Damaged tyres and burnt hotels

We were meant to fly to Lamu from Malindi but when the 32 seat Saab turboprop came in from Nairobi the captain came in (it's a tiny lounge at Malindi airport) and said he didn't like a tear in one of the tyres and so he wouldn't fly to Lamu. "It might last one more take-off and landing". We were therefore shunted to a hotel for the night to wait for the next day’s flight. (“Scorpio Villas” was fine, but initial impressions were not favourable; there had been a fire in December and the first buildings we saw were burned and crumbling.) When we returned next day, the plane had disappeared, and lo-and-behold it arrived with passengers from Nairobi. I asked what had happened; had a tyre been brought up before the plane went to Nairobi? Apparently not, the plane had simply gone to Nairobi after we had left. As we were about to board the plane to Lamu, please note, the girl told us the pilot thought he could land the plane at Nairobi but Lamu was "a bit rough"!

On landing at Lamu the fire tender was on hand, but parked under a tree with its cab up for servicing the engine, rather than prepared for action. The ground staff just changed their fluorescent jackets to suit the incoming flight and picked a handcart with the label of the relevant hotels to carry passengers’ luggage. There was a mechanical weighing machine and even an X-ray machine with a generator to power it, all under a thatched roof with no walls.

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An excellent book

Quite long but easy to read in chunks. Shows trends in behaviour across the continent and fits all too well with what has happened in Kenya and is happening elsewhere now.

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Stuck vehicles

In no special order:

A stuck lorry near Masai Mara. Irony: the lorry was carrying rocks to improve the road!

Our land cruiser broke a bracket supporting the rear fuel tank; passers-by gather to assist and it is sorted out with a piece of rope.

A road is under re-construction, a lorry jams in the muddy by-pass and the villagers erect a thorny pole to block the better route until they get money.

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Termites and Doom

The rains have started with a couple of torrential downpours, one on the day we got back from safari.

Outside the flat there were swarms of insects in the dusk, something I’d not seen before, but then a few dozen of them came in.

They shed their wings, or in some cases only one wing, and revealed themselves to be termites looking for a new nest.

There were more piles of wings on the communal stairs and pretty much everywhere we went in the next couple of days, though never in vast numbers.

Those who came into my flat were met with what I sometimes say is my second favourite smell: Doom. (“Stops all Dudus dead”). Just for the record, my favourite smell would be DEET, the only insect repellent that works.

(They must work, I’m glad to say I’ve had very few bites while in Kenya.)

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Spot the leopard

I’ve looked for leopards on three safaris over 20 years, but at last we found them!

A mother and cub was known to be in a small copse, but had proven hard to find. (They hunt at night and lie-up during the day).

These pictures show all contain a leopard cub (honest). The mother had taken a Grant’s Gazelle up the tree and we saw the cub feeding, and later saw it resting on the ground. The mother hid better but was seen, in part, eventually. <<...>> <<...>> <<...>> <<...>>

Baboons

Baboons have a mixed press. From a distance they are OK but close up they can be aggressive thieves. They are heavy and don’t stick to Queensberry rules.

While lunching at the National Park, I saw a troop of baboons pass by and drink at a pool. They then went to a scrape they had previously made under the electric fence and queued up to crawl under.

Another troop went over the roof and one eyed up the buffet below before being shooed away. <<...>> <<...>> <<...>>

Beauty and the beast

Many kenyan birds are beautiful, and some are beautiful only to their mothers.

Here is a weaver on a security wire outside my apartment block and a stork patrolling the rubbish area in the doctors' residences.

I have posted a number of pictures in publically-viewable albums hosted by Picasa (Google's web album facility). if you are keen, please go to http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/townfurze and see what is there. I'll update them slowly and add more as I get around to it.

you should be able to see them without logging in but please let me know if it works.

 

Feb 12th

Well, I’ve had a number of messages lately:

*Birthday cards and emails (many thanks, I’ll reply soon)

*Christmas cards and letters (arrived at last! Overlapping with birthday cards)

*Complaints, that I haven’t added to the blog recently.

So, here is a quick update. It’s pretty peaceful locally, the peace talks are moving on, and life is getting nearer to normal. (That is also true in the bad areas of Rift Valley, but they are a lot further from normal and the situation there is still very poor with a lot of people unable to go to their homes or work. Some are moving back to their ancestral tribal areas and so ethnic cleansing is happening by stealth. Many people have lost all/much of what they owned and many have been bereaved in several waves of violence and revenge.)

My teaching is going ahead and I am looking forward to a weekend away with a colleague in his home area and to a safari trip with visitors around Easter. The weather is mixed but mostly warm without a lot of rain. So, pretty good in my part of the world!

My darkest passions

It’s good to get used to different fruit. In Oxford one can buy all sorts of things but here there are more varieties of everything. The names vary slightly too. These passion fruits are known here as ‘passions’ and so they are dark passions or yellow passions. I prefer the dark ones.

Likewise mangoes come in at least 4 varieties that I can recognise. Some are better for eating, others for juicing. Here are a tommy mango (left) and an apple mango.

I just can’t differentiate all the bananas, though I can identify plantains and matoke, which are both for cooking.

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Your resident alien

Now I have a certificate to prove it!

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Exchange burned

On Wednesday, the ODM party arranged a funeral service in a local park near Ngong Road. I saw people assembling at the mortuary on my way to work, along with press vans and the army General Service Unit. Towards the end of the event, youths threw stones at the GSU and started fires at barricades they made in the road. The GSU responded with tear gas and that was the end of the funeral. The youths then vandalised the telephone exchange, pushing over a wall and pushing two cars against the wall. They set fire to the cars, looted everything they could find, broke windows and had fun in front of the cameras until the police and army got back in force and stopped it all. Some of the crowd ended up in my road but didn’t do any damage. I was at work at the time and all was well when I got back. The exchange is 2-300m from my flat, opposite my bus stop. The burned section is at the back, towards the mast. <<...>> <<...>>

Organising a student protest

My postgrad students returned today, and the undergrads are due to arrive this week.

One of the postgrads remarked that the undergrads might get involved in any Mass Action that is called.

Apparently it won’t happen on our campus because there isn’t a good main road to block and the police post is too small to bother with.

For a good protest one should have a big road near to student housing, for running away, and a police station. The Uhuru Highway (the biggest in the country) is ideal; blockages will cause an impact, it’s got a roundabout next to student accommodation on the main campus, and the central police station is only 200m away.

If this isn’t enough to get the police out for a fight, it may still be necessary to throw some stones at the police station to get them out.

Either way, when it gets to lunch time both sides will go to eat and reassemble at the agreed time.

Sounds rather like the previous city centre rallies. (And very different from the slum fights.)

Friday 18th Nairobi

We are on the third day of “Mass Action”. In reality there has been much less enthusiasm for these as the situation has settled. The heavy rain probably also helped.

I stayed at home, with supplies of food, phone cards and cash but haven’t been very much affected directly.

The city centre has been cordoned off each day and the token efforts to have a rally by the opposition leaders have been rebuffed with tear gas, at which point the leaders disappear in Range Rovers to go to hotels and the followers run from the police.

Meanwhile in the slum areas, there is general hooliganism and robbery to which the police respond with tear gas and some bullets. Sadly, there have been a few deaths, from various causes.

The road to work gets blocked as it is a containment point for marchers from the slum to the central park and there are sometimes clashes there. Otherwise I would not know anything was happening.

 I did hear a bit of gunfire yesterday, from the Kibera slum, perhaps in connection with a train that got stopped and robbed.

The opposition say this is the last of the calls for rallies; they are moving on to boycott businesses now, which will presumably just continue to hurt fellow Kenyans and leave the politics unchanged.

The antics in parliament are all too reminiscent of UK parliaments but they also have a bit of true Kenyan chaos. The opposition party, formed out of a load of splits and mergers, has to submit a list of 6 additional MPs to be appointed in addition to those elected. They have submitted two different lists; one from the “current leaders” and one from the registered officials of the party. The latter includes two of those officials themselves. Presumably this will get resolved  but it isn’t a great start from those who wish to run the country.

There are several things which are concerning. One is the enhanced poverty amongst those who were already poor, a second is the deep ethnic enmity which has opened up again, and a third is the problem of a president without a majority in parliament.

Despite all that, and there is a lot of sadness amongst Kenyans, there is also optimism from everyone I speak to that after this period of turbulence it will get resolved and normality will return.

I am hoping students will return on Monday, at the third attempt, and we can get back to normal there too.

Kenyan Anthem and flag

O God of all creation
Bless this our land and nation
Justice be our shield and defender
May we dwell in unity
Peace and liberty
Plenty be found within our borders.

This is the first verse and was written for independence in 1963; it uses a Swahili song for the tune.

It seems so poignant now.

The stripes on the flag are symbolic:

Black for the people

Red for blood shed to gain independence

Green for a fertile land

White for peace. <<...>>

Getting stolen goods back

In the coastal area, there was a lot of looting which the police were unable to prevent or deal with. One timber-yard owner announced he would be pronouncing a curse on anyone who hadn't returned the goods. There was a rush to return items as news got around that one person had a heart-attack while carrying off a TV. Others claimed not to have been able to go to the toilet for several days, or other ailments. Some hired handcarts to get the stuff back, others said they knew they'd be a laughing stock but they couldn't risk the curse. People in the Muslim areas seemed to take this very seriously.
Less seriously, a newspaper columnist argued that this should be used to combat mobile phone thefts, instead of the expensive high-tech solutions that don't seem to work.

Time travel

To visit my friends at Christmas, I used Ethiopian Airways (“Connecting Africa to the rest of the World”) rather than Kenyan (“Pride of Africa”) and so spent a night in Addis Ababa each way. The useful tit-bit for pub quizzes is that Ethiopia is the only country still using the Julian Calendar, so this year is 2000 and started on Sept 12^th in our Gregorian calendars. Thus I travelled 7 years back and forward again each way. All that Tardis stuff bothered me much less than the half hour early they tried to get me on the hotel-airport bus coming back at Addis.

I also had Christmas twice; my return trip happened to be on the Ethiopian Christmas day (7^th Jan this year, though all the books/calendars say it is the 8^th).

You can see why they had famine there when you look at the scenery but Addis seems nice enough.

Another quiz question: Anyone know which was the last country to switch from the Julian calendar?

Addis Airport & Ethiopian Airlines

Odd curiosities:

1. Very high security (unless girl is distracted talking to mate while luggage goes through) but then Ethiopian are the most high-jacked airline in the world. (More quiz trivia for you).

2. Souvenir coasters for sale; designed on a Thai pattern and made in USA.

3. Announcement: “Would passengers waiting behind destined for (Nairobi) frankly go to gate 4”. Hope the other 3 languages were better but I guess the message is conveyed.

4. Best in-flight magazine I’ve seen.

New year

Normally New Year is seen in amongst the cold wet Cumbrian hills.
This year I slept under a myriad of stars on a beach on the Gulf of Aden. On Jan 1st we swam with Whale Sharks, the largest fish on the planet. OK, these were 3 metre babies, but that's still pretty big. They are committed vegetarians with a lovely pinkish surface and rows of white spots. The water was a bit rough for poor-swimmer me (1m waves) but I found that with a life-jacket it was good fun.
Other beach life included many gulls, a heron, crabs, various multi-coloured fish and some hermit crabs.

The rock hyrax were in a nearby canyon.

A real low point

You know Kilimanjaro is the highest point in Africa, but where is the lowest?

 

This is!  Lac Assal. 156m below sea level. (Also claimed to be third lowest in the world.)

 

The lake was cut off from the sea by a volcano and there are hot springs (oops, burned foot) and lots of salt. The whole country is rather bleak and dry and there is a significant haze to dull the views.

 

The salt you can see, with a shallow layer of water in parts leading out to the deeper and amazingly-coloured waters of the lake.

The wading Brits are my old school friend and family.

Nairobi situation

Thanks to all who have contacted me to see how things are.
I'm due back in Nairobi on Tuesday 8th , having delayed 3 days in North Africa to allow things to settle. I understand all should be well now, indeed some parts of Nairobi were untouched all along. One person told me if it were not for the news they wouldn't have known anything were happening but another said it was very bad.
The trouble was in predictable spots where there is a history. (Slum areas with a lot of support for opposition leader Raila Odinga, city centre, the far west of the country where fighting has continued for years over land, ethnicity, etc.) Having said that, one of the protest marches got intercepted near my flat and there was trouble at that point; a petrol station got burned and that made me take the chance to delay my return.
There has been a shortage of cash (banks closed), fuel and food but that is now resolving.
The politics need sorting but I can't see there being a lot more violence immediately.
The election certainly seems odd. I could understand it being close, although Raila's campaign was a lot better than Kibaki's, but it seems odd that Mwai Kibaki got a majority personal vote when at the same time his alliance got far fewer MPs than the opposition ODM (about 55:95 depending who is allied to whom with about 30 seats yet to declare). Most people will have voted consistently for MP and President. The EU observers said that in at least two places the local count reported 50-odd thousand for Kibaki but the Electoral Commisiion announced 70-odd thousand in the final result. MPs made themselves very unpopular with massive pay awards and pensions and most were voted out, regardless of party. Twenty ministers lost their seats, including the VP.