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Crowd goes wild at Sawa Sawa Music Festival
Hugh Masekela and band at the outdoor jazz festival in Nairobi.
Katherine Howell Hey troops!
Hope you’re all well. Brigid and I are all better on the eye front, although it’s really only in the last day that she has stopped looking like a devil. After a brief let-up in the rain, it returned with a vengeance last week so, on Wednesday night, we decided to go to Nairobi for the weekend. Was a long weekend here - Friday was a public holiday for Madaraka Day (Promotion Day, which marks the day Kenyans took over their parliament after independence was declared). We weren’t sure if it’d be raining any less there but figured that, given it’s a big city, that there’d be more indoor stuff to do. As it turned out, it didn’t rain a drop in Nairobi during the 3 days we were there (and temperature very mild) and we had a fantastic time. Best last-minute decision of the trip so far!! Since everyone talks about Nairobi as being a dangerous place, we got lots of tips from the Nairobeans (is that a word?) in the lab about where was safe (or not) to go and what was good to do there. They definitely came through with the goods. On the
Flooding on the Kilifi-Mombasa road
Was trying to get some better photos, but getting anything reasonable out the window of a moving matatu is more easily said than done! whole, following their advice and generally being sensible (yes, Joey, it is possible!!!), we actually never felt unsafe and, surprisingly, we were harassed far less than in Mombasa.
We booked our tickets on Thursday, and headed off Friday morning. The aim for the weekend - besides seeing the sights of Nairobi obviously - was to experience some city comforts and things we’d been missing over the last 7 weeks - ie hot showers and food that is not African or Italian. Managed to get some good Chinese for lunch on Friday, then headed out to a place called Village Market (which has a heaps of shops and cafes/bars plus cinema and ten pin bowling alley). Did some damage at the bookshop (we are going to have quite a library to bring back home…), wandered around the shops a bit and then went over to the Maasai Market, which sells various cultural things - clothes, jewellry, paintings, trinkets, carvings (of animals and Maasai masks) etc. Is an interesting place to visit. There is a mixture of great stuff and rubbish, as there is with most markets. A lot of stalls sell the same things and, I imagine, this makes it
Kenya loves Richard Branson
Which is understandable given Virgin has just pledged billions of shillings worth of funding towards HIV, TB and malaria programs here. There were banners up about him everywhere, with things like 'good work, sir' written on them. hard to get ahead of your competitors. So, there are a lot of attempts to entice you to buy things - sometimes it was hard to get away from people selling things we didn’t want. Disappointment number one of weekend (there were only 2) came after the market when we realised that the ten pin bowling alley was closed as their machinery was broken. We’d decided a game might be quite fun and I wanted to have a crack at the only ball sport in which I might have half a chance at beating Brigid! That night we headed out to a bar called Casablanca. If there were a place like this in Melbourne, I’d definitely go there. Moroccan-styled place with large indoor and outdoor areas, big drum fires outside, lots of candles inside, big couches and day beds everywhere, good music, good food (and they serve when you order late after deciding that a few drinks has produced enough hunger for a second dinner!). There was an unfortunately large number of dirty old mzungus with young Kenyan girls (not that I’m making assumptions…), but apart from this the crowd seemed very respectable.
Saturday morning I broke the no
African food rule to try Kenyan tea - chai masala, which is basically just cinnamon tea. Tea is a new thing for me over here - never used to like hot drinks (but am warming to tea now…geddit?! Sorry, hopeless joke!), so thought it was worth a go. The verdict from both of us was that it was nothing special, but cinnamon isn’t something we have a lot, so bit of a foreign taste. Was strange in the same way that cinnamon chewing gum is. Wandered around the city a bit and then headed out to the national museum which reportedly has a great collection of east African art. Unfortunately it is closed for renovations until later in the month - disappointment number 2. So, jumped on a matatu and headed out to a place called Westlands for some more shopping and for lunch at a place called Wimpy Hamburgers. Bad to go to a fast food place, I know, but who could resist a chain with a name like that?! Incidentally, we haven’t seen any McDonald’s in Nairobi or Mombasa. I don’t know if it exists here.
In the afternoon, we headed out to a place called Nairobi
Late afternoon at the Sawa Sawa Festival
Sawa sawa means 'ok ok'. Unclear why the festival was called that... Arboretum (big park, lots of trees) for an open air jazz music festival. I’d read about it in the paper the week before, but didn’t take any notice of what date it was on. It was only when looking at the paper on the plane that I realised we’d actually be able to go. The headline act was Hugh Masekela, a South African musician who is one of Brigid’s favourites. I was surprised at how calm she was about getting to see him before hand, but she told me later that she didn’t want to get too excited in case we missed him (we got there halfway through the festival - but whoever heard of the headline act playing anywhere but last?). You should have seen the smile on her face when they announced that he’d arrived. I don’t think she stopped grinning all show and, when for his last song, he played ‘Bring Back Nelson Mandela’, she was seriously beside herself. It was an absolutely fantastic show - he was an awesome performer and the crowd was singing and dancing like crazy. So much energy for a man who is now well over 60. A fantastic mimic too -
he played a song about African women and his imitating them was quite a sight. Before the last song, he spoke for a few minutes about Mandela and others involved in the anti-apartheid struggle and how Africa has moved forward because of them. Was an interesting insight into this part of history and into his connections with it, and a very moving speech. The other musicians we heard were really good too - Brigid bought the CD of a Kenyan guy called Eric Wainana, who was excellent. I think that, come the end of our trip, this will remain one of the highlights. We finished off the day with dinner at a restaurant called Carnivore. This has been voted one of the 50 best restaurants in the world on a few occasions. As you’d probably guess, there is meat galore. Basically, after soup, they bring out a plate of salad and sauces, and then proceed to offer you meat (kind of like at yum cha) until you put the flag down on your table and surrender. We ate so much we nearly exploded - from the usuals (chicken, lamb, beef etc) to the more exotic (crocodile, ostrich). Was a great
meal, and one we think we’ll repeat when Dad, Liam and Rod are over.
Sunday saw a visit to an art gallery and then out to another market where we bought some goodies, then it was back to the airport. We arrived back in Mombasa to discover that it had absolutely bucketed down all weekend - definitely a good weekend to be out of Kilifi!! The road back from Mombasa was flooded, and our matatu had to divert right out to the beach and go through the villages in order to get through. Thankfully, there is an alternative road, even if it is a dirt one that takes twice as long to travel! We hope to return to Nairobi during our time here to see the museum, and to go to Nairobi National Park - Nairobi is one of the only cities in the world to have a national park right at the edge of the city - apparently there are lots of animals to see here.
So, now for a few interesting tidbits:
- I bet you’re all wondering what happened with the first round of the Miss Titanic competition, which was on Thursday. Unfortunately, so are
Hugh fires up...
Fist pumping, trumpet playing, booming voice jazz. we. We were expecting big things as we’d heard that last year’s MT ended in a fight after the wrong girl won. But, unfortunately, proceedings still hadn’t started by 11pm and seeing as we had to be up early on Friday, we figured we could wait until round 2. Soft, I know…
- Brigid is a man magnet here. Lots of men come up to tell her that she is very beautiful. It is moderately disturbing as they often think she’s about 15 and want her to go out with them. A guy at the market in Nairobi asked me if she’d started to ‘take Tusker’ (the local beer) yet. He then blessed her eyes.
- We successfully took Klein for a walk today. No running away, no attacking other dogs (true to what we’d heard, she is a wuss around other dogs and steers clear). She was so excited - jumping and running around in the grass - that she overheated and had to sit in the pool when we got home. She didn’t stop panting for about an hour. It’s not a hot day today, so I’d hate to see how she’d go if it were!
- Our
Not to overstate the impact or anything...
As you can see, there is no hold up at all! Swahili is progressing quite well - getting to a point where we can pick out at least a few words in most basic conversations and get the gist of what is going on. At Mombasa airport, the taxi drivers wait at the exit of the arrivals lounge and then walk over to their vehicles with you (about 15 metres away). We had a bit of a chat with ours in Swahili on the way to the car (we had to get a cab to the matatu stand in the city) and, after we’d got into the car, a man came to the window to ask the driver (in Swahili) if he could get a tip by riding with us (as extra taxi ‘help’, I guess). The driver told him to go away because we were not ‘dumb mzungus’!!! Nice to know that we’re less likely to get scammed!
I bet you’re all wondering about the title of my blog. We heard some funny language mix-ups from our teacher, Reuben. The word for zebra is punda milia (literally: donkey with stripes, which is funny enough anyway). The word for prostitute is malaya. One of Reuben’s students told a heap of people at church that, while on safari, he’d seen a lot of punda malaya. We have to stop saying it, or we’ll accidentally call a zebra ‘donkey prostitute’ while we’re on safari.
So, this weekend we’re off to Lamu for our second long weekend in a row. You would think I never do any work, but au contraire, I worked my little behind off in the 2 weeks before Nairobi. Things are going very well in the lab so far (remarkably snag free for lab work) - have some good results and, hopefully, with a few more weeks worth of experiments, shouldn’t be too far away from something publishable. Speaking of which, my first article (just a case report that we submitted last year on side effects of Botox injections in kids with cerebral palsy, nothing fancy pants and no earth shattering discoveries) was published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health last week. Haven’t had a beer especially to mark the occasion (have had a beer, just not for that…), so will have to do so this weekend.
Enough writing. Enjoy the photos - there are a lot fewer this time as my camera temporarily carked it on the weekend. A lot of these are Brigid’s. Hope you are all well. Thanks to those of you who have emailed with news and hellos. Look forward to hearing more - and especially to hearing how Hamo went last week, paddling chicks. Enjoy the family reunion this weekend, those of you who are going! K x
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Sonny
non-member comment
WIMPY!
I love wimpy's. There was one in leicester when i was 10.