Pole Pole

(rhymes with olè olè, means slowly slowly in Swahili)

I've just returned to Nairobi from the coast. On the night bus. A small price to pay.

Maria Josè and I traveled together for eight days. She enriched my life in many ways besides just cost sharing. We talked about her "coming home" to Buddhism, both of us looking at the same world seeing something very different. She passed her one-year mark of RTW travel on Wednesday. Josè (as she prefers to be called, since her mother and three sisters all also have the first name of Maria) convinced me to visit India and introduced me to the winsome "snacks," where you walk through the streets at mealtime and fill your tummy with great variety of little things, at about $.15/snack. It took me a few days of watching her, but I learned that dealing with the coastal touts as a Mexican was more effective than dealing with them as (my version of) American. Warmly rather than zero tollerance. And she basically has the entire Beyoncè catalogue memorized. To the left, to the left.

We spent three days in Watamu with it's gorgeous bays, and making two excursions to a turtle sanctuary and primate research project at the Gede ruins, all brokered through an afternoon visit to A Rocha. Leatherback turtles, one of which washed up in Mombasa last week with propeler wounds and died in transit to this facility, get this: can weigh 900 kilos (1,800 lbs), can be 3 meters long (9 ft), and can dive 1,000 meters (3,000 feet). The lady researching the monkeys, get this, knows all 47 monkeys of the pack by their name, tail, gait, and face.

On to Lamu, which my friend Wes' dad, who visited it back in the 1970s after having fulfilled his contienteous objector's two years with the Menonite Central Committee in Congo, said was one of his favorite places in all of Africa while he hitchhiked back to England for the flight home. It's not changed much. Days there are pole pole. Donkeys in the narrow streets, veiled women, fishermen with bleached out dreads, yummy seafood, dhow trips to other islands. Though it is a Muslim community, the Civil Servant's Club, which is about on par with the Long Branch Saloon in Hawk Springs, had a better dancing scene than posh Casablanca in Nairobi.

So one night in Nairobi, again (it's not the sort of place you'd want to stay unless you're visiting friends). My biggest achievement of the day was getting my teeth cleaned. I think Dr. Dan in Cheyenne is cheaper, but it made my brown spotted flouride-plagued teeth ecru again, so all's well that ends well.
One more week. I won't know what it looks like until I check in again. Hoping for some wildlife, maybe a safari splurge, up from $3/night on the coast. Loving this!