18FEB2007 “Mtn biking the Kenyan Moon”

On Sunday, we went for a long bike ride, heading north along the coast. We went to the end of Bofa Road then continued on a sand path through a coconut plantation. We came out on a dirt road that took us through the coral quarry. When I heard that there was a coral quarry, I thought there was a big work site with a fence and some equipment and people worked there. In reality, it is a hundred small pits, and a few big ones, being dug out by little kids, old men, women, anyone really, all covered in white powder from head to toe. They were manually hacking the underground coral into small blocks with picks and bits of metal. Their ‘houses’ (3-4 walls of mud with a makuti roof, barely bigger than a 5 man tent, many of them barely standing up) were only a few feet away. It felt like we were biking on the moon rather than Kenya, with fields of people eking a living out by mining the surface around them…it was a strange experience. We did see a few seriously large and flat coral quarries with large mechanical block cutters the size of a small tractor with dual giant circular saws ~3 feet in diameter. Thankfully they were not running and we were spared the noise and craziness with which I am sure they operated. Having seen the miles and miles of coral quarries and the families that literally live in them, I look at the truckloads of coral blocks and piles of abandoned coral blocks in a new light.

On the way home, Wendy got a nasty flat tire that took us several attempts to patch – the thorns are serious here and heavy-duty tires are critical. We still made it home in time to go to Caroline & Nathan’s for dinner, where their puppy Davey spent at least 1-1/2 hours remembering who Suki was before she would play with her. We sat around their pool overlooking the ocean, and sipped gin & tonics, while their cook made fresh prawns for dinner…certainly a strange shift from the families in the quarries...it is really difficult to live in the middle of such polar extremes.