Day 2 in Kilifi County: Passing through Gedi

Since I only work for half a day on Friday, I left my hotel-cum-office in Malindi not long after noon. I arranged with the hotel to find me a tuktuk driver who would take me to the town’s matatu stop, but once I climbed into the rickety three-wheeler and we started talking, he easily convinced me that it would be much faster to travel all the way to Gedi with him. His price was not exorbitant, and he very reasonably pointed out that if I took the matatu to Gedi, I would still have to either walk or take a tuktuk from the matatu stop to the site itself.

I found Gedi besieged by school groups. Some of the children were quite fearless and greeted all white people with loud “ciaos,” making the generally correct assumption that most foreigners in the area were Italian. Foreigners seemed to be of about equal interest to the children as monkeys, which they did not greet but which still attracted little circles of onlookers. The foreigners were braver. Encouraged by their guides, they showed the monkeys pieces of fruit, prompting the monkeys to climb onto their shoulders and descend onto their arms to the frantic tapping of fingers on mobile phone cameras.

Despite the urging of the ticket salesman, I insisted that I did not want to go with a guide when I found out it was not compulsory. I knew I wanted to take a lot of pictures, and a guide would have slowed me down while telling me information that I would have had to fact check when I got home. Instead, I wandered past the incomplete visitor centre to the tiny museum, whose two rooms displayed dishware and fragments of dishware from as far as Italy, Arabia, and China. After spending one or two minutes there, I took a picture of the site map outside the ticket control desk and walked in.

Gedi is large but not difficult to navigate. The path from the ticket control desk directly to the centre of the ruins, which has been almost completely cleared of trees to reveal the full scale of the Great Mosque, the House of the Double Court, the Palace, and several adjoining tombs. Still within the inner wall of the city but overrun by trees stand the Large House, the Small Mosque, the Mosque of the Sarcophagi, and the Mosque of the Three Aisles. Towards the outer wall, the ruins become more derelict and there is not much to see beside trees and beautiful purple butterflies.

Not all the buildings that used to belong to old Gedi are contained within the main complex. In fact, one big wall and several other structures belonging to an erewhile mosque were discovered to the left of the ticket control desk, with the wall held together by the roots of a tree. Behind this wall stands the Snake Park of Gedi, a centre where snakes discovered around the complex are brought instead of being killed. Housed in separate terraria, the snakes include some of Africa’s most iconic reptiles, like the green and the black mamba (which is actually grey but has menacing black gums), the puff adder, the vine snake, the red cobra, and the only recently identified large brown spitting cobra. A big African rock python also found a home at the centre after fleeing a forest fire.

I left the main gate with a school group, using the outpouring of children to escape the various onhangers in front of the ticket office. I then continued on foot to the centre of new Gedi, where I had to politely decline multiple motorcycle drivers before reaching the matatu stop. I was the last person to be put in the van, doubtlessly for a price multiples above what all the locals had paid, and the driver made space for me by reseating a boy at the window to the middle seat in the front. We took off almost immediately. When I reached Kilifi, I walked to the beach to eat a little dinner before finding my way to a house owned by the friend of a friend and waiting for the rest of the group, which was due to arrive from Mombasa late in the evening.