Journey to Lamu

We started in Nairobi last Friday and took the night train to Mombasa. We all agreed that “Night Train to Mombasa” sounded like an old Hollywood romance starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand. Well, Anne and Tabea don’t know who either of those people are, so they agreed that it sounded like a romance and I supplied the rest. I’m pretty sure that the Kenyans haven’t done anything to the train station since the British pulled out. The map of Kenya in the ticket office/waiting room was from 1961. The train takes eleven hours or so and included breakfast. There were lots of other tourists around, and I hit the trifecta when I sat down in the waiting room next to two Dutch girls and an American travelling around together. I talked to the American for a while, and then turned to the Dutch girls and started talking to them in Dutch. This got several raised eyebrows, a snort of laughter from Anne and Tabea, and one, “I guess we’ll have to be careful about what we say.” If only I could do that more often in Swahili…

Anyway, the night train was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in Kenya. Anne, Tabea, and I got a sleeping berth all to ourselves with four beds in it. An attendant brings bedding a couple of hours after the train leaves the station, so after socializing for a while with an aeronautics engineer from India, we turned in early. We woke up while the train was passing through Tsavo National Park. We didn’t see any animals, but we had a lovely breakfast with a couple of older British ladies before heading back to our car and discovering that we could open our windows all the way. We spent the rest of the train ride standing on our seats and sticking our heads out the window. We tried to gauge the distance to our destination by the prevalence of palm trees and the strength of ocean smell in the air. I would almost recommend the train to Mombasa more than the city itself, but that might just be my dislike of the climate there. Below: Morning on the night train.

Saying that Mombasa is hot is like saying that William Hung can’t sing or that Andrea Yates was a bad mother. All technically true, but poorly descriptive. Mombasa feels like everything I’ve heard about living in Phoenix or central Florida in the summer, but without air conditioning. We tried going to the beach, but the reef causes the ocean floor to slope down at about one foot every half mile. We were there at low tide which meant that walking out to the water took ten minutes. It took another fifteen minutes of wading to get to water that came up to our knees, but it was water that had been sitting in equatorial sun for the entire morning—probably around 100°F. It was our first trip to the Indian Ocean, though, so we splashed around and then found a restaurant with cool drinks and some shade.

Anne and I went out to dinner that night at a cafeteria-style restaurant with wireless internet (!) that served American, Indian, and Kenyan foods. I was shoveling my way through a giant piece of triple chocolate cake a la mode, when our Indian friend from the train the night before came in to say hi. I had had great fun the night before asking him questions about how planes worked and which airline companies had good or bad reputations in the industry. He said that he got stopped for questioning every time he flew into the United States because his last name is Mohammed and he works in the airline industry. Sample question from TSA, “How much do you know about planes?” Sample answer from Nihal, “A lot. It’s my job.” Hahaha. Oh, TSA, I feel safer already. Needless to say, it was fun to run into him again.

We left Mombasa early the next morning on the bus bound for Mokowe, where we got a boat transfer to Lamu. The bus ride was cheap, but long. I sat next to the window, so the first half of the ride I got baked, and then it started raining, and it turned out the roof leaked above my seat. Fortunately, Shela and her ocean views and rooftop terraces have been making up for it ever since. Below: Camels on the beach and an ocean view with a dhow.