Visiting Kenya's second city, Mombasa

Late this past week, my parents returned home to the Seattle suburbs at the end of their five-week visit with us. For a few days before they left Nairobi, Sarah and I took advantage of Baba and Lolo’s (what the grandparents call themselves) willingness to babysit and took off without Lexi to visit another place on our East Africa list – the city of Mombasa. When people here say they are going to Mombasa, they mean the beaches and resorts that are outside the city proper. We had already been to one of these beach resorts back in December, and we actually prefer to visit cities as tourists as there are usually more museums, monuments and tourist attractions in them. So we had to return to see the city itself.

Part of deciding to go to Mombasa was to experience something else that was nearly as exciting (to Sarah, at least) as the destination – the train ride home. Because of the schedules of the train, we took it only one way and flew down to Mombasa on Sunday morning. More on the train trip below.

Mombasa isn’t the most pleasant place for a tourist. Many factors were not in our favor. We tried to see the city like we saw European cities – by staying at a hotel in the city center and walking around on foot a lot. Most tourists visiting Mombasa would probably have a guide to drive them around to the various sites. It’s the low tourist season anyway, hurt more by the fact that tourist numbers are still probably way below normal as a result of the post-election violence from earlier this year. So many guides and tourist operators are even more desperate for business and an income. So we as white people in a very densely populated town really stood out and showed we were tourists. We were hounded a lot by people wanting to be our guides, to give us taxi or tuk-tuk (motorcycle taxis) rides, or to come browse (and buy) in their souvenir shops or visit the tourist information/travel agent. And there are many more child beggars on the street than Nairobi who aren’t afraid to ask for a handout. So we could not really walk anywhere without being noticed and spoken to; so much for a quiet, pleasant getaway in another city. Also, it’s much hotter there than in Nairobi. One afternoon we just went back to our hotel and rested in the heat of the day. And there are lots of mosquitoes that ate me alive – they always love my blood. Add to all this the fact that Mombasa is a lot dirtier than Nairobi. There are large piles of garbage all over the place, and the streets and sidewalks have litter everywhere. Then the cats and crows scavenge in these garbage piles.

But like a European city, Mombasa also has a historical old town, and we stayed very close to it. We toured it with a guide on our last afternoon there. The houses have balconies over the street (think New Orleans-style but with intricately carved wooden railings instead of iron), and the lanes among them are windy and narrow. The architecture here is influenced by the Portuguese and Indians, and the city, which was really just the old town, an island on the coast, for centuries, changed hands many times among the Portuguese and Arabs. There are some streets in the old town that are mostly intact and where most historical houses/facades are in fairly good condition. But wander off the main drags, and you’ll encounter much poorer living conditions with many run-down houses and with all the piles of garbage among them.

On the edge of the old town is Mombasa’s main attraction, Fort Jesus, built as a defense by the Portuguese. We toured that as well. It’s got a few interesting places to walk around among the outer walls and ruined buildings inside, and it has a museum inside.

One night we had a lovely dinner at a fancy restaurant on the water. We returned to a dark city center and a dark hotel room, where we were issued a couple of candles for the night. It appeared the entire city was without electricity – the case for most of the country, we later learned.

We paid a brief visit to a large Hindu temple near the train station. It had been advertised as being tourist-friendly – that you could get a tour. We were met by a kind Indian gentlemen who met us at the front door. He showed us the prayer rooms and explained briefly how and to what Hindus pray, mentioning their belief in reincarnation. Sarah asked him how long he had been in Kenya. He told us he was born in Kenya and that his father had been born here too. I thought it was a strange answer for someone who believes in reincarnation. I was surprised he didn’t respond with something like, “I started my life as a peasant in 1362 in Nepal then became someone in the royal court in India after that…”

Shortly after we moved here, I had heard about taking the train to get to/from Mombasa. This route’s operation has recently been taken over by the South African railways, and apparently they had brought back some of the old-time feeling of a railway journey. So we had to try it ourselves. Going either way, it’s an overnight trip that takes at least 13 hours – leaving one city at 7:00 and getting in sometime the next morning. This isn’t Switzerland anymore, Toto, and trains (or anything, for that matter) cannot be expected to run on schedule. They tell people to expect to arrive more around 11:00. We had to check in for our trip an hour early, although there were only a handful of other parties in the one sleeper car that was used on the whole train. It was dark by the time we left Mombasa, so we were not going to be able to see anything. At 8:00 we were invited for dinner in the dining car. This was part of the trip that we had heard was fairly luxurious, and it was a fine and lovely meal. We started with bread and soup and had our choice of three main courses (one of them vegetarian). We chose the beef/vegetable stew over rice. And there was fruit salad for dessert. The silverware used was mostly the old, fancy silver used during colonial times, but the dishes were fairly modern. By the time dinner was over, it was fairly late, so we retired to our cabin, which was fairly spacious compared to its European train counterparts, and went to bed. I slept quite well. A hot breakfast was served at 7:00 a.m. the next morning in the dining car again. We sat and read after breakfast while we finished the journey. We got into Nairobi around 10:45 a.m. Before we entered the city, we saw a bit of wildlife in some fields – some zebra and some animals in the antelope family. All this – transportation on an overnight train trip, a two-person private cabin with bedding, and dinner and breakfast – was quite cheap. The only drawbacks were that the bathrooms were lacking in several ways – squat toilets, no soap, and no locks on most of them. We had a small sink in our cabin, and there was a separate faucet for drinking water, but it didn’t work. But it was fun to come home this way – a fun part of the trip and not just functional transportation to get us home.