Happy Nights in Watamu

One week to Xmas - now I am starting to miss the tinsel and lights a little. We've only one more day here - we've been taking it easy, wandering around the little streets of the original town here, and spending some time on the beaches.

It looks like the cheap community wildlife place we thought we'd visit on the way home basically offers bush-walks, so we'll need to go to a proper national park for Naomy to see animals with us. Fifteen quid each would seem nothing too much at home, but it seems huge here - although it pales by comparison with the air safaris we were offered by a friendly guy today, starting at only 700 euro per person for two days (more than our entire Kenyan budget for just the four of us!)

Spent the day variously shopping, sleeping, chatting with Benny from Dudley (nice to hear a Midlands accent), and wrestling with a very underpowered PC getting photos out of the cameras and onto a CD-Rom. Then off to Malindi for dinner, 24kms up the coast, and Naomy's longest drive with us all as passengers. We sat and ate reasonable food served by very helpful staff, looking out at the Indian Ocean from the Baobab restaurant, discussing colonialism and world history (Anne is particularly interested in African and World History). I spoke to my Mum, and Melissa phoned home (well, got them to phone us, in fact), both of which were sort of sad calls. I think we'll miss people over Xmas.

Hotel-ward bound, but we popped in to Happy Nights Disco first, and stayed for an hour or so, hoping to meet our new friend from the Malob, Shabina Aslam, which we didn't. All too shy to dance - and it doesn't 'get going' till later, we were told, although around fifteen or twenty young Kenyans were doing their thing on and around the dance floor by the time we left.

Anne continued our education in African youth culture - the young men's clothes made them msalads (Stupid Africans Learning American Dress = salad, then add m to make it into a person word), while the young women were "dressed like Botswanans" according to Naomy (much less clothing than Africans generally wear). Anne got the DJ to give up on the WestLife album we arrived to, and to play a mixture of Tanzanian and Kenyan music - in pure KiSwahili and in Sheng, the Swahili/English street-talk young Nairobians use.

We tapped our feet, and pondered the 50-something mzungu (white) woman we've seen a few times with a teenage Kenyan boy on her arm, and the many middle-aged wazungu (white, plural) men we've seen with young African women in Botswanan clothes. We decided that true love was not the main factor in play...

- Mark