A Weekend in Lamu

I arrived at Manda Airport on Friday at ten in the morning. Ordinarily, I would have liked to arrive either earlier or later, but flights into Lamu are restricted to a narrow window between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. Word on the street has it that planes do not fly into and out of the city at night to avoid drawing the fire of al-Shabaab terrorists. Every few years, air travel to Lamu is suspended due to attacks, some of which have targeted the airport in the past.

Having done my research before coming, I walked straight out of the airport and made my way to the jetty, as I had read there is a public ferry between the airport and Lamu Island. Besides offering a limited range of arrival times, Manda Airport is a mildly annoying place because – although most of its customers use it as a conduit to Lamu – it is located on another island. Hence the name Manda, the name of said island. There were several boatsmen who took some offense at my no-thank-yous, but I achieved my purpose of finding the public ferry. Once I was seated, we waited for about a dozen local passengers – just a few too many for the number of life vests on the boat, which I helped pass towards the end so that I would not have to wear one. We only departed after loading several sacks full of charcoal.

The boat ride to the island of Lamu took about fifteen minutes. Once I arrived, I walked down the pier and made my way to a hotel right behind the thick grey walls of Lamu Fort, where I waited for my friend Wei. She had reached Lamu two days earlier and teleworked from Shela Beach, a more touristy locale south of the old town. I was not prepared to have to refuse two handfuls of people trying to offer me various boat trips and guided tours as I sauntered my way over taking pictures and taking in the views from the piers. This struggle would become a leitmotif during the whole weekend. Every time we as much as set foot on the small town square or the seaside road, we were continually approached by guides and captains until we dove into a side street or restaurant.

We did not see much on our first day, as it was a Friday and we had to work remotely from the hotel. Later in the afternoon, we walked through the old city and along the seaside road, reaching the Al Wali Seif Mosque in the south and Lamu Creek in the north. The seaside road was the only road in town that did not imbue us with claustrophobic sentiments. The rest were narrow, squeezed in between multi-storey old houses built of stone and coral, with busy shopfronts and poorly lit food parlours elbowing their way into the bustle. Most people in the town got around on foot. Some men pushed wooden carts with car wheels, while a few rode motorcycles, but the latter came in such low numbers that the appearance of a motorbike was always a surprise.

The most popular form of transportation in Lamu, however, are donkeys. Small groups of donkeys coursed through the streets carrying goods in woven bags on their sides, and sometimes a donkey would rush through with one or two men sitting astride on it. Interestingly, no one approached us offering a donkey ride. Following the founding of a donkey sanctuary on the town’s main artery, I imagine that Lamu’s tourist sector came to understand a change in Western attitudes towards animal use and abuse. Perhaps for the lack of interested tourists, or perhaps simply for the lack of work to do, most donkeys we saw in the streets were just lazing about eating garbage and wandering aimlessly through the streets. We wondered how their owners would find them if they strayed too far, but we saw they had letters shaved into the fur on their necks, doubtlessly identifying them as the property of one person or another.

On our second day, we made a longer tour of the old town. We visited Lamu Fort, which was constructed in the 19^th century and which served as a jail for political prisoners during the British colonial period. At the fort’s museum, we learned that Lamu was the oldest continuously inhabited Swahili town in Kenya, with a history stretching back some seven hundred years. We also learned about traditional crafts like basket-weaving and the making of ornamental cloths, which are traditionally inscribed with lines of Swahili poetry.

Following our visit to Lamu Fort, we muddled our way through the narrow and crumbling streets to Riyadha Mosque, one of the largest mosques in Lamu and a centre for many festivities. Our final stop before lunch was the Lamu Museum. Housed in a hefty seafront building that employs some Western features alongside Swahili ones, the museum displays various items important to life in Lamu, including the decorated horns used by the town’s heralds, various types of traditional wooden doorframes, and jewellery. Most of the upper floor of the museum is dedicated to Omani culture and history, as Oman is one of the museum’s sponsors. During my travels throughout the Kenyan and Tanzanian coast, I have found that Oman sponsors a number of cultural and educational projects as part of an effort to nurture its centuries-long ties with the Swahili Coast.

We ate lunch in Shela but not until we had wandered our way through the confusing patchwork of streets to the Friday Mosque. It was in a completely different location from what Google Maps would have us believe. We would hardly have found it had we not asked about half a dozen people for directions, and they seemed as confused by our trying to find an old mosque as we were by the layout of the city. We bumped into two different groups of colleagues at lunch. Lamu is small but immensely popular with the Nairobi expat crowd, but during the course of our lunch conversation we could not determine why. The flights are expensive and their timing impractical, the water is too dirty to swim in, and the historical town is not very extensive. Indeed, we hardly saw any tourists outside of hotels and restaurants, which confused me even more: why undertake this whole journey just to sit on a chair overlooking the sea?

Following lunch, we walked down Shela beach but decided not to walk all the way to the dunes as it was sunny and windy – a terrible combination for people like us who had decided to defend ourselves against the sun with umbrellas. After wracking our brains for a good hour over lunch, when we returned to the hotel, we made the spontaneous decision to go on a sunset boat trip. All the dhows were booked up, but when we appeared at the seafront, we were immediately approached by a man in a speedboat. He spent the entire ride talking to us while chewing on what appeared to be areca nuts and spitting into the sea, except when it started to rain and all of us had to hide under a tarpaulin. We left the following day on the 10:50 plane back to Nairobi.