Lamu was lovely, one of my best experiences of Kenya and a good choice to do near the end of the stay. I have much more to say and some nice photos to stick up here but I’ll do it in another entry starting tomorrow when I have had a chance to prepare the pics for uploading.

I took the cheap Akamba bus. And therein lies the tale. I won’t do that again.

And now Im back in Tala, with just under a month to do what little ‘good’ might be possible or appropriate.

When you coming BACK??!!??!!

xxxTyg

Interesting to here your impressions of Uganda. You know we took Akamba bus to Uganda and it was great. Of course, we paid extra for the fancy bus and I’m wondering if you took the budget version…Regardless pole for your bone rattling safari. Does make for good stories though!

Enjoy Lamu! Do drink gallons of lime juice and scramble the sand dunes by Shela beach for me.

Am chilly in Canada. Surviving Christmas consumerism, hibernating at my sisters and playing with my nieces. Coming to terms with the fact I am nolonger in Kenya.

Love to you, C

“Yes boss!”.

I turn to look at him blankly.

“I feel as if you are my new son!”.
Some other travelers turn to look at him too, possibly for the sport.

“I don’t know why you feel that”, I reply blankly. The other travellers laugh.

The money-changer laughs too and introduces himself to me by name. Some elaborate multi-syllable old-testament name. He tells me he is saved and that his own father (or was it boss?) is working in the Vatican (I think; I was concentrating on looking blank).

I introduce myself; we shake hands. I smile; he’s been grinning at me the whole time.
“Now change some little money with me, my boss”.

My blank look returns, “No thankyou”.

But this isn’t the bit I wanted to tell you about. There was a long-ish queue at the Ugandan Immigration office last night, and I mentioned it to the woman who had been sitting next to me on the park-bench near the front of the coach for the first part of the journey. (She’s here in Nairobi today to buy clothes, returning overnight tonight on the same Akamba bone-shaker, to start selling them before the 1st Jan)

“There might be a shorter queue on the Kenyan side”, she offered, “because they aren’t using the computers”.

I did a double take: the Ugandan office had an array of bright new-looking black and silver Dell computers fitted with Passport Scanners. Surely all this tech was supposed to make the process quicker?

After getting stamped out of Uganda, we wandered over a few hundred yards of dark no-mans-land to the Kenyan Immigration desk. I didn’t see my co-traveller but she soon appeared from the gloom and asked to borrow my pen to fill in the forms. Then she used her familiar position to assume the place in front of me in the queue as if I’d been saving it for her.

I didn’t complain; I asked her about the queue. It was shorter than on the Ugandan side.

“Maybe because there were only two of them working”, she offered.

“But there are only two of them working here!”, I protested.

“But there they’re using the computers”, she explained, “here it’s just stamp-and-go”.

Before I stamped and went, I wished the immigration officer a happy new year. On my immigration form I’d ticked the “returning resident” box for purpose of visit. She looked a bit puzzled and leafed through my passport to find the resident’s re-entry pass stamped there, then she visibly relaxed.

“You’re a resident”, she smiled.

“For the time being”, I said

“What’s your work”, She asked

“I’m a volunteer, working at a technical college teaching computers and IT”, my standard answer

She smiled again and looked me straight in the eye (an unusual gesture for a Kenyan lady, in my experience, and virtually unheard of for an Immigration officer: they can even scrutinise your face for deviations from your passport photograph without actually catching your eye), “Let me say Good For Kenya!”, she said.

I melted. “Thank you, I hope so. I hope it is of some good for Kenya that I’m here”

Right now Im (not very) fresh off the bus from Kampala. The bus in question was a shitty old clockwork rustbucket of a vehicle owned by ‘Akamba’ bus company (avoid them!) which must have been upholstered by a carpenter or, possibly, a blacksmith. I’d booked so far in advance I was the first passenger to be allocated a seat. The man at the desk told me he’d chosen a good seat for me when I told him of the problems of being 6′4″ tall. Turns out I was in the second row, not the first, for some reason, the bloke who got the seat I wanted wasn’t particularly tall. The coachwork was so bad that:-

a) his seat kept wobbling about after he reclined it so that if my knees came near it — which they did — he would clobber them

b) my seat couldn’t be reclined at all

c) my seat had no armrest

Armrests become supprisingly important when you’re driving for 16 hours (!) over unmaintained roads so bumpy that the idea of sleeping becomes comical (for a few hours, anyway). The roads were once tarmacked but since then potholes have developed and grown deeper and more severe. Some of them are so vast that the views across them are starting to attrat more vistors than the Great Rift Valley itself. The effect on passengers of a shity old Akamba bus, with shock absorbers made of knicker elastic, is much
like being a bit of wet lettuce in a sieve while someone shakes the dropps off. If you don’t have an armrest you might get tossed off (the seat!). The armrest gives an alternative anchor point. Since there is nothing to brace one’s feet against the only options for remaining seated for the duration are:-

a) active balancing (which requires very strong buttock muscles)

b) moving to another seat with an armrest (which I eventually did)

Sorry if this turned into a rant, but Im writing what I feel and, right now, I feel it in my bum!

The men sat around a table at one end of the room while women sat on rush mats on the floor at the other (apart from when some of them got up, now and then, to get more food for the men’s table). There is quite a strong culture around this gender separation from what I can tell, though I was not there anywhere long enough to really understand what was behind what I saw. Women (and children) are expected to kneel while greeting their superiors (elders, members — either sex — of the husband’s family, men in general) I found it very strange because, of course, its so different from my native culture and also becuse it’s so different from what I have experienced in Kenya.

The differences between Ugandan and Kenyan traditions and daily life are an impotant part o the reason I wanted to visit another African country before I leave: it would be grossly unfair of me to judge the continent by Kenya alone. I have managed only a brief glimpse of another African country, but have had the chance to see that there certainly are big differences between neighbouring E. African countries.

In the morning of my last day (yesterday) we visited the traditional burial place of the kings of Buganda. The young man who showed us around was very knowledgeable — he wants to prepare a website covering the history of the people and the place — he told us of the kings of history, how the institution of regional kings impacted political life during the British colonisation and also during and around the rule of Idi Amin. The many clans of the Buganda people had various roles to play in the administration of the kingship. For examle one clan was specifically responsible for ‘crowning’ new kings. Members of this clan were not required to kneel when greeting the king. Meanwhile the king would take many wives from various clans. His sons would take their mothers’ clans (usually children belong to their father’s clans) to prevent a monopoly of kingship from any single clan. Eldest sons were not elligible to become king but kings were chosen from the available pool of younger sons by a group of elders. The king was, however, prohibited from marrying into the clan who have responsibility of choosing and crowning kings, once again, as a safeguard gainst such abuses of power as sometimes occur today when rulers arrange for their sons to gain power.

There’s so much more to this than I can write here, and so much more, even, than I have heard, but I wanted to capture some of the insights that made me sit and wonder in that thatched mausoleum.

How are you blogging this?

C

The moped taxi story developes. I have now seen a 100cc moped carrying:
- a mattress rolled up and stood up on end
- a sofa, tied on sideways to the back with bits of inner-tube rubber (Africa’s answer to Duct Tape, without it the whole continent would fall apart
- Jackson and me! (plus the driver) out in the sticks we took one boda boda between us and trundled over paths barely wide enough to walk through.
Hair raising stuff. Luckily I dont have too much hair to raise.