Some thoughts on Mombasa
Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya and East Africa’s largest port, is the kind of place I would have really loved five or six years ago – the streets are constantly bustling and bursting with colour, there are impromptu fruit markets all over the place (including on median strips of main roads), and the Muslim men and women are often beautifully dressed. Throw in the rickshaws, the dirtiness and the general disorder, and voila, you have a place that feels just like India – or at least as much as a place can feel like India when it’s in Africa. Certainly, it’s a world away from the largely Christian areas of Kenya that we had visited earlier.
These days, I still find a place like Mombasa very interesting, but I prefer to watch the goings-on from the safety of a hotel window rather than launching myself into the thick of it, where it’s blisteringly hot and at every turn there’s lots of hassle, noise, pollution and filthiness (and danger at night). This revelation, and our aversion to our dodgy €6 hotel room – the same kind that we stayed in for months on end during our first trip to India – shows us that we’re changing as travellers as we get older and reaffirmed that we’ve made the right choice by giving up our eight years of journeying for the stable Geneva life that awaits us in October.
After two nights in Mombasa, we took a six-hour bus north to what seemed like the ends of the earth. For the last three hours on a dirt road we passed two one-street towns and no other signs of life except a handful of tiny thatched-roofed villages. When we finally got off the bus, a small motor boat awaited us, and 10 minutes later we were docking at one of the greatest Swahili civilisations and an island town that almost instantly became my favourite place in sub-Saharan Africa: the donkey-laden old Muslim kingdom of Lamu.
Tags: Africa, East Africa, Kenya, like India, Mombasa
Nick