Sand and Sun at the Slave Port

We just had a 5 day weekend due to National Holidays landing on friday and tuesday. Tuesday was Eid (the feasting celebration marking the end of Ramadan fasting), and lunch has never tasted better! So for the holiday, I made a last minute decision to go to Mombasa, Kenya aka "Coast" with Atieno (my twin sister from Kisumu). It was a great adventure since the train and all the buses were full (Coast is the vacation spot) so we had to go around town at 6am to try and find some way to get there. We ended up getting the last 2 seats on the last bus on friday, which was the worse looking bus around. What luck! We were skeptical whether or not we'd ever arrive at Coast, so we decided to say a little a prayer with the women sitting next to us who was equally doubtful.

The trip is 9 LONG hours, half of which is on a horrible road. Considering Atieno and I were one row from the last row, the turbulence effect was even worse for us. My housemate Rachel packed me some Indian sweets she bought for the Indian Diwali festival that had just happened, which I broke fast with on the way. What a sweetheart...

Too bad those rich, fatty sweets on an empty stomach soon started feeling like someone was punching me from the inside. It was really really painful and sharp. I started worrying... maybe they'd gotten some weird bacteria from being on a stuffy bus for 8 hours. That on top of being on a bad road and bouncing all over the place, really made me worry whether or not this was the beginning of the worse vacation ever. Then when we arrived we had to take public transport, carrying our bags all over town, meanwhile I'm feeling faint and want to crawl into a gutter in fetal position. About 4 hours later when I ate some Chapati and beans at Atieno's friends house was when I felt better, but before that I was actually really really worried that something might be terribly wrong with me. The feeling even came back more then once but luckily went away permanently, or at least I think so.

The best part about going with Atieno is that instead of staying at hotels, we moved house by house to different family friends, who were happy to feed us and give us beds even though we didnt even warn them in advance we were coming. Such is Kenyan hospitality. We stayed longest with Atieno's former english teacher from 12th grade.



Mombasa is actually a series of islands, so we had to take ferries to go everywhere... here's a snap.





The Coast is a really interesting place, because Mombasa used to be a big slave trade port, where the Arabs and powerful African chiefs were selling rural Africans to go to the Americas and other places as slaves. Luckily for them Africans are very forgiving, when that trade ended, the Arabs stuck around and the population now is ethnically mixed Arab and African. The food, music, and architecture is a good mix of both cultures. It is even more interesting because it is mostly Muslim town due to the Arab history but the mixed culture coming in is more christian or other religions. So you walk around and see many
women covering their heads, many even wearing the veil, and then others dressed like it is any other beach town.



This door picture and the painting on top, actually aren't my pictures, mostly because I took no pictures in the Arab part of town, out of respect because many people don't like their pictures taken, and the streets were crowded and I would have looked even more like a tourist then I already did. But at least you get the idea...

We rode camels on the beach, went to look at the coral reefs (which unfortunatly aren't very vibrant anymore so I am pretty sure it is dying do to all the soil flowing into it from erosive practices). But it was fun!
I'll have to put those pictures up when I get them developed since I took them with a disposable rather than the digital camera.