Gede ruins

We got up early on Sunday morning to visit the ruins at Gede - an old muslim Swahili town which had been famed along the coast. Our guide spoke rapid english and punctuated sentences with "are you follow me" to check if we were keeping up, and spoke of the secretans in the tombs (three tombs in I realised he meant skeletons). All in all its an interesting place / palace and the various methods they used for sanitation in terms of clean and dirty water were ingenious.

Although it was interesting the highlight for me were the baobobs.

For details of the site see Kenyan National Museum Site







We also visited the museum attached - where I was impressed by craftsmanship of the door!

Desert rose

Watamu - Marijani

This is our hotel / resort the Marijani.

We were the only guests - I don't know if this was a good or a bad thing. They still forgot to clean our room. Twice.

But at 20 euro a night we were comfortable (when the electricity was on - and thus the fan otherwise sweaty) - it wasn't luxurious - and made us feel almost like travellers again.

Our balcony sitting area / kitchenette where we spent a lot of time hanging out




This is Ugly - our resident cat. I'm sure he has another name, but we renamed him anyway - I don't think I've ever seen such a badly proportioned cat. Ever. - I think his mother was friendly with a hyena. Anyway - he was a noisy vocal cat that came every mealtime and rummaged in the bin and nicked an unattended cheese sandwich from the table. Marijani was home to some 11 cats, 5 parrots and 2 dogs (none fed enough or given enough attention to my mind). Watamu is home to many hundreds of cats - all undernourished and mangy lookingthis is Scary our resident spider in the tree outside. HUGE. and scary

Watamu - food and the village

Watamu is essentially still a fishing village at heart, with some hotels built around (and more in the offing) - we felt very much at ease and safe, and enjoyed the exchanges of jambo, habari? Mzuri (swahili for" hello how are you - I am fine") or ciao with people.

Rwanda still feels cold (not just temperature) in comparison - there are goats grazing freely, women on corners frying fish, or manzani (doughnut /oliebol type things - but with cardamom flavoured sugar), kids playing in the street etc, as well as music playing in the shops and from peoples houses.









Mama Lucy's supermarket - a well stocked oasis of Kenyan and imported produce.

Roasters was where we ended up taking a lot of our meals - fish curry with rice, fish masala with chapatti etc reasonably priced, and reasonably fast.


This is the Banda cafe taken from the terrace of the Jambo pub. The Jambo was a great place to have a Tusker or two as the sun went down (and not bad dinner either), however the Banda was a new and pretty interesting place to go. We had an incredible dinner of octopus stew (swahili spicing) with chapattis, soft drinks and african spice coffee for the princely sum of two euros.


Street food!! these are batter dipped potato slices which you buy per piece (1 shilling = 1 eurocent) and sprinkle with chilli salt, and can squeeze with lime - served either in a newspaper twist or a plastic bag depending on who you buy from. They are gooood.....

Watamu - handicrafts

The lack of many other tourists meant we got a lot of attention from the beach boys and ladies (and even beach masaai) trying to sell us local crafts, imported sarongs, day trips etc

Everyone wanted us to come and look (looking is free) and were perplexed that we wouldn't buy soapstone / bags / wooden masks / plaques with our names carved out (real boot polish ebony)

Watamu - Hemingways

For my birthday dinner we went to Hemingways a very colonial style hotel experience - where we had cocktails and watched the sun go down, before eating a really good meal and juddering back overstuffed the 4km in a tuk tuk to Marijani.




Thanks for all the birthday wishes I received.

Ciao carameli

well we got back from Watamu later than planned on Wednesday due to a VIP leaving Nairobi.

The beach was amazing, I can see why it has been rated among the top ten in the world. Unfortunately we visited during a period where there was a lot of seaweed - which should be absent November - April.

There are three bays which are protected by a reef, which means that the waves are not too scary, we were confused by the way the tides varied from day to day - one day at four we'd gone swimming, when the next day the tide was out - completely! We still swam a lot in the warm warm ocean, and spent one morning snorkelling (not a lot of fish, and dead coral)

We had also forgotten how high humidity can really drain all the energy out of you, and spent long hours in the shade resting.

traditional dhow

Santi - a beach boy who took us on a reef tour with octopus (borrowed for photo)

Lon holds a starfish





























low tide




























dhow detail


















shipbuilding










idyllic
















fish in a rock pool




Watamu reminded me a lot of Zanzibar the first time, still a bit unspoiled - but maybe its because we were among only relatively few tourists. The troubles after the elections have hit the tourist industry hard, and only the intrepid italians are around in any number. They tend to stay in their hotels eating italian food (one website for a hotel I saw when planning our trip boasted of its Italy trained chef). Hence the title, instead of saying "jambo" like you might expect almost everyone greets you with "ciao" and kids with "ciao carameli" - "hello sweets"

Imigongo and entrepreneurship

I met Paul a few weeks ago, he works in a giftshop in the centre of Kigali. We started chatting, and he told me how he wants to make something of himself, he has the familiar and sad background of orphanhood, and was a street kid until a guy called Alan took him to World Vision who paid his schoolfees. At present he doesn't receive a salary or even commission for working, but some money when the owner decides to give it to him. Fearing a request for "patronage" but interested anyway, we carried on talking and he showed me the jewelry he was making, and one of the pieces of art that he makes.

In the end we brainstormed a bit, about ways he could make something different to sell to tourists, and we came up with the idea of imigongo cards. Imigongo is a Rwandan handicraft which uses cow dung and is painted. It is typically Rwandan, unlike a lot of the crafts which are regional.

Below are some snaps (better photos are needed) of some imigongo. I really like the strong graphic geometric designs, and think that a lot of tourists do too, its just that they are unlikely to buy a bunch of them to take home - but cards are always possible. So far we have printed some photos and Paul is in the process of making some prototypes... I'm hoping that they work out and we'll make a small business plan to work out how to take this forward.