Kenyan Adventures

Hello!
I am currently sweating my skin off on Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya and an island on the Indian Ocean.
Kenya has been lovely so far. I spent two days in Nairobi, took the overnight train to Mombasa Wednesday evening, and I will be here until tomorrow, when I will take the overnight train back to Nairobi.

Firstly, Nairobi has really grown on me. They sell fresh popcorn on the street for 10 ksh a bag (about 12 cents), and that alone is enough to win me over. They also spice their food in Kenya, which is a nice pick-me-up from the terribly bland Rwandan cuisine. Wednesday I had the most lovely and touristy day. I hired a driver for the day and went first to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which is an elephant and rhinoceros orphanage. Yes, I said orphanage. From 11-noon every day, visitors are invited to watch them feed the baby elephants (yes, I said baby elephants) and pet them and watch them play with each other. The youngest were three months old; the oldest less than two years. I died. They are just big fat dusty lumps of adorable. They take to the orphanage caretakers as surrogate mothers and follow them around, play with them, even try to wrestle with them. It is just heart-squashingly adorable. After the elephant orphanage, my driver wanted to take me to a Masaai marketplace. I have never seen so many masks in my life. The market collects African masks from all over the continent, including many antiques and old bronze pieces. They were breathtaking. Outside the shop I met a Maasai warrior named Julius who is 23. The shopkeep said, "you're a single girl, he's a single boy, and you are both tall--you make a great match!" and urged me to marry him. I gracefully declined, and continued on to Giraffe Manor, a Rothschild giraffe preservation and education center that allows visitors to feed the giraffes by hand! I did, and was french-kissed by a lady giraffe as thanks for lunch.

The overnight train from Nairobi to Mombasa was awesome, by the way. You do travel through Tsavo National Park, but at about 2am, so it is impossible to try to spot animals unless the train breaks down (which it apparently often does). I managed to score my own room, which was nice because I would not want to have shared that closet-sized compartment with a stranger. The views are absolutely beautiful. You leave Nairobi just at sundown, and as the train winds out of the city, the bright lights of the Central Business District trick you into thinking you're in New York. There are a lot of shantytowns and slum shacks along the train tracks, though I suppose that is standard in developing countries. When you wake up in the morning, there are hundreds of children lining the fields along the tracks waving at the muzungus. All in all, it is a hell of a colonial throwback. At dinner on the train I sat with three railroad employees--one was the conductor, one his assistant, and one a guard. The guard, Francis, engaged me in a two hour discussion about the duties of a father and raising daughters and why it was good that I did not accept the Maasai warrior's marriage proposal.
The train arrived in Mombasa just before 10 am (practically on time!) and I checked into my hotel, which is in the heart of town and acts like a four-star hotel despite costing $50 a night. I'm talking glasses of juice and cold towels at check-in. My hotel also has this hilarious calypso cover-band that plays on the hotel patio every night and is loud as hell. I can hear them from my balcony overlooking the city. Oh, did I mention my room has a balcony overlooking the city? I must have forgotten that part. My first day in Mombasa, naturally, I walked down the road to Fort Jesus and to see the Old Town.

Fort Jesus was built by the Portuguese in 1593 after Vasco de Gama "discovered" Mombasa. It has, throughout history, alternatively been occupied by both the Portuguese and Arabs. It is now mostly in ruins, but totally cool. It overlooks the Indian Ocean (as any good island fort should) and gets great breezes, an important consideration in Mombasa life, since this is the most oppressively hot place I have ever been. Yes, it's worse than New Orleans in July. Old Town is pretty slummy, to be honest. It's not like what I imagined it to be, which I suppose falls more in line with my expectations of Zanzibar's Stone Town. Old Town is definitely interesting though, and has some incredibly intricate wooden doors. I also found this quaint little Indian tea shop with the best Indian sweets I've ever had! While wandering Old Town, I ran into the two American students that I met in Gisenyi in November! It really is a small world.

Yesterday I went on a day excursion to Wasini Island to go snorkeling on the coral reefs. It was incredible. We took a very long drive to a pier, then a motorized dhow around the Indian Ocean chasing bottlenose dolphins for a while. Eventually we anchored off the coast of a beach island and snorkeled for about an hour and a half. I saw rainbow fish that literally looked like the ones in that children's book (mom, you know what I'm talking about). And angel fish! And weird massive white fish that looked kind of like fat baby crocodiles bred with catfish. And clowfish! (One of the tour operators made me promise to try to catch him a "Nemo" when I snorkeled.) It was just lovely. What impressed me most was the massive variety of types of coral that existed on this reef. It was just breathtaking.
After snorkeling we had lunch on Wasini Island, and took a tour of the (very poor) town there. I wanted to visit these Slave Caves that were used during Portuguese and Arab times to hold slaves before shipping them to Zanzibar, but everyone else on my tour was tired so I missed out. But it was just a beautiful day.

One more thing about Kenya before I sign off for the post: they LOVE Dolly Parton. Now, I know that country music is popular in East Africa. I've heard Jimmy Buffet and indistinguishably country music playing in markets in Uganda and Rwanda. But Kenya takes it to a whole other level. My hotel has been playing non-stop Christmas music since my arrival, which makes sense. What does not make sense is that every morning during breakfast hours, they play the same five Dolly Parton Christmas songs on repeat. I now know all of the worlds to "Christmas to Remember" (I do quite like the "we'll make this"/"springtime bliss" and "Christmas to remember"/"in the middle of December" double-rhyme, though) and "Hardy Candy Christmas" (excuse me if these aren't the accurate titles--they are merely educated guesses based on learning all of the lyrics) which I'm pretty sure is just a breakup song and not actually about Christmas.