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My blog - January 2003

Haandi Hint

January 25th 2003, 9:04am

If you're in Nairobi and you're looking for a good curry house, you could do worse than look in on Haandi, in The Mall in Westlands. Their curries are very nearly as good as those from the Royal Bengal Balti in Coventry. I'd advise you to make a reservation if you're going on Friday night though - we had to wait about an hour and a half last night before getting seated.

If you don't want a curry, try going to the Awash Ethiopian restaurant on Mucai Road. It's extremely cheap and the food's not bad either.

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I'm an Alien, I'm a Legal Alien

January 20th 2003, 11:28am

Only 26 weeks after arriving in Kenya, I now have my Alien Card, which means that for the remaining 23 weeks I don't have to carry photocopies of my passport around with me. Now I just have to wait for my full driving licence to turn up. My interim one runs out again at the start of February.

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Lamu V: Karabadangbaraka

January 18th 2003, 8:04am

After I've spent a few lazy hours doing nothing much on the beach (mainly trying to take a photo of a yellow, green and red bird flying into a small round nest suspended from the tree), Smiley decides that the currents are now right for sailing to the Takwa ruins.

As we start to sail towards the ruins another dhow slides into view from behind the mangrove swamps. We halfheartedly race them to the creek, but their boat is bigger and wins easily.

We reach a narrow opening to the creek - it's only about ten metres wide, with mangrove trees growing in the water on either side. The water is very shallow, and we have to chart our course carefully to avoid grounding the boat. I think to myself that they should have withies to mark out the course. Eventually the water gets so shallow that we all have to sit on one side of the boat and lean out to make it tilt, so that the keel doesn't touch the bottom.

When we get as far as is possible, Ali gets out of the boat and wades off round the corner while we wait in the boat, listening to the sounds of splashing and squeaking of imagined animals in the swamps.

This place is like Secret Water, and Smiley and his crew on the Uhuru remind me of the Death and Glories. I could quite imagine them using an earthenware pot for a chimney if their boat had a cabin. When Ali reappears pulling a flat bottomed boat behind him I feel like shouting 'Karabadangbaraka', but of course he wouldn't know what I'm on about.

I climb into the boat on my own, and Ali proceeds to pull the boat the rest of the way to the ruins. The ruins are vaguely interesting, but not nearly as interesting as sailing to get to them. I take a few photos and then return to the boat. This time Ali stands in the boat and poles it through the water as it is now getting deeper due to the tide. Alone on the boat with my native guide in the middle of nowhere, I feel like Michael Palin! Especially when I say the same silly things that Palin says to his guides - telling them stories about what it's like in England.

The tide has now risen enough for us to be able to sail out of the creek quite easily. We sail slowly so that as Lamu comes into view the sun is setting over it. The sun is very big and orange and there are a few small clouds floating in front of it. The sky is streaked with yellow and pink which is mirrored in the sea. The guys in the boat say it's one of the best sunsets they've seen.

As I get out of the dhow back at Lamu I decide that this was one of the best days of 2002. I also decide that I'm going to start sailing when I go back to the UK.

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Lamu IV: Thomas Goes Fishing

January 14th 2003, 7:52am

Just before Christmas while I was in Lamu I went on a fishing trip. This is the first part of the writeup...

At half past eight in the morning I meet Smiley on the seafront, who is already there with his dhow, the 'Uhuru' (freedom). I climb into the boat from the stone steps in the sea wall, getting my trainers wet as I do so.

The Uhuru is a relatively small dhow - only about eight metres long perhaps. There are small decks at the bows and stern, while the rest of the boat isn't covered. Smiley is sitting on the stern deck with the tiller, while someone else is further forward. At the stern of the boat there's a flagpole with three flags flying; the top one is the Alaskan flag, the middle one is CND and the bottom one has a picture of Bob Marley on it.

Bob Marley is quite a theme on this boat. On the mast there are several Bob Marley stickers and there's another Bob Marley flag flying from one of the ropes. Smiley is wearing wooly rasta hat too.

In the hold of the boat there are a few buckets and boxes of various fishing equipment. I sit on a plank which stretches from the foreward to the aft deck. We move away from the seafront under power - an old Yamaha outboard motor, but as soon as we are a little way out they cut the engine and the Ali unfurls the sail.

We sail along the island to Shela (pronounced 'Shella', and sometimes spelt that way too), which is a much smaller and cleaner town than Lamu, but it's more expensive to stay there, which is why I'm staying in Lamu. At Shela we get out and Smiley goes to find his mum who has cooked coconut rice for us. I sit at the bar at Peponi, a very expensive hotel where the rooms cost something like £150 a night. Fortunately the bar is free!

Once we have the rice we return to the boat. We've also acquired another member of the crew, someone whose name I forget, but who is going to be our cook later. As we cast off, Ali picks up a bilge pump and starts emptying the bottom of the boat of water. He assures me this is because he had cleaned the boat the day before, not because it leaks.

We head South, between Lamu Island and Manda Island, toward the open seas. The water is relatively calm until we near what Smiley calls 'the ocean door' - the bit of the sea where it changes from shallow green sea to deep blue ocean. Once we come to this part then the sea gets quite rough, with some waves two or three metres high. The dhow rides up to the crest of one wave and crashes down into the hollow, making water splash over the side of the boat, so that on the way back Ali will have to empty the boat again. After a few minutes we're out on the ocean, and all is calm again.

When it's decided we've gone far enough we take in the sail and get out the fishing gear. We have long green fishing lines wrapped around pieces of wood, which each have a sharp hook on the end onto which we skewer pieces of squid as bait. To catch the fish we simply thow the line into the water and let it out until it goes slack, indicating it's on the bottom. Then when you feel a fish biting you haul it in. It sounds simple, but I don't manage to catch anything, even though the other three haul in about ten fish in fewer minutes.

As soon as we have enough fish for dinner, we turn round and head back to Manda Island. Fortunately this is very soon, as I'm starting to feel seasick. Back at Manda Island the cook starts to prepare the fish and salad while I take notes so that I might be able to try it at home sometime.

The fish (white snapper, yellow snapper, squid and something I didn't catch the name of) has a couple of cuts made diagonally on each side and is coated in a mixture of oil, salt, chilli, black peppercorns, lime juice, garlic and various herbs. It's then barbequeued for several minutes until it looks ready. The salad is made from cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, cucumber, sweet peppers and onion.

We sit round on a banana leaf mat and eat with our hands. Fortunately I've watched enough people eating rice with their hands by this point to be able to do it myself without too much trouble. The food is delicious, and made all the better by the fact we are sitting on a perfect silver beach on a virtually uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean!

To be continued...

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Lamu III: Up On The Roof

January 10th 2003, 5:37am

From my vantage point on the roof of the Yumbe guest house I can hear all sorts of sounds this evening. The most pervasive is the constant barrage of squeaks everywhere, which is probably the sound of bats and crickets.

I can hear people talking in the houses around here, and the occasional crying child. Most of the buildings here have a fine green gauze on the windows instead of glass, so the sounds which are usually confined to the inside of a house escape into the streets. A donkey was braying a few blocks away, but has stopped now. Sometimes I hear donkeys trot past in the street below. A crowd of children walk past singing and cheering.

Because the streets are so narrow, the sounds of people 3 storeys down seems to bounce up the side of the houses so it sounds like they're just below the roof wall.

There are shuffling footsteps of an old man in the street, followed by the light footsteps of a child. Another child is crying, and someone starts to sing to comfort it. At first I'm irritated by the crying child, until I realise that it's the sound of helplessness and not of anger.

The Yumbe guest house is difficult to describe, with each side of the building being a different height and contains a different number of storeys. It is built around a small courtyard where there are lots of plants growing. Some sides of the building are roofed directly with banana leaf thatch, while other parts have flat rooves with a thatched canopy above them. My room looks like it has been added as an afterthought, and even more recently another room has been added on top of it, making four storeys in total.

The whole place is made of rough cream coloured blocks about the size of breeze blocks, cemented together with large amounts of grey cement. The floors are all concrete, the ceilings are uneven rows of wooden poles. I wonder if there are any structural checks on these buildings, or if you just keep building higher until the place collapses.

I can now hear repetitious Swahili music playing in the distance, and the hum of an outboard motor over the sea. Someone is wheeling a bicycle with squeaky wheels past. The other side of the building there is the sound of splashing water and the clatter of pots.

A prayer call goes out from all the 27 mosques in Lamu. Some are long haunting wails, some sound like barked orders, and most loudly one sounds like a woman singing, but is probably a young boy.

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Photos from Lamu

January 6th 2003, 12:15pm

Out of the six rolls of colour film I shot at Lamu, I have chosen sixteen of the best pictures for you to view on the Kenya photos page.

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Just What You Always Wanted

January 5th 2003, 12:55pm

The observant among you will have noticed a new button over there on the left, saying Make a Donation. You can now give me money! Hooray, what fun!

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New Drawings

January 3rd 2003, 8:07am

I've just scanned in the drawings I did while in Lamu. You can see them on the Kenya Photos page.

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Two Things I Like

January 3rd 2003, 6:35am

Unrelated to my ongoing Lamu story, here are a couple of other things I want to comment on...

First, Anita Shreve. I've just read three of her books, and I've decided that she's my current favourite author. Unlike most books which take a few chapters to really get into, I can get into her books immediately. This does have the unfortunate downside that I get through the books too quickly and then have to go and buy another one. The books I've read so far are The Last Time They Met, Eden Close, and The Weight of Water. The Last Time They Met was written after The Weight of Water and contains some of the same characters, but I'd recommend reading The Last Time They Met first as I did, because the twist at the end will be all the more surprising.

Second, Sixpence None The Richer. I bought their new album last week and it's fantastic. I've been playing it almost non stop since then. It has a lot of really good songs on it, including a cover of Don't Dream It's Over. One track, Tension Is A Passing Note I think has distinctive overtones of Eden Burning, while another track somehow reminds me of Stereophonics, although I'm not sure why.

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Lamu II: A Maze Of Twisty Passages, All Alike

January 3rd 2003, 5:31am

This town is a fantastic maze of narrow streets, tall buildings, donkeys, graffiti, pink blossomed trees, open drains, people, smells, children, cats, mud, ruins, palm trees, ornate carvings, ancient tombs, women cooking in doorways, men chewing miraai, thatched rooves, rubbish in the streets, craftsmen, restaurants, guest houses, power cables, water pipes, tourists, fishermen, boat makers, dirt, humidity, cybercafes, tailors, men discussing politics in courtyards, islamic chants, prayer calls, mosques, black cloaked women, lush courtyards, fish, smoke, streetside grills, corrugated iron rooves and a million and one other things all happening at the same time.

The first impression I have of the town is it is dirty, smelly and chaotic. The buildings have paint peeling or look like they're made of breeze blocks without any exterior decoration. It's difficult to get an overview of the whole place as the streets are only just wide enough for two people, and the buildings tower above, cutting out the sun and holding in an oppressively hot atmosphere, full of all sorts of smells - mainly the smell of donkey poo though.

A guide who calls himself 'the chief' gives me a tour of the town. He's particularly proud of the carved door frames which he keeps pointing out to me. There are twenty-seven mosques in the town, but only a couple of them are anything to look at - most of them look pretty much the same as any other house, except for the pile of sandals outside at prayer time. The excess of mosques unfortunately means that I get woken at five every morning by a cacophony of prayer calls.

We keep walking along the narrow streets, abruptly turning off down another side street which looks just like the last one. I'm soon completely lost, but fortunately my guide knows exactly where he is, as I will too before the end of my holiday, after I've spent days wandering the same streets with my camera.

I look inside the buildings as I pass them. Some have an empty dilapidated courtyard inside. Sometimes there's a flight of stairs disappearing up directly inside the doorway. Some houses look like they have collapsed in on themselves, and there's just a pile of rubble. Quite a few houses have lots of plants growing in the courtyard, which looks like an oasis in this hot dirty town. Most houses are better decorated on the inside than the outside.

Towards the back of the town, away from the sea, the streets get a little wider and sandier and less smelly. A mosque with glistening green minarets stands by a large sandy square where a couple of donkeys are lazily wandering.

We disappear down another narrow street and eventually we come to the chief's house. I am invited inside, where I sit on a round bamboo leaf mat. A cat slinks across the room; I ask the chief if it has a name, and he tells me it's not their cat - they just wander in and out all day. A woman brings several bowls of food over and places them on the mat between us. One bowl contains fish, another rice, and the last bowl contains a mix of cooked vegetables. She then brings a bowl containing slices of mango. Although I know how to eat ugali with my fingers I have difficulty eating rice without dropping it all over the place, so the woman brings me a spoon. Several small children occasionally peep around the corner, watching the the mzungu (white man) who doesn't even know how to eat properly.

After dinner I'm taken back to the seafront where I'm finally left to my own devices. I realise I've already taken a whole film of photos - hopefully one or two of them might be good ones. I sit by myself at the front of the Hapa-hapa restaurant and look out over the low wall and watch the world go by. A warm sea breeze blows through the restaurant, and I start to write about the day while I drink freshly squeezed mango juice - something I will do many times over the next week and a bit.

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