Soft Landing

11th February - 15th February 2010 – Days 135-139 – Lamu, Kenya

Call it the result of bad scheduling, weak immune systems or pure pleasure seeking behaviour, we eventually left Nairobi about half a week later than originally planned. Knowing we wouldn't have enough time to explore the whole of Kenya before we would have to be in Dar es Salaam to meet a friend, we agreed to devote our time to seeing the coastline on our way down south to Tanzania. I'd been looking at too many photos of the apparently scenic Lamu archipelago up the north coast not to miss it so we bussed it up there first, stopping in Mombasa for a mandatory night while changing buses.

To get to Lamu island or to move around in the archipelago people use dhows, either old style with the sail up or the modern motorised version. After two days on buses and about 15 minutes on a dhow, we disembarked at Lamu town and sat down for a big pint of passion fruit juice while trying to suck in the old Swahili fishing town atmosphere. Touts had found us already by now and one of them was waiting outside while we negotiated last minute tactics on how to get to our chosen accommodation, the Wildebeest guesthouse/art workshop. It turned out we were not safe from the touts inside the restaurant either as a man who introduced himself as the 'second in charge' there was also working as a commissioned salesman for the Wildebeest. We eventually let him guide us to the place and negotiated a fairly good deal with only minimal commission and were very satisfied with what we got: a small corner in a Swahili style house on two floors with a thatch roof, open from the sides with bamboo blinds covering the bigger openings on the walls. Ok, we needed a soft landing for coming back out into the real world after our stay at Tom's house in Nairobi, but we hadn't exactly envisioned a romantic hideout with a soft sea breeze blowing right in either.

For a moment, we are confused

No matter how idyllic the place was, we were quickly back out in the maze of streets that makes up the town, in search of a dinner place and to scout out our options for catching a dhow to the surrounding islands. We'd already been offered a fishing trip to the nearest island at a price that nearly exceeded our daily budget and we soon learnt that this was going to be the name of the game – despite the budget traveller friendly image of the place, you would not actually manage to make any budget deals here. Looking around at other wazungu in town confirmed our beliefs. There were both young and oldish European ladies walking around with local beach boys, middle aged couples in deck shoes zapping around on the motorised dhows and expat families on a weekend getaway from the mainland.

While I was trying to enjoy the salty air and the relaxed atmosphere all the same, T was having more difficulties adapting to the scene. Ok, so the place didn't have much going for it; it was historical in the sense that it was one of the oldest trading towns on the East African coast, but now it clearly lived off tourism. Nonetheless, the people were friendly enough and not too pushy compared to what you could expect from a place like this, and the town layout was original without modern resort architecture unlike most of the coast had been on our way up here from Mombasa. Had it been cheaper to sail around, we probably would have been more convinced about the whole archipelago. As the situation stood, however, we were effectively stuck on Lamu island with four nights paid for, and we would have to kill the time somehow.

Generic black and white Lamu picture #537349

The first full day was spent in Lamu town itself wandering around stopping for beer and coffee when appropriate and counting our pennies to see how many of such stops we could make per day without blasting our budget completely. On the second day we walked down by the beachfront to Shela, another concentration of life on the same island. Shela tends to an even more expensive lifestyle with its expat owned villas but also has a 12 km stretch of sandy beach. We had some lunch, did our casual tour, got stitched up for beer and coffee and made a mandatory visit to the sands. On the trip back along the beachfront we were caught in high tide and had to wade through waist-level waves trying to avoid stepping on crabs, which formed the most entertaining part of the day.

Beware of the tide: The road to Shela...

...and the way back.

The third full day had been reserved for a dhow trip to the more pristine Paté island further out in the archipelago, but as the price of the boat there (one-way) was our three days' budget, we ended up repeating the pattern from the first full day. I got my fix of seafood for a while and T pushed on through the days to his deserved break from coastal tourism until we reach Zanzibar at some point next month. The most beautiful glimpse (and pretty much our only one) of the archipelago was in the morning light when we glided away from Lamu jetty just after dawn.

A mosque whose name we don't remember...