Erin and I may be the most cautious adventure travelers to traverse Africa. Neither of us is particularly daring when it comes to risk-taking adventure sports. If you've ever swum in the ocean with Erin or me you probably know that we both have an aversion to swimming with ocean critters. We've probably watched too many Discovery Channel Shark Weeks.
On our first snorkeling trip in Lamu Erin didn't even get off the boat (though she did assume the role of the great provider by catching a fish for lunch). And I made it into the water for about 15 minutes before I started getting visions of being eaten by a shark and swam back to the boat.
So this morning when we embarked on a dolphin tour off the coast of Zanzibar I don't think either of us actually thought we would make it into the water. We were the only ones on our boat to spend $2 extra for the life preservers (and no, they don't come standard with boating in Kenya or Tanzania). When our boat pulled up next to the dolphins everyone else aboard hopped off and started chasing after the dolphins... Erin and I stayed put on the boat. But by the third jump into the dolphin colony Erin and I finally got up the nerve to dive in with the dolphins.
It was AMAZING. You only see a few dolphins on the surface, but if you look down you can see huge bunches of them swimming along just beneath the surface. I think I lasted less than a minute in the water -- enough to see it, check it off of my life list of experiences and scuttle back to the safety of the boat. Erin lasted about 10 seconds longer than I did before hopping back into the boat. But the important part is that we both SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!
Erin keeps telling me that we're going to go shark-cage diving in Cape Town ... we'll see if either of us makes it into the cage...
Showing posts with label fun in the sun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fun in the sun. Show all posts
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Lamu & the Muslim Rasta
On the recommendation of my friend Laura, Lisa and I decided to splurge and spend some time in Shela, on the island of Lamu.
Lamu is a European beach destination on the northeast coast of Kenya, located in the middle of a pretty conservative Muslim community. This made for a very interesting dynamic. On one hand you had Europeans (and us) frolicking around in bikinis (and sometimes less), and on the other hand you had a conservative community going about their day to day.. donkeys abound, the women are clad (in very beach inappropriate) black niqabs (which can't be pulled up - very haram - and therefore get wet and sandy).
Lamu is also where we got our first introduction to the Kenyan beach boy. While these boys are all members (or former members?) of the surrounding community, they have shrugged off (as far as we could tell) their religion and have become wild haired, Bob Marley loving, (mostly) pot smoking, beer drinking rastafaris.
How does that work, you may ask? I'm not entirely sure. There is definitely some palatable tension between the rastas and the surrounding community, but it wasn't violent or extreme in anyway. At worst I think the community looks at the rasta beach boys as sort of a minor annoyance, and low level security threat (a few of them have been involved in the muggings of tourists in the past, and of pickpocketing and that sort of thing)... sort of an all around anomaly.
I also wondered how rastafarism took hold on the coastal areas of Kenya. Does pot smoking and hair dreading increase in direct ratio to your proximity to the beach? Does Bob Marley sound more convincing when listened to out in the hot sun, on a dhow (it's a kind of sailboat) while fishing? (I say YES to that one, having experienced it myself last week). Does weed enhance your enjoyment of all things nautical? I don't know, but maybe the answer is yes to all of them.
Needless to say, we interacted with the beach boys much more than we did with the surrounding community. They took us on snorkling and fishing trips, they cooked us lunches and dinners on the beach, they built us bonfires, they showed us the phosphoresence in the water (so freakin' cool) they took us out dancing (oh man, that could be a whole different post. the hottest dance ticket in town is what they referred to as "the boogie boogie" but was actually called The Police Comission's Social Club, which was ACTUALLY this open air cement floored verandah thing with a dj and a man that sold beer from inside a cage. full of beach boys, prostitutes and Lisa, me and the two American girls we've been traveling with for the past week. it was obviously a LOT of fun)... etc... they basically tried to take our money from us in any way they could. It worked. It worked for them, and it worked for us.
But I couldn't help but wonder what they went home to at the end of the night (or in the early morning). Do they live with their parents, and have to listen to a lecture about cleaning up their acts? Are they pretty much ostracized from the community, and ignored? Is it acceptable behavior?
I don't know! It's another mystery. I'll add it to my growing list...
Lamu is a European beach destination on the northeast coast of Kenya, located in the middle of a pretty conservative Muslim community. This made for a very interesting dynamic. On one hand you had Europeans (and us) frolicking around in bikinis (and sometimes less), and on the other hand you had a conservative community going about their day to day.. donkeys abound, the women are clad (in very beach inappropriate) black niqabs (which can't be pulled up - very haram - and therefore get wet and sandy).
Lamu is also where we got our first introduction to the Kenyan beach boy. While these boys are all members (or former members?) of the surrounding community, they have shrugged off (as far as we could tell) their religion and have become wild haired, Bob Marley loving, (mostly) pot smoking, beer drinking rastafaris.
How does that work, you may ask? I'm not entirely sure. There is definitely some palatable tension between the rastas and the surrounding community, but it wasn't violent or extreme in anyway. At worst I think the community looks at the rasta beach boys as sort of a minor annoyance, and low level security threat (a few of them have been involved in the muggings of tourists in the past, and of pickpocketing and that sort of thing)... sort of an all around anomaly.
I also wondered how rastafarism took hold on the coastal areas of Kenya. Does pot smoking and hair dreading increase in direct ratio to your proximity to the beach? Does Bob Marley sound more convincing when listened to out in the hot sun, on a dhow (it's a kind of sailboat) while fishing? (I say YES to that one, having experienced it myself last week). Does weed enhance your enjoyment of all things nautical? I don't know, but maybe the answer is yes to all of them.
Needless to say, we interacted with the beach boys much more than we did with the surrounding community. They took us on snorkling and fishing trips, they cooked us lunches and dinners on the beach, they built us bonfires, they showed us the phosphoresence in the water (so freakin' cool) they took us out dancing (oh man, that could be a whole different post. the hottest dance ticket in town is what they referred to as "the boogie boogie" but was actually called The Police Comission's Social Club, which was ACTUALLY this open air cement floored verandah thing with a dj and a man that sold beer from inside a cage. full of beach boys, prostitutes and Lisa, me and the two American girls we've been traveling with for the past week. it was obviously a LOT of fun)... etc... they basically tried to take our money from us in any way they could. It worked. It worked for them, and it worked for us.
But I couldn't help but wonder what they went home to at the end of the night (or in the early morning). Do they live with their parents, and have to listen to a lecture about cleaning up their acts? Are they pretty much ostracized from the community, and ignored? Is it acceptable behavior?
I don't know! It's another mystery. I'll add it to my growing list...
Kenya is freakin' hot
So. News flash. Kenya is really hot.
Nairobi was not so bad, it was temperate even. Really cool with rainshowers that lasted like... 10 minutes but cooled everything down immensely. HOWEVER, immediately upon exiting our aircraft on the island of Lamu on the northeast coast of Kenya, my hair poofed out to Diana Ross proportions and my face broke out in rivulets - no RIVERS, of sweat. And my condition has not improved as we've traveled further south down the coast. Not even a little bit.
Lisa and I have started taking 2, 3, sometimes even 4 showers a day in order to stay just ahead of spontaneously combusting in the afternoon sun. We've also completely given up on make up (comes right off!) and have taken to wearing the same clothes every day (what's the point of getting everything so sweaty and digusting? NO POINT, so we don't bother). I want to know how Angelina glows when she comes to Africa, when the adjective that best describes Lisa and I from 10A to 5P is "DRIPPING".
Not only that, but some enterprising person needs to introduce waterproof sunscreen here. All the sunscreen you can buy (which comes, charmingly, either in spf 1.5 or spf 357) is labeled "water & sweat resistant," which seems ok at first... until you take your third "end of day shower" and realize you're bright red, and the owner of the restaurant you eat at that night calls you his little lobster and insists that you jump in his pot because you'd be good eating (yeah...). Water resistant in Africa actually means water soluble and sweat resistant is not enough to stand up to the aformentioned rivers that Lisa and I are outputting every day.
Luckily, we'll be back in Nairobi by next week, nursing our blistering skin, and washing all of our increasingly disgusting clothes.
Nairobi was not so bad, it was temperate even. Really cool with rainshowers that lasted like... 10 minutes but cooled everything down immensely. HOWEVER, immediately upon exiting our aircraft on the island of Lamu on the northeast coast of Kenya, my hair poofed out to Diana Ross proportions and my face broke out in rivulets - no RIVERS, of sweat. And my condition has not improved as we've traveled further south down the coast. Not even a little bit.
Lisa and I have started taking 2, 3, sometimes even 4 showers a day in order to stay just ahead of spontaneously combusting in the afternoon sun. We've also completely given up on make up (comes right off!) and have taken to wearing the same clothes every day (what's the point of getting everything so sweaty and digusting? NO POINT, so we don't bother). I want to know how Angelina glows when she comes to Africa, when the adjective that best describes Lisa and I from 10A to 5P is "DRIPPING".
Not only that, but some enterprising person needs to introduce waterproof sunscreen here. All the sunscreen you can buy (which comes, charmingly, either in spf 1.5 or spf 357) is labeled "water & sweat resistant," which seems ok at first... until you take your third "end of day shower" and realize you're bright red, and the owner of the restaurant you eat at that night calls you his little lobster and insists that you jump in his pot because you'd be good eating (yeah...). Water resistant in Africa actually means water soluble and sweat resistant is not enough to stand up to the aformentioned rivers that Lisa and I are outputting every day.
Luckily, we'll be back in Nairobi by next week, nursing our blistering skin, and washing all of our increasingly disgusting clothes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
