So Long Indian Ocean, and Thanks For All The Fish

Hello faithful fans and readers. Or perhaps I’m flattering myself and its just faithful readers...in any event, I’m back! I apologize for the long hiatus, but everyone deserves a vacation, right? I’m sure you were all too busy enjoying time with your families and bundling up in front of fires with hot cocoa to really miss my blog all that much. At least I hope you were.

I had a white Christmas of sorts this year, if you count beautiful white sand beaches. If you squinted it almost looked like snow, and with the hot sun blazing above and the loss of my favorite pair of sunglasses, there was a considerable amount of squinting.

Sara and I had an amazing three week vacation, even if it had an inauspicious beginning. We made it to the airport a bit late to catch our flight to Ethiopia for the evening, and found that we had just missed the final boarding call even though we were 45 minutes early and the airport only has one gate. I’m pretty sure this is the first flight I’ve missed, and hopefully its the last. We had to spend an extra evening in Lusaka and start our vacation a day late. This meant no layover in Ethiopia and it put us in Nairobi a day late to catch the train to Mombassa. All and all though, it turned out to be a good thing. While I would have loved to have some time to leave the airport in Ethiopia, it was nice having a day in Nairobi to spend with my friend Paul who was vacationing there from the UK. Paul and I met in Peru and have now met up on three separate continents and I was grateful for the time to see him. We also ran into a guy at the hostel who told us about Abdul’s Eco Nest on Lamu Island, which ended up being the best suggestion we had the whole trip.

In the 24 hours we were in Nairobi we were pulled over by the police in our cab and asked for a bribe, ditched on the side of the road by a mini bus who decided not to drive any farther into town because he was afraid of the police that were out checking for papers, and told by a cab driver that it was too dangerous to get out of the cab and walk just one block to the bus station at night. Nairobi had its charm but I wasn’t sad to see it in the rearview mirror.

We took an overnight bus from Nairobi to Mombassa and then a 6am bus straight up the coast to Lamu. As we were getting on the bus to Lamu, Sara leaned over and told me not to be alarmed if guards armed with AK47s boarded our bus at some point and escorted it to Lamu. Apparently in the past this particular road was having some issues with pesky Somali bandits crossing the boarder and attacking buses. Sara knew of this before, but chose this strategic moment of no return to inform me. What are friends for, eh? Meh, I’m always up for an adventure, so we boarded our bus and headed north. Several hours in, armed guards did in fact board the bus, but it wasn’t nearly what I expected. By this point our bus had loaded so many passengers that there was literally an old woman AND her grandchild sitting in my lap. A couple of feet away there was a woman holding a chicken, and when I glanced over at the guards I realized that they were holding AKs in one hand and babies in the other. I love Africa.

After our crowded but (thankfully) uneventful bus ride, we reached the ferry to Lamu. As I mentioned in previous posts, Lamu is an island where the only modes of transport are boats and donkeys. There are only three vehicles on the whole island: a car belonging to the top ministry official, an ambulance for people, and an ambulance for donkeys. When we got off the boat we heard people saying “welcome to paradise,” which we at first scoffed at as tourist talk but later came to realize was actually quite an accurate description and a sentiment shared by locals and tourists alike. Not that there were all that many tourists honestly. In fact, when we headed down to the beach, we realized that miles of deserted white sand beaches awaited us. Save for the couple of tourists and the meandering camels, we really were on our own little piece of deserted paradise.


As I mentioned earlier, we had received a recommendation from a guy at our hostel in Nairobi to stay at Abdul’s Eco Nest. When we first arrived we were so tired we just posted up at the first hostel we saw. The next day we decided to seek out Abdul’s for dinner as we heard he was an amazing chef, but had no intention of shifting our bags as we were only scheduled to be in Lamu one more night. However, when we showed up we instantly fell in love with the Eco Nest. Small bandas on stilts awaited us along with delicious coconut shrimp, coconut rice, and homemade ginger chai. To make a long story...less long….we went just for dinner and ended up staying an extra three days. In these three days I ate like a king with shrimp, crab, and even an 8.5 kilo red snapper prepared for the group of us staying there. It was amazing.



Finally we pried ourselves away from Lamu and headed to Malindi where pizza, pasta and gelato awaited us. Malindi is referred to as "Little Italy" in Kenya, and its painfully obvious why. Restaurants had menus printed only in Italian, little children ran by yelling "ciao!" and everyone tried to speak to us in Italian. At one point we sat down for dinner and our waiter said with a puzzled look, “you speak English very well...” It was a high point. The beaches in Malindi were nothing to write home about, but I ate gelato for lunch every day and pizza for dinner, so I was pleased :)

Check back for the next post chronicling Christmas in Mombasa and New Years on Zanzibar. I'll even throw in the 52 hour train ride home!!