Call to Relax

I just returned from an amazing weekend in Lamu Town. Lamu is part of the Lamu Archipelago, a small chain of islands off Kenya's coastline, quite near Somalia.

It was short trip: Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. But even that short stay in and around Lamu was enough to fall in love with the place. I have to give Lamu the title for East Africa's most charming and romantic spot. The rich and famous have been fans of Lamu for a while; Bill Gates visits the area from time to time and Princess Caroline of Monaco has no fewer than four houses here, not to mention the scores of wealthy finance types with cash to burn. Fortunately, the islands remain accessible even to humbler elements like me.

Getting to Lamu from Nairobi involves traveling to minuscule airports and jumping on even smaller planes. The views of the flight as we got close to the coast were terrific:



Pretty much every aspect of the weekend was a huge hit. I traveled there with a great group of people -- four volunteer consultants working at TechnoServe (my employer last summer in Tanzania). For most of them, it was their first time in Lamu as well, so we had the chance to explore the island together.

Our accommodations were outrageously nice. Rather than staying at one of Lamu's fancy hotels, we rented a mansion for the weekend. The mansion was called Mnarani House, which means "the house at the minaret." And indeed there was a beautiful mosque right next door - nice for views, not so nice for sleep when the call to prayer blasts at 5 am, twenty feet from your head. Muezzins aside, the house itself had a charming Swahili open-plan layout. In general, I've always found Islamic architecture to produce some of the nicest homes - simple exteriors and elegant interiors centered around courtyards, sitting areas and gardens. This house followed that tradition: there were four floors, and each floor was divided up with low walls which created sitting areas, a coffee nook, the dining balcony, a reading area, etc. Instead of windows, the house had several balconies and open views of the town so that place was always kept cool by the sea breeze. The bedrooms were really beautiful, with en-suite bathrooms and unusually shaped windows that prevents those outside from seeing in allows a nice breeze to blow through at night.

We spent most of the time in the house eating in the open-air dining room or hanging out on the cushion-filled rooftop, which had great views of the mosque, the beach and the mansions nearby. This is the view of Mnarani House and mosque:



One of Lamu's biggest attractions is the seafood. The apartment that we rented came free with a chef and steward; we only had to pay for the ingredients. The seafood there was amazing: fried calamari on the first night; oysters, crabs and lobster on the second; a gigantic, grilled white snapper for our final lunch. Everything had been caught hours before we ate it. Even the side dishes were great: avocado-onion salads, coconut-cooked rice, dressings like ginger, lime, garlic and chili.

We hired a local guy to give us a tour of Lamu town on Saturday. The tour itself was somewhat half-hearted, more of a loop through tourist boutiques owned by our guide's friends than a history-focused trek through the island's points of interest. Nonetheless, we spent a few hours in Lamu's quiet streets filled with crumbling buildings, narrow alleyways and vegetable stalls. The photo opportunities were incredible, and I tried to do my best with my entry-level Canon. The quality of the footage was good enough that I told myself I would learn more about photography before the summer is over. Here are some of my favorites...





Lamu's transportation industry is donkey-based. The narrowness of the roads, the lack of bridges to the mainland and the small size of the town make cars totally impractical on the island. In other places where I've seen similar constraints (Utila, Honduras), people have used golf carts as a fill-in for cars, but not here. Human and cargo transport is done primarily with donkeys, who are everywhere. I saw donkeys working, donkeys standing around, a donkey being forcibly bathed in the ocean and donkeys recuperating in Lamu's donkey hospital/sanctuary. Here is a young donkey downtown.

The beach outside of Shella (where we stayed) was a 10-mile stretch of pristine, powdery sand with very few visitors. Definitely one of the nicest beaches I've seen in a long time. The near absence of tourists and total lack of hotels was refreshing (if surprising). I wonder how long the island has until the big hotels arrive. I spent quite a few hours swimming and lying on the beach.

The highlight was probably the sunset dhow cruise we took on Saturday. As in many parts of the Swahili coast, Lamu's fishermen use dhows (traditional wooden vessels with a single, spinnaker-like sail) for getting around. Two local guys took us out for a two-hour sail around the island just as the sun was going down. Here is me on the boat with Simon as we set out:



And Lamu town at sunset:



I was sad when it was finally time to leave for the airport. And by airport, I mean this:



PS. As I am posting this, I'm sitting in a hotel in Arusha. It's noon and the hotel lounge is blasting house music. Why, Tanzania, why?

Nothing can go wrongo in Bongo

I am now nicely settled in our digs at Bolgatanga, the regional capital. It's not metropolis, but it does have a few internet cafes, decent hotels, and even a few nightclubs (as discussed last post).

The place I'm staying is called the "Comme Ci Comme Ca Hotel." To me, calling your hotel the "So-so" seems a bit unambitious, but the place is actually quite nice. I think it was designed for honeymooners and other romantic vacationers at some point in the late 70s or early 80s. The rooms are inside a giant conical structure that is supposed (I think) to look like a traditional local dwelling. While touring around, I've seen a number of the traditional homesteads and they are very cool looking indeed. They build the frames with tall grass and then apply dung or clay in layers, letting the sun dry it out. It's a similar process to the adobe huts of the American Southwest. Each family lives in a compound with multiple circular huts connected by a low mud wall.

Last Friday, our team first visited the two towns where our group is working: Bongo and Walewale, small district capitals with populations of around 100,000 each. For reasons I don't totally understand, Bongo is much, much hotter even though the towns are closer together. We visited both in succession Friday afternoon and I am convinced that Bongo was at least five degrees hotter than Walewale. Bongo is slightly further North, so it's closer to the Sahara. Bongo also has large rock formations in the middle of town which, according to locals, reflect a large amount of heat. The town authorities, with funding from some NGOs, have tried to re-forest the town in an attempt to create some shade and respite from the scorching heat. Unfortunately, trees take time to grow, so it will probably be a while before that happens.

Our daily routine here is fairly laidback: we get up and have breakfast around 8 am, travel to our respective towns (I chose Walewale, for the thermal reasons noted above), do some interviews, and then debrief back at the hotel. Yesterday was government and NGO interviews. Today we did visits to the villages; I spent the morning at a place called Unguru. We met first with the Paramount Chief (which is a government-sanctioned title given to traditional leaders of sufficient importance) and got his blessing to chat with the villagers. The people in Unguru were charming and warm, and most of them welcomed us into their households so we could ask them questions about the healthcare they weren't getting. The best part of the visit was definitely the kids: pretty much the cutest thing I've seen in a long time. Yes, even if you include the baby goats they have around here. One of them took a shine to me and held my hand most of the morning. Me and Saira:

I asked one of our guides what sort of Islam most people practiced at the central mosque. "Orthodox," he replied. "Oh, as in Sunni?" I asked. No, he said, "Sunni isn't the normal type. I mean orthodox, as in Tijaniya." Tijaniya is an Islamic order or brotherhood which is generally classified as Sufi Islam, a third branch of Islam which does fall into either Sunni or Shi'i. Because Tijaniya is relatively uncommon globally, I found it strange that he viewed as the mainstream type of Islam, but I suppose that it just shows that 'mainstream Islam' means very different things to people in different places. Or 'mainstream' in general, for that matter.

The pace of work in the Upper East is amusing. I've been trying to track down some documents from the local hospital for the past couple of days. Yesterday morning, the official in charge promised me the report and asked me to get it from a subordinate right then and there. But the subordinate was still in Tamale and wasn't expected back until Tuesday at some point (apparently this is common practice for government employees traveling for the "weekend"). When we finally tracked down the guy he insisted that it would take him hours to print the report because the needed to find paper and fix the printer, and he insisted that we come back the next morning. Similar delays happened when I tried to get a different report from the facility next door: people not answering their phones, missing meetings, feigning ignorance about things that you discussed the day before. It's mostly just amusing for the time being, but probably pretty annoying if you have to deal with it all day. I will probably blog later on about the impact of uncertainty and bureaucratic laziness on the economy -- it is definitely a huge roadblock to getting anything done, commercially or otherwise.

Other strange things -- a pair of overheated local donkeys had figured out how to turn on the tap at the hospital with their necks, in order to take a bath. The nurses chased them away and screwed the tap tightly, but the donkeys came back again to try.

Also, I saw a woman selling tofu on the streets of Walewale! A girl was carrying a huge plastic container of the stuff on her head. The only thing that would surprise me more would have been a walking sushi salesman. Although, given the way that fish gets treated in this part of Ghana, I'm not sure I would buy any.