Mombasa

Mambo?!? Habari za nyumbani (How's it going? How's home?)

Yesterday I got back from an amazing little weekend at Mombasa, the main city on the Kenyan coast.

Myself and a few other students on our program left Friday afternoon and had our first big trip away from Nairobi. The trip to Mombasa was...interesting. The bus we took was fine, but the roads in Kenya are nothing like home, and once we got outside of Nairobi, there were no four-lane highways, so if we got stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle, we stayed at that pace until we could pass.

The landscape, however, entirely makes up for the drive. The landscape outside Nairobi gradually turns into rolling hills where we saw giraffes and camels. As you drive further down, the highway splits Tsavo National Park into two. Here, it was the perfect example of the "African Bush" with small mountains in the background. It was beautiful, and we even got to see elephants a few hundred yards from the road!

8 hours later, we all got off the bus sweaty (the bus wasn't air conditioned) and ready to get to our place. A 40-minute matatu ride later, we finally arrived. While we got dropped off by the bus in Mombasa, we actually stayed at a place in Diana Beach, and it was amazing. About 50 meters from our rooms was a wall, leading down onto the beach, and then to the Indian Ocean.

That night, we walked down onto the beach and down to the water. Being so far down from Mombasa, the sky was filled with stars. Then I went and put my feet in the water, and being almost on the equator, it felt like a bath. It was beautiful and warm.

That heat, however, translated to a warm night of sleeping. I woke up sweaty, but made my way down to the beach around 6:30 a.m. to watch the sun rise. At Mombasa, there's a sand bar about 300-400 yards off shore and then coral, so the waves are very small coming toward the shore. The water is not only calm, but a beautiful blue coming into the shore, which is made of white sand. I sat there and watched the sun rise until about 7:15 and then made my way to the water and was back and forth between the ocean and our place until noon. There were also monkeys climbing in the trees around where we stayed.

Myself and a couple other people walked about 45 minutes down the beach to go grab some lunch. There were not many people out, and along the way there were beautiful rock structures, old boats just offshore and camels walking down the beach for tourists to ride. We ate at a place called 40 Thieves, where we sat and ate on a picnic table in the sand in the shade of a tree.

Then I had one of the coolest experiences of my life. One of my friends and I went out on a rickety old glass-bottom boat to the reef to go snorkeling for 800 Kenyan shillings (about $10!!). We jumped into the water, and I found Nemo (a Clown Fish), as well as Dory and other "Finding Nemo" characters!! Along with this we saw about 40 different kinds of fish, star fish, sea cucumbers, eels and sea urchins. Fish were swimming all around us, and I even got charged by one. It was beautiful. We snorkled for about 30 minutes, and then the driver took us out to the sand bar as it gets exposed as a small island in the afternoon. As we stood on the sand, the ocean was to our right, the coral to our immediate left and the beach with palms trees were farther out. It was beautiful! Then we got to ride on the front of the boat back to the restaurant with the ocean, beach and coral around us. It was an absolutely amazing and beautiful experience.

That night, we went for dinner and got to see some traditional African dancing. The group performing there did traditional dances from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. It was very cool.

Yesterday, we got on the bus a little tired and made our way back to Nairobi. All in all, it was an amazing weekend, and I hope to return to the Mombasa area soon!

I hope you're all doing well at home, and to hear from you sometime soon! I miss you all! Kwaheri!