Kilifi

When Ronnie and Lisa asked us if we wanted to go to the coast with them for the weekend, we thought, that sounds great. Staying near the ocean, hanging out on the beach for the weekend, sounds fantastic. We had no idea what was in store for us.

They had rented a house for all of us to stay in, well, house doesn't really do it justice. This place was gorgeous. The house was about 300m down the beach from the mouth of an estuary off the Indian Ocean. Each bedroom in the house was essentially it's own suite. We had a private balcony facing the ocean, a king-sized bed, and an ensuite. There were stairs down from the house to the private beach, a private pool, oh, and did I mention that the house included a staff that would be doing all the cooking and cleaning for the weekend? Joce, myself, Rachel, and Sara (another intern that is staying at Lisa and Ronnie's), just walked around, mouthes agape, in disbelief. The thought of staying at a place like this never even came close to crossing any of our minds when we envisioned this trip to Africa. It was simply stunning.

The meals all weekend long were incredible. Breakfast would start with fresh fruit, yogurt, cereal, toast. Then would come bacon, sausages, eggs any way you like them, and pancakes. Any preconceptions about potentially losing weight in Africa were right out the window. Lunch and supper then consisted of fresh seafood, fresh salads, more fresh fruit, and generally far more of all of it than we could possibly eat. Prawns, tilapia, crab, barracuda, shrimp, all fresh from the ocean, all delicious. We spent the days alternating between laying on the beach and swimming in the ocean, and laying by the pool and swimming in the pool. The temperature held steady at 35+ degrees, but thankfully a substantial breeze off the ocean blew consistently throughout the day keeping us at a comfortable temperature.

On Sunday evening, Joce, Rachel, Sara and myself took a sunset cruise up the estuary in a Dhow, a traditional sailing vessel of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. The crew of two, took us up the estuary which opens into a reasonable size lake, through mangroves and then back around to the mouth of the estuary where we were staying. From the water we got a great view of the development that is going on on the banks of the creek. As we sailed slowly on, Joce suddenly urges me to turn around and look at the captain. I turn around and see him holding out his hand to me, clutched carefully between his fingers, a grapefruit sized jellyfish. He assures us that, oh no, just don't touch here and here and it can't sting you. So we do touch it, and it feels like, well, really hard jello. As we look into the water though, we start to see more and more jelly fish floating by, until it seems that there couldn't possibly be any more jellyfish in the water. This is not the place you want to go swimming! We reach the far end of the lake, and the captain fires up the little outboard to take us back to the home. As we cruise due east, the sun sets over the hills behind us.

Soooo many jellyfish!

Perhaps it was a miscalculation on the captain's part, perhaps it was me asking him if he could head back faster as 75% of us had to pee more than you can imagine, but about 200m short of our house, the boat runs out of gas. The captain is able to open the sail and use the cross wind to angle us to shore. We are plenty anxious to get out of the boat at this point, so we hastily hand the captain the money for the trip, jump out of the boat and run down the beach towards home.

The next morning we had a few hours to soak up a bit more sun, then it was back to Mombasa, and a short flight back to Nairobi and reality. Or at least the version of reality we are living here.


-steve