Mombasa

I arrived into Mombasa, Kenya at 7am, after 30 hours of travel and very little sleep, where the two AW139 helicopters had just arrived, and as manager for this new operation, I expected to be faced with a long couple of days even before I got off the plane.  Luckily that first day was hectic and I was able to keep going on adrenaline.  Everyone put in solid 16 hours days for the first week, and one couldn’t ask for a more professional crew.  Everyone just knew what needed to be done and got on with it.  We had a fully operational base within a day, and were moving the customer out to the rig well before anyone’s expectations, except the customer of course.  Oil and gas exploration companies are well known to be very demanding, and seemingly more so in Africa. 

 

The tour was definitely the best I’ve yet had, despite maintaining a pace that didn’t allow me anytime to write the blog, I enjoyed myself.  I don’t know if everything just gelled with some romantic ideal I had in my head of Africa, but I loved Mombasa right from the start, and it only got better.

I’m writing this now back in Mtwara, Tanzania, in the African summer heat, my air conditioner fighting a losing battle with the morning sun.  The singing roosters, the scratch of crow’s feet on the sheet metal roof echoing though the building, downshifting heavy diesel trucks just outside the window and the Muslim call to prayer, not nearly as pervasive as in Turkey, but capable of waking one from a deep slumber just the same.  I wanted to capture Mombasa, but I was too busy, too involved, too caught up, but I’ll do my best to recollect.....

 

Like anywhere I’ve been, your comfort level grows with exposure, and I knew that going in, but having repeatedly heard that Kenya was one of the better African countries, ripe with tourism and safaris and Karen Blixen and Hemingway, I was surprised to find it felt much like Dar Es Salaam, only dirtier and less well kept.  Battling heavy stop and go traffic along the beat up and potholed dusty road, noisy and air thick with diesel fumes from heavy built trucks hauling produce from Mombasa’s port deep into Africa, into Uganda and the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.  I’m dazzled by the onslaught of colour and activity, the make-shift shops selling all matter of knick-knack and Chinese knock offs and rusty metal car parts, mattresses and handmade beds suspended precariously over open sewers, and it all has a transitory market feel, as if no was willing to put much time into building anything substantial, permanent, to be proud of, at least to my tainted North American way of thinking.  Garbage is omnipresent.  Everywhere.  Your view is never not polluted with empty plastic water bottles and colourful discarded packaging, everywhere you look.  You drive by huge mounds of garbage by the side of the road with cattle feeding on whatever nutrients they can find, kids playing, people living under discarded tarps right in the middle of it.  And people are everywhere, and doing everything, sweat soaked and shirtless males pushing large carts with any variety of produce dodging NGO Toyota Land Cruisers, small local cars with smartly dressed people, and as always, tuk tuks and motorcycles threading the mayhem with aplomb.

 

Beyond the hard working masses, those bare-footed young men pushing ancient bicycles, insanely overloaded with cassava root for the staple food ugali , a stiff dough made of cassava flour, or laden with impossibly large loads of firewood or coal, or sweeping the sand from the roadside or hand digging trenches, beyond all these manual laborers that makes you wonder if trucks and forklifts and backhoes are somehow forbidden here, you’ll find the secretaries and drivers and waitresses and store clerks. Driving through impossible slums, on roads that would challenge any offroader,  you’ll see the well dressed women brushing their teeth outside their 10 foot square intengo, small houses with walls made of straight strong sticks joined together and plastered with mud from clay soil, invariable with a sheet of tin for their roof, hopping over the huge puddles from the heavy rains, walking daintily in the mud with their high heels.  And soon you are in Nyali, where the well to do live, and the beaches that are impossibly wide and stretch beyond the horizon in both directions, gorgeous Colonial era resorts with uniformed waiters and food...ah the food, for I have ate meals in Mombasa that have been the best I have ever had, bar none.  After village life in Mtwara, we were glad to find Mombasa had modern and clean malls and shops, hidden behind barbed wire fences and security, checking each incoming vehicle for bombs, looking under our land cruiser with mirrors, opening hoods and boots, every time and every vehicle.  There is reason.  There has been violence here, we were right in the middle of it, but more on that later.

 

Mombasa.  It will grow on you.