Mombasa and Kenya's coast

The road between Nairobi and Mombasa is long and scary! Only 500km away, we expected a good steady drive, nothing like what we encountered.

The number and the condition of the trucks on this road make any travel for cars extremely long and frustrating. Add that to Kenyan driver mentality and you have quite a dangerous drive ahead of you. As we discovered on a number of occasions, just because the road law says you should drive on the left hand side of the road, it doesn’t mean that’s what people are going to do! We lost track of the number of times a driver coming in the opposite direction on OUR side of the road would flash their lights at us telling us to move out of the way. And it’s actually dangerous not to, or least slow down allowing them time to merge back in to the right hand side of the road. CRAZY!!

Beautiful cloud covered mountains on the way to Mombasa

We arrived in Mombasa in the late afternoon and headed to the Nyali Beach area to a backpackers called “Backpacker’s Nirvana”; we’d been tossing up between that one and Mombasa Backpackers. In hindsight I’d have gone to the other one as “Backpacker’s Nirvana” felt a little weird and facilities a bit run down, although the staff were all quite friendly.

What we were drinking in Kenya :-)

We only had a few days in Mombasa but still managed to squeeze a bit in. We started with the usual touristy stuff like a visit to Fort Jesus and the “Old Town”, both a tad disappointing although I suspect that’s more a result of having been to places like Stone Town in Zanzibar. The fort was ok and we wondered around the grounds and museum for about an hour. The Old Town in the neighbouring area was probably not worth the effort; in fact I’d say give it the miss if you’ve been to Stone Town or places like Ilha de Mocambique. It has the same sort of architecture and narrow laneways, but completely unpreserved and quite (very) filthy in many parts. It really isn’t nice. 

View of boys playing football @Fort Jesus

Me @Fort Jesus

Canon @Fort Jesus

Inside Fort Jesus

Heavy wooden doors.....

......and stone stairs

Looking at the bottom of the fort

Old Mombasa Town

Alley way in the Old Town

One of the nicer building fronts

Cutting our time short in the Old Town meant we had time to head to Mombasa Beach where we spent a lovely afternoon having lunch at Yuls Restaurant (including the biggest pizza ever), a walk along the beach and afternoon cocktails. Very enjoyable.

No...I did not eat the whole pizza...plenty was left over for lunch the next day :-)

Mombasa Beach

Cocktail hour!!

Mike taking it all in

On another day we headed a little bit up the coast to check out the beaches there. We made a big mistake of saving Jumba Ruins Monsoons for dinner instead of lunch. We were lucky as it was to get a dinner as they are normally only open for lunch, however we didn’t see the ruins in the dark, which you walk through to get to the restaurant. Nonetheless the food in this place was great and I’d highly recommend this one for a seaside lunch.

Nyali Beach, Mombasa

Cargo ship @Nyali Beach, Mombasa

More great coffee (try Cafesserie Mombasa) and relaxed days near the beach and we were ready for a quieter beach destination.

The streets of Northern Mombasa...not as I had pictured them AT ALL!

Enjoying a cold pineapple and mango juice at a nearby hotel

Our next stop was a tough choice; Lamu Island or head south? Let me back up a minute……

Our original plans as described on this blog had been to head north to Ethiopia from Kenya, but due to the following factors we had made a decision to return to Zambia and fly back to Australia from our starting point:

• The requirement to sell Ruth before we went home…easier in Zambia (as she is Zambian registered)
• The wear and tear on Ruth from driving the northern road to the Moyale border which we decided to avoid
• The visa requirements and logistics for Ethiopia; definitely doable but still difficult

And so, knowing that we had to return south pretty soon, we made the decision to head to one of Kenya’s Southern beaches, Diani Beach, not that far from Mombasa.

The Likoni Ferry, taking us South of Mombasa

On the ferry

As disappointed as I felt originally about missing out on Lamu, this disappeared pretty quickly when we arrived in Diani. What a lovely beach! A little piece of paradise.

Diani Beach: A little piece of paradise

Mike and I decided to stay in the Simba-OryxBeach Cottages given this was the last real part of our holiday. These cottages were a great deal, paying $55pn for a fully self-contained cottage, fully equipped kitchen, hot shower, ceiling fans and a beautiful porch to enjoy breakfast and sunset drinks. Our three night stay doubled to six in the end as we just never wanted to leave!

Heading down to the beach

Simba & Oryx Cottages @Diani Beach

The front porch of our little cottage:
A great place for breakfast.........

Our days consisted of breakfast on the porch, a morning swim, lunch, reading and relaxing, afternoon run on the beach, shower, sundowner drinks and dinner. And I loved every second of it!

......and a great place for a beer in the evening

White sand and turquoise water

And even camels!

The beach was beautiful; the seaweed in parts was a bit annoying, as were the beach boys, but we found ways around both and were able to enjoy the white sand and warm water. Some days we had guys bring fresh fish to our door (yay!!) which we brought and cooked up, the fresh prawns being an absolute winner.

Prawns delivered to our door

Mike cooking up a storm

And the finished product! Boy, were they good too!!

Unfortunately all good things come to an end and after nearly a week in paradise the time had come to leave Diani Beach and Kenya, at least for a while L

A visit to Kenya's capital

The road up to Nairobi once again started out pretty bumpy. In fact we found it easier to use “side roads” instead of the road as it was quicker and had less impact on Ruth (the side roads are just tracks resulting from vehicle use overtime). As we got closer to Nairobi (from Narok Road) the road did improve significantly. It is perhaps worthwhile mentioning here that only weeks before we arrived, Maasai Mara tour drivers had actually gone on strike for two full days over the state of the road. From what we were told, no one was allowed in or out of the park. The result was that the government of Kenya had six weeks to make a start on improving the road before further protests. See what happens!

The road to Nairobi?? Hhhmm!

We were told lots of stories about the roads in Nairobi and were expecting the worst only to find them actually quite civilised. We headed directly to Jungle Junction, an unsigned haven for self-drive overlanders and backpackers near the centre of town. Jungle Junction was great; if offers camping, dorms and rooms all at very reasonable rates and the owner, Chris, is full of information and was very helpful regarding car matters (c_handschuh_68@yahoo.com)

I found Nairobi to be one of the nicer Africa cities we had been to, nothing like it had been described to us "Nairobbery", although admittedly we didn’t venture far from the better parts of town. We did head into the city centre one day, however it was a weekend so probably not as crazy as busy as it would normally be. It was also surprisingly cold. I don’t know why but I’ve always pictured Nairobi to be hot, however given its 1500m+ altitude, it makes sense that it’s not so warm.

In the city centre we visited the Kenyatta International Conference Centre which offers a great view of the city from the top of its tower. 

Kenyatta International Conference Centre

View of Nairobi city centre from Kenyatta International Conference Centre

Much greener than I expected!

Mike.....

.....and me!

More of Nairobi

The building from where we had our great views

Evidence of the colonial influence left behind

We also checked out a couple of the local malls which offer significant evidence of a growing Kenyan middle class as well as the strong expat community there. The malls were amazing despite the rigorous security checks required before one can enter them.

Westgate Shopping Mall

Evidence of the ever growing middle class in Africa

One of our afternoons in Nairobi we headed out to the Karen Blixen Museum which is definitely worth checking out! Neither Mike nor I (I’m embarrassed to say) had read any of her books or seen the movie “Out of Africa”; I definitely think it would have helped to have this background. But the tour guides are great and when I left I was keen to at least see the move. From memory entrance into the museum was around $8pp, so pretty reasonable.

Karen Blixen Museum....

....and old colonial house

Set on large grounds

In Nairobi we also ate extremely well with visits to Artcaffe as well as a much anticipated BBQ meal at "Fogo Gaucho" Steak House and Lounge Bar. We had actually planned on eating at the famed “Carnivores” well known in the past for its variety of exotic meats on offer, e.g. Giraffe, hippo, zebra, etc. Carnivores haven’t been offering these choices for a while however we both thought that they would still have a reasonable selection of game meats. However it turns out that this is not the case, with beef and chicken the standard fare but at exuberant prices. Given this information we opted for "Fogo Gaucho" Steak House and Lounge Bar, a Brazilian style of BBQ with an awesome salad bar, leaving both Mike and I very happy J

Mike waiting for his coffee :-)

Anyone for meat??

Happy customer :-)

We only spent a few days in Nairobi and I would say that’s enough. I really enjoyed the little luxuries it offered, but at the end of the day it is just another city and we had sun and sand on Kenya’s coast calling us.

Walking with Maasai

From the Maasai Mara to “Walking with Maasai”!

Earlier in our trip we had been told about a project being run in Southern Kenya, not too far from the Maasai Mara called “Walking with Maasai”. It got a great review and after looking up their website/ Facebook page we decided to check it out too.

“Walking with Maasai” is actually a bit off the tourist trail, located in the remote village of Olorte among the Loita Hills and the ride there is often a bumpy one. It is an eco-camp run by a group of Maasai elders, setup as an income generation activity with profits going back into the local community.

Crossing the river as we left the Mara

Not as deep  as we thought :-)

Road in and out of the Mara...does it look bad in the photo?? Because it was
truly horrible to drive on

A very straight road and much better to drive on....

....until we arrived at this

That crossing was worse than it looked!

We stayed in one of the camp’s permanent tents, equipped with toilet and shower (hot water bucket) at around $90pn. The tent had an incredible view looking out over the Loita Hills and each night John, one of the camp’s resident Maasai, would make us a huge campfire.

Our tent at Walking with Maasai

Very comfy

Our innovative toilet seat, made from a real elephant

And our bucket shower which actually worked very well 

View out from the tent

View looking back at the tent

There are plenty of activities to do including a couple of different treks (day and overnight), horse-riding, tea in a Maasai home and more. We opted to do the horse-riding which went for the whole morning and took us past Maasai homes and farms. We had hoped to see wild dog, occasionally seen in the area, but were not lucky on this occasion. Still we had a very pleasant ride, accompanied by the resident Maasai Sable, a young male named “Tusker” (after the beer). Tusker seemed a tad confused; perhaps he thinks he’s a dog? J

Meet Tusker.....a rather confused animal...

.....he thinks he's a dog. He followed us on our horse ride ALL the way!

My horse Buoyant

Cruising along

Tusker: A Maasai pet

Isn't he beautiful?!

We were also fortunate to be able to visit another project under “Walking with Maasai” the “Osiligi Bead Work “. In the Maasai language “Osiligi” means “hope” and there’s no doubt that the beautiful work being done by around a dozen Maasai women should be bringing hope to their community. This was a highly impressive aspect of the project with the profits from the bead jewellery going into the education of children in the community and helping women to support their families. Furthermore the jewellery itself was amazing; while I had loved all of the Maasai jewellery I’d seen up to that point, I knew that I would never where any of it, particularly when I got home. This jewellery however has tried to merge traditional Maasai jewellery with western tastes and the result is beautiful, colourful designs. Needless to say, Mike and I did our bit in supporting Maasai women through the purchase of many of their amazing beaded designs J

The bead project

A couple of the women involved in the project

So pretty....

.....and so colourful. I had LOTS of fun here :-)

We spent two nights in total at the camp; it would have been easy to spend more in the very relaxed surroundings, however our budget didn’t really allow for it.

Back at the camp on the river

One of our Maasai, John, chilling by the fire

Our horses enjoying their afternoon off

Truthfully I’m not sure whether I’d recommend the camp or not…..the project’s location as noted is a bit off the beaten track and when you go there you need to be fully self-sufficient. No food or drinks are available. We had asked the guys there when we arrived if they could organise a traditional meal on our second night, however this turned out to be too difficult or not enough time for them; perhaps if you request this upon booking?? The activities on offer are great and for the most, reasonably priced (I thought), however I did feel that the camp itself was quite overpriced. We actually opted for one of the permanent tents, despite costing more than using our own tent, in order to get some value for our money (with the permanent tents we at least got a toilet and shower). I actually wasn’t aware of the cost of the camp prior to heading out there; had I, I probably would have decided against it. Nonetheless it was a great experience, just one that should be weighed up on an individual basis J

From our tent at sunset

And again at sunrise. What a sight to wake up to?!