Vacation:
Wendy and Patrick are living in Kilifi Kenya Africa where Wendy is conducting malaria research and Patrick is working with a non-governmental organization (NGO) on sustainable development. They have been there 1.5 yrs and should be returning to the US this winter. This was our chance to visit them.
Thursday, 3 July -
At the Nairobi airport we decided not to check our luggage three hours early to cut down on thievery, so we went to a café in the international airport to kill time. [However, when we finally arrive at Kilifi we find that someone has stolen the diet coke out of Dottie’s suitcase. Not anything else, just the diet coke.] Dottie and I had a funny/tense exchange about Brad having a sandwich at the airport. Dottie didn’t want him to eat anything that wasn’t canned – so in her opinion the lettuce and tomatoes on the sandwich were out. I, on the other hand, thought that this is a major city and we are going to eat on the economy. So I prevailed. If Brad get’s sick my name is mud – or worse. [At the end of the trip Patrick and Wendy get sick. In an email after the trip Wendy notes that Patrick probably got the drug resistant amoebic dysentery from lettuce! I think she is just trying to pull my chain.]
This reminds me of my folks going to Japan. They were told there was no toilet paper or meat in Japan. So they took a case of toilet paper and a case of canned corned beef. They brought it all home four years later. On this trip Dottie brought 48 power bars. She plans to live on them, I guess. They turned out to be good for breakfasts for Dottie and Brad. We tried to leave some with Wendy and Patrick, but they declined the large number of bars. So we ended up brining about a dozen home from the trip.
Wendy and David meet us when we landed in Mombasa at about 11:30 pm and we had an hour drive to Kilifi. I am glad we had a driver. The single paved road to Kilifi had potholes as large as cars and speed bumps. There is no ambient light from street lights so people turn on their turn signals when they pass to tell the other driver how wide their cars are.
Suki has a laundry basket on her head. She got a cut on her hind leg that needed stitches. To keep her from pulling them out Patrick had to fashion a “collar” out of a plastic waste paper basket. Suki keeps bumping into walls and chairs with the collar. I am amazed that she doesn’t try to remove the collar.
Friday, 4 July -
Wendy knows everyone in Kilifi. Shopping is an extended process where you have to check in with the proprietor and ask about family and general health. Then you get down to commerce. Wendy is quite good at this. Only later does she share that she finds it annoying in how much time it takes up.
I got up around 9 am just as Patrick was leaving for work. He had set out coffee and breakfast which was very nice of him. I worked on the computer. At about 11:30 I got Dottie and Bradley up. Wendy came home about 12:30 and took us to her hospital/Welcome Foundation Research Center. We had lunch at an outdoor shed with a tin roof, cement floor and a few tables. A woman sets up a lunch stand where she serves briyani rice every Friday in midst of the chickens, goats, and crows eyeing the food. On one folding table she had about 6 crock pots with different foods in each one. They picked up plates from the tables when people finished, washed them in a tub of soapy but dirty water, rinsed them in water (probably of dubious origin) wiped them with a grimy dish towel and handed them to us. I couldn’t imagine how Dottie must be cringing given her concerns the previous evening about only eating things boiled or canned! Wendy had biryani. There were mainly Africans eating there. We met an African woman who had run in the ½ marathon with Wendy and Patrick the weekend before. Patrick is going to loose three toenails, and Wendy one from the race. This is apparently something that routinely happens to long distance runners. The African woman asked Wendy if she had started training. Wendy said no, not until she looses her toenail. The African says “help it along by running.”
Wendy and Patrick are renting a beautiful house right on the ocean. They have a day worker and a Massai night watchman. From what we saw he mostly slept. The house is three story made from coral blocks and stuccoed. The roof is thatched with palm fronds lashed to poles that come from sisal flower stalks. The windows are barred and the property had a walled/barbed wife fence. When you opened the back gate you were on the beach. The front gate required the workman or Massi to come open it from the inside. All the nice homes are protected by KK Security. Wendy said this was because the police were slow and ineffective. Once they tripped the alarm and this KK swat team came charging in in riot gear. And they gruffly pushed their guests around to be sure Wendy and Patrick weren’t being held against their will.
The floors are large irregular flagstone. The kitchen oven is not big enough for a large chicken. They have a small washing machine in the kitchen. They hang their clothes to dry. The showers have a small electric water heater at the shower head, but there is no central hot water. All the water for drinking and brushing teeth has to be filtered. It was amazing to me how much smaller the “energy footprint” of homes here are than in the US. There were only a few small light bulbs throughout the house.
We couldn’t have asked for a better time to come. The weather was like NJ or slightly cooler. Being on the beach there was always a breeze that made it comfortable. Even though there were no screens on the windows, there we virtually no bugs in the house – much fewer than if you tried that in NJ. However Patrick said that at the beginning of the rainy season there were so many termites flying about that they would have to put on a “decoy” light somewhere in the room and they would eat in darkness.
Saturday, 5 July -
We got up at about 6 am – however all of us didn’t sleep very well. The five of us got in David’s car and he drove us to Kilifi where Wendy and Patrick took a bus, and we continued in David’s car to Mombasa and Southern Cross Safari – “excellence through experience”.
Our guide was Sammy Iriri. He as excellent. He could sing just like Louis Armstrong. He told us he wasn’t a “born again Christian” but he prayed in the morning that we would see lions and cheetahs. He said he had a strong sense we would see a cheetah and had some sort of vision of the side of a cheetah. He said it was just some sort of feeling or instinct that would lead him to the animals. It reminded me about the guide at the nature center at Ayer’s Rock in Australia who was an animist.
Just inside the park we saw an antelope and then a wart hog. The rest of ride to the lodge we saw all sorts of animals. We saw two lions and one of the females was holding a piece of meat in her mouth. Apparently there are about 11,000 elephants in the park, 80 lions and 60 cheetah. It is known for its elephants. We watched a group of males fight. Three pairs were flapping their ears at each other and eventually two pairs actually locked tusks with each other and pushed back and forth. One elephant eventually retreated and crossed the road. Apparently, this kind of display was rare, and Wendy and Patrick really enjoyed it.
We saw a remarkable array of wildlife in the day of being at the park. It was equivalent to seeing all the animals in the zoo – but in their native habitat. I would not have guessed that they were all in one location, or that they would all be visible from a road. You certainly wouldn’t see all representative species in North America if you just drove around on roads. Another way I thought about it was what would be the probability of seeing all those species if you just drew a random line on the map and asked what animals are within 100 yard of that line.
It was a funny dynamic that once you had seen a particular group of animals, if we drove back that way, there was little interest in watching them further. It is kind of a competitive checklist enterprise-- Can you see the most “important” animals?” Clearly lions are at the top of the heap. Everyone at the lodge and park exit asked if we had seen lions. If you told everyone that the rarest thing in the world was an elephant, then that would have been the thing to see. My personal favorite was the secretary birds. They are remarkably unlikely looking - very long legs and a feathered top knot.
That evening Brad, Wendy, Patrick and I went up into the tower overlooking the waterhole. When I got there they had already seen the hippos leaving the waterhole to forage. We watched a silver backed jackal walk through all the resting/sleeping impala. The grounds of the campsite were covered with sleeping impala. That made a lot of sense since no lions would come into he camp, and they watered the grounds so that there was green growth (not really grass) on the grounds. The impala lie down to sleep—like deer. The guide had said that lions were mainly nocturnal. I asked him the next day if the lions hunted the antelope at night – he said yes. That meant they hunted sleeping, or at least lying down antelope. All of the TV footage we see of lions hunting running antelope during daylight must be the anomaly, rather than the rule.
Brad stayed up in the tower and I went to bed. I came in the tent just as Dottie had turned off the light. I took a shower and got in bed to read a while. Then Brad came in. The next morning Dottie said, “What do you mean ‘the lion sleeps tonight’ – no one sleeps at night in Africa! You guys came in four times – zip zip zip.” Also that night we heard lions growling. In the morning they said that there had been a lion on one side of the camp and another on the other side of the camp. Brad said on the platform they had seen jackals harassing the geese. They also heard elephants farting which sounded like opening a scuba tank open under water, or opening a balloon under water, or whoopee cushion half full of water.
Sunday, 6 July -
The guide spotted a cheetah. Then we saw two more and finally all four. They were hunting – slowly walking towards an impala. Finally it bounded away. The cheetah walked back in the other direction. Sammy Iriri moved the land rover slowly along the road following the cheetah. Finally they stopped with the female perched on the top of a termite mound. It was as if she were posed. Patrick took lots of photos. We watched for about 15 minutes. The other three cheetah went under a bush and laid down. We think that the female was watching a group of hartebeests. They were too large for a cheetah, but the young one in the group would be considered prey.
Monday, 7 July-
Wendy came home and picked us up about noon. We drove to the coral quarry. It turns out that there is a coral bed layer that underlies the area around Kilifi. As I mentioned most of the sturdy construction was with coral blocks. Wendy had walked to the coral quarry but never driven. But since trucks made it there, there must be a way. The road was like a jeep trail. We first arrived at the mechanized quarry. This was fascinating. They had four large circular saws at work on a table-top-smooth area the size of a football field that was pure coral. The saws were electric powered and had a vertical 3 foot diameter saw blade and a horizontal 2 foot blade. The machine was the size of a Volkswagen. It ran on steel tracks that they moved and spaced so that the vertical saw cut about 9 inch wide slits in the coral. The horizontal blade cut the bottom of the block about 7 inches deep. They criss-crossed the pattern to cut individual blocks. I asked the foreman lots of questions – much to Wendy and Brad’s amusement. The man asked us not to take pictures, but I think we already had a bundle. The saw blade was carbide tipped and it lasted 1-3 days depending on the rock. They sent it to the “saw shop”, a coral block building a few hundred feet away, where they brazed off the worn carbide teeth and brazed new ones on.We then drove further along where the quarrying was done by hand with a pick with a single point. A man cut through the coral by hand. The blocks were of course less regular. The laborers lived in pretty abject poverty in huts near the quarry. It was a striking example of automation making hand labor obsolete, or at least tremendously devalued. The automated quarry produced 3,000-8000 blocks a day with relatively few laborers. Blocks cost 16 cents a piece. So the poorer quality, hand hewn blocks had to compete with this.
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