The moment the cabin door on the airplane opened, we felt the wave of heat and humidity hit us. Nairobi is at an elevation of about 1800m so it has a drastically different climate than Mombasa. Nairobi has generally been mid to low 20's and relatively low humidity. We were now at sea level, mid 30's and high humidity, it felt like we were walking through a sauna.
We arrived in the evening, and it was already dark. It's generally recommended for tourists to not venture out in the city after dark, and with the added tension of election nominations, we heeded the advice and took a taxi straight to our hotel. Not exactly the lap of luxury, the was the finest, cheapest room $15/person per night could buy. It did have A/C though, so at least there was some relief from the heat. $15 bought you not only A/C and what they claimed was a single bed, but also breakfast the next morning. The breakfast ended up being quite adequate for the cost, so we ate our fill and then headed out to explore Mombasa.
While there are quite a few things to see in Mombasa, we only had until about 1PM, so it was going to be an abbreviated tour of the city. We headed off, Joce and Rachel keen on finding the spice market. As we wandered around the markets, the temperature continued to rise. As we walked aimlessly up and down the streets of stores and stands, mostly all selling the same things, some even selling spices, we apparently hadn't found the right place. Joce decided it would be in our best interest to start following some random guy on the street as he knows just the place to buy spices. So he leads us up and down the all the streets we had already walked on, while making calls on his phone. At this point we are pretty certain he is either taking us to his store, or leading us into an ambush to be kidnapped. Well luckily for us, he was leading us to his brothers store. We went into the store and the proprietor proceeded to show us pretty much every spice in his store. All of them, advertised as the very finest available. Rachel and Joce both bought a bunch of spices, all of which we were certain were sold at the 'white' price. Joce was able to barter them down somewhat, but we were pretty sure we were still paying many times the local price. All in all, cheaper than what we would have paid in Canada, and much more entertaining of an experience.
Spices in hand, we headed out of the markets and towards Old Town. Old Town is an area right near the main port in Mombasa, that was initially settled and was a major trading hub. We didn't have time for a full tour of Old Town and Fort Jesus, a fort that was built to protect the port in 1591, so we just decided to walk around aimlessly. We were approached by a number of people, obviously wanting to be paid to show us around, which we were fairly successful in sending away. But one guy that came up to us was pretty insistent, he was a volunteer, wanted no money, and just wanted to show us around. Experience had taught us that even though he said he didn't want money, he would take us on a tour and then demand money at the end, so we were still skeptical. We explained that we would not be giving him any money, but he continued to walk on with us, insisting that he didn't want any money. He continued on with us for the short walk through Old Town, giving us a few tidbits of information as we walked. He was a funny guy, 'Moody Blues' apparently was his name, he lived in Old Town. He knew everyone. Every person we passed in the street, Moody was talking to, he knew them all, and he strutted around like he owned the place. As we headed back towards our hotel, Moody went on his way, and in fact, didn't ask for any money after all. We wished we would have had more time to tour around, and head into Fort Jesus, but we were hungry, dripping with sweat and didn't have much time before Ronnie and Lisa were going to pick us up to head to Kilifi. We grabbed a bite to eat, cooled off with some ice cream, and then were off and on our way to Kilifi for the rest of the weekend.-steve
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