which served really good food (falafel!) and played primary-school-disco music on a dancefloor lit with lots of stars spinning around. It was so much fun :)

The next night was even more spectacular, as we had dinner in a CAVE :D It was the poshest place I've seen in Kenya, with enormous round tables with big white tablecloths, set with 3 wineglasses increasing in size and lots of silver cutlery in each place, and all under this coral cave, lit with lanterns and candles and with a large hole in the roof at one point where you could look up and see the stars and hear the sea. We had a waiter named Athman, who told us he would transform into Batman the following day and looked very amused when we sat there grinning like chesire cats on drugs at how amazing this place was. I ate a veggie shepherd's pie and, for dessert, a flambeed mango, which I ordered simply because I didn't know what flambeeing was and the menu said they'd do it at the table. So my mango appeared, looking tasty, I went to eat it, and Athman said 'No, wait for flame'. One minute later he reappeared with a metal jug of flaming liquid, which he poured on my mango, and it danced with fire in front of me :) SO exciting.The day after the cave, we once again made a rather intrepid day of travelling, taking two matatus, the pile-in-like-sheep ferry again and a tuk-tuk to central Mombasa, only to find we'd missed the bus to Lamu that we'd needed to get. Wonderful. Whilst everyone else actually tried to be useful, Lorna and I spotted a nearby bakery and wandered towards it, and were suddenly confronted by a man saying 'you want to go to Lamu? I get you bus.' Before we knew it, he was on the phone, we were arguing about price, and we were happily zooming along on our way to Lamu in a private matatu.

Sadly, this happiness was not to last, as when we stopped about 2 hours into the journey for chocolate (of course), an undercover policeman suddenly appeared and we consequently spent two hours in Malindi Police Station as apparently the driver didn't have the right insurance to drive tourists. It took 3 phonecalls to our police friend, quite a few bribes, and an explanation from the policeman that he was worried the men would simply abduct us, before we were allowed to leave, reassured by the fact that, as the police had taken our names and passport numbers, they would at least be able to inform the British Embassy if we were abducted and killed. Fantastic.

The remainder of the journey was long, dark, and had an air of danger as we discovered the reason that buses don't go any later than 11am to Lamu: you have to drive through an area filled with Somalian bandits who will very seriously attack vehicles in the dark. We had an armed guard come with us, but thankfully the only danger we saw was a large hippo stomp across the road right in front of the van.

Our brilliant day of transport was completed by a boatride: Lamu's an island just off the Kenyan coast. It was pitchblack and we zoomed across the water in a little motorboat. The black sea merged into the black sky so it felt like we were flying, thousands of stars twinkled above us, and approaching the old white, lit up buildings of Lamu town, which looked like they were floating in the sky, it felt as if we'd come to the end of the world.

We spent five days in Lamu not doing very much; it was SO hot that any unneccessary movement was to be avoided. We went to the beach and baked, and took a boatride out to this beautiful idyllic private desert island, which I swam around in the clear blue sea :) The house we were staying in was extremely weird but in a very good way; it was four stories high and we were renting the top three. It was like Hogwarts, with stone staircases everywhere and everything being highly disfunctional. There was an absence of real walls, and so all through the night you heard the sounds of Lamu as though they were right there in the bedroom (which indeed they were some nights; often random black cats would just run through). Donkeys e-orring, cats screeching and muslims talking in kiswahili were all around. One night we went to a club, which was a bad idea, as it was stupidly hot even at 2am, and we found that all Lamu-men were pretty aggressive and nasty in their treatment of women.
Now I'm back in Nairobi, after taking a sleeper train from Mombasa last night (see above!), looking very sadly at my hugely decreased bank balance and heading to the foot of Mt. Kilamanjaro tomorrow morning, to do an evening and early morning game drive, and watch the sunrise :)