What have we been up to since my last post?? Well...We flew from Nairobi to the Maasai Mara on 28 June, where we were met at the airport by James, our charming and able guide for our two-night stay. On the drive from the Ol Kiombo airstrip to the Kicheche Bush Camp, James spotted three snoozing cheetahs… which felt like a very good game-viewing omen for the upcoming two more days! We felt even better when I spotted four more and James declared me "at least half-Maasai." Mmm hmmm. I was actually more excited about spotting a rock-shaped, rock-colored tortoise in the road and about the familiar music of bells on the cattle grazing in the distance.
Our tented camp was luxurious and largely unoccupied, so we got royal treatment! Larry and Francie, the New Zealand couple who shared the camp with us, were good company, and the nearby lions entertained all of us throughout the night with their impressively raucous mating.
Our early morning drives resulted in all kinds of game sightings, including, on the last day, lions over a fresh kill. We also saw herds of elephants, water buffalo, zebras, giraffes, hyenas, jackals, hippos, all manner of antelope-looking beasts, countless birds… I’m missing a lot on this list, I know. But even absent James’s excellent tracking skills, it would have been worth it just for the lushness of the landscape: the grasses were door-high to our vehicle, and the golds and greens and blues all around us were breath-taking.
Our "sundowner" cocktails were pretty good, too…
Two days was enough, though.
So we moved on to Lamu! We flew back to Nairobi to change planes, then had a somewhat bumpy ride out to the coast, on a much larger plane than I remember ever making the same trip on before… The Manda airstrip was unmistakable and familiar, though, as was the choppy crossing from Manda to Lamu on a low-slung wooden boat (which, by the way, had the same motor as the one in OUR new/old boat, making conversation impossible at anything but a shout).
We stayed at a gorgeous old house in Shela called "Fatuma’s Tower," named for a Swahili woman who lived there alone some centuries ago, but now owned by a lucky Italian couple that now also makes Shela home. The place is set at the back of the village, so the dunes and the accompanying trees were our view out the back windows, but the top of the "tower" afforded views of the whole village, out to the water. The whole place had an open-door and open-window policy, so the breezes kept us cool and we lived large, Fatuma-style. We had private breakfasts and dinners each night, prepared and served by the immensely talented Saidi---and I succumbed to the temptation to decorate my feet, old school.
We walked to Lamu town, of course, and I had incessant sensory-memory flashbacks of making that trek several times a day… We dropped in at the post-office, where the telephone booths I once used to call my parents (collect) now constitute a communications graveyard in the front walkway. Sigh. We strolled through town, visited the donkey sanctuary, marveled at the Hapa Hapa’s enduring presence at the waterfront, and were generally kept busy responding to all of the cheerful greetings and inquiries about how we were enjoying our stay.
We had to also, of course, hit up the beach near Shela---which is radically changed since I was last here! The view across the channel, for one thing, is now populated with enormous foreigner-built mansions, and the worst of it was right around the bend: apparently some Italian with more money than taste has built a private residence, right on the point of the dunes, designed to look like a monstrous sand castle. Argh!
Fortunately, I was able to drown my sorrows at the deck at Peponi, which opened for the season on 1 July. Perfect timing! Oh, and of course, we adjusted our cocktailing location according to the weather---blistering sun? Right out in the open. Torrential rain? Under the awning. Repeat.
We left Lamu on 2 July and headed to Malindi. I never spent a lot of time in Malindi back in the way back, but I was looking forward to seeing one of its most prominent residents again: Ole Kina!
He met us at the airport (where we entertained ourselves during our wait by counting the mangoes on the tree in the parking lot: 65!) and escorted us to the resort he and his wife own: the Seaview. We haven’t really left the resort since, actually--at least not to explore town on our own. We’ve been lounging by the pool most of the time (boring, we know) and occasionally making the trek into town to take advantage of the Book Café’s internet access and computers. Greg’s gone on a couple of runs (in this humidity? Insane.) and we’ve strolled down the VERY windy beach where bands of teenage boys play pick-up soccer that somehow incorporate the gusts into their game plans.
Otherwise, we’ve mostly just spent time with Ole Kina, his lovely wife Lucy, and their three children, Nareiyan, Shorua and Santoni. They are incredibly busy and productive people, with holding and activities all over town.
Ole Kina treated us to a visit to his favorite place: their property at Sabaki River, where he’s taken it as his personal challenge to, before he dies, "plant more trees than have ever been cut down for his life’s comfort." They’ve already managed over 100 thousand mangroves and 50 thousand or so others… so I’d say he’s well on his way.
The property stretches from the river, to the dunes, to the beach, and we got a tour of it all in the company of Ben, the very man who was reported in the BBC for being dragged up a tree by what must have been a very ambitious, very enormous and very buff python.
It is the morning of 7 July now, and the power is out at the hotel, where we’re now having coffee on our patio and watching the millipede I stepped on yesterday (my Facebook status update shortchanged the creature by many hundreds of legs---my apologies!) make its way across a beam, back toward the room. Awesome! At some point, we’ll wander back into town so I can get this posted and we can check in on our Blackboard classrooms. We’re "teaching" this summer, after all…
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