It all started so normally – the matatu had dropped us off in Ukunda town, we had a cold Coca Cola and started off on the long trek towards Diani Beach where we had a campsite lined up. Diani Beach, by all accounts is a tourist resort plagued with beach boys who wander around trying to trick tourists into giving them money, old sex tourists – both men and women (and we saw plenty of evidence of that) – and the usual soulless establishments that you generally find at tourist resorts on the coast. Our purpose for being here was rather that it was the nearest jumping off point to visit Kaya Kinondo, a sacred forest which M had read about in a Kenyan travel magazine in Lamu and taken an interest in. As soon as we arrived though, things started deviating from the plan in quite a spectacular way. After taking a few cooling off beers and a pizza, we had a chat with an Australian guy, a British girl and an American girl who, despite looking like beach bums themselves, told us unconditionally that Diani was a dump. After a few more beers we went out into the garden, pitched up the tent and clambered in.
As M fell asleep I was getting too much pain from the ever growing lump on my arm to get any sleep and so I tossed and turned until about 5am when I heard someone going through the plastic bags outside the tent where we had kept our pasta and juice for the next day. As I peered through a hole in the tent, a telltale long black tail revealed that our unwelcome visitor was the advance party of a troupe of monkeys which was coming to raid our supplies. I hit the side of the tent a few times to try and scare this marauding monkey away but instead of taking fright, it just punched me back a couple of times and more monkeys jumped from the trees. For the next 3 hours they were screeching, munching on raw macaroni, and jumping around on the tent. True to form, M slept through 2 hours of this but eventually I woke her up and we lay around for a bit, waiting for them to calm down and semi-hoping that they would take our small reserve of Tuskers – it would be annoying to lose them, certainly, but the sight of a drunken troupe of monkeys would definitely have compensated for the loss of the macaronis. As we broke out of the tent and inspected the damage, it turned out that not only had they not stolen any of the beer, but they'd broken one of the bottles. Half a kilo of pasta had been destroyed as well as a half kilo pot of creamy cheese sauce. M's towel, which she'd hung up to dry the night before, had been dragged off the line and used as some kind of plaything. The tent next to ours had had its top ripped off, and the frame of ours had been snapped. Nice work, monkeys!
The guilt on her face tells it allAs we had breakfast I looked at my lump which had by now a large black blob just under the surface. M's was giving her trouble too although hadn't grown quite so much and looked like a big spot with a large reservoir of goo inside. She inspected mine and declared that the black blob looked like it had wings and legs. We had breakfast and then decided that it may be a good idea to go and get a doctor's advice about what to do in cases of having flies growing inside one's arms.
Off we headed and one thing led to another, and before we knew it we'd been pumped with antibiotics and lined up for surgery to remove the offending lumps, and shown to our rooms where we were to stay for the night. It seemed a bit excessive for what was effectively just an abscess but we wanted to get rid of these and did as we were told. We were fed fish and chicken, watched al-Jazeera news for the first time in a while, and when afternoon came I was called over to the operating theatre where I spent probably the 30 most unpleasant minutes of the whole trip, having the lump excavated. No flies or spiders or small aliens escaped from the resulting chasm and so I was left to suppose that the big black blob was something altogether less cool, like dried blood or something. Dammit. M went after and came back smiling and in an altogether more composed state than the shaking, sweating mess that I had been after mine. We looked great as a pair with our patches on arms and a drip plug in the back of our hands. As we got ready to go to sleep in the “Palm Beach Hospital” in Diani Beach, we reflected on how we had spent the afternoon in an operating theatre rather than an ancient sacred forest as we had planned. But then again, if adventure always went according to plan, it wouldn't be adventure any more would it?
Things continued not going according to plan as we sat around in our room all day getting pumped with antibiotics, although the doctor did come in at one point to talk about football and inform us that we could be let out tomorrow. My dressing was changed and underneath it was a large black crater, which apparently was a “necrosis” which was basically not a good thing. We sat around watching more al-Jazeera, growing restless and wandering around the hospital trying to find something to do, before realising that a hospital is not necessarily the best place for this and settled for going back to the room to watch more al-Jazeera news. M had started getting strong pains from the IV antibiotics and it became clear that we both wanted to get out as soon as possible. Fortunately my crater looked a lot better the next morning, and we were unleashed onto the streets of Diani Beach.
War injury gallery picture #2347349Not that we had much time to be there – just the time to go and pack our monkey-wrecked tent and have some lunch before heading out to the main road where we flagged down a matatu to yet another wonderfully named place, Lunga-Lunga, where the Kenyan border post is. Over from there the Tanzanian border post was at the equally well-named (apart from for the Finns, for whom it's much funnier) Horohoro where we got stamped in quickly and painlessly, hopped into a dalla-dalla (what the Tanzanians call a matatu) and, once it had been crammed to way over capacity, rattled off over the corrugated road to Tanga, where we were to spend the night.
This was possibly not one of the most successful legs of this trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment