Zambia World Wide

We walked from our room one morning and through the palm trees on our way to the beach. As we were walking through the trees we saw a Kenyan climbing one, naturally we stopped and watched to see what he was doing. When he reached the coconuts he stopped, cut one off and brought it down with him. Once on the ground he chopped the kernel from the coconut with a machete, it took some time as the kernel is thick and quite tough, also he did not want to damage the nut inside the kernel. Once he had removed the kernel he cut the coconut into halves which he gave to Gary and Craig, who were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get their teeth into it. After this we would often see him early in the morning working in the gardens. The next time we saw him climbing a tree to get a coconut we took a cine film, which seemed to please him. When he came down from the tree he cut open the coconut and gave it to Jan. After two days spent on the beach we decided to go into Mombasa, the hotel ran a free bus service every hour throughout the day. Mombasa is a town in two parts the old town and the new town. That day we decided to spend time in the newer part of the town which is where the shops, street markets and café’s are located. As we walked along the main street we saw a huge archway crossing the street. It was two enormous artificial elephant tusks, stretching out and up forming an arch across the road, apart from the size they were also very realistic in colour. They were known as the gateway to Mombasa. We wandered in and out of shops, around the street markets, not looking for anything specific, just enjoying the atmosphere although we did want to buy gifts to take with us to England. Just as in Zambia everything had to be bartered for in the street markets. Bartering is not just something that Jan was good at but also seemed to enjoy, at times it would seem to take forever to buy goods that were worth only a few pence. It often seemed such a waste of time to me but Jan enjoyed it. I have known Jan barter for 10/15 minutes and then walk away with nothing, Jan would say its fun, although I can’t agree, it does add to the atmosphere surrounding the markets.

Mombasa had been a large Slave Trading port in the past and therefore had a varied population, there were many Arabs and people of Arab descent plus many of mixed races. The slave trade in Mombasa had been controlled by the Moors. There is such a wide range of souvenir goods for sale at the street markets from wood carvings to Moorish silver, many interesting hours were spent looking round the street markets. Gary and Craig were too young to have much interest and appeared to be bored for a large part of the time. That is until we came across a stall selling African drums, which they were both determined to have, they did get them although I am not sure it was a good idea. The highlight of their day was probably when we stopped for lunch at a pavement café and they had a coke float with their lunch plus the opportunity to play their drums.

The old town is situated around the port, which is where the slave market was, at the entrance to the port is Fort Jesus which was built by the Moor’s in the slave trading days to protect their interests. It is a massive fort and must have taken a lot of labour to build (probably slave labour) it was obviously built to last as even today it is in very good condition. Along the waterfront there are still signs of the slave markets and warehouses built and used by the Moor’s. The streets in the old town are much narrower than the newer side of town. The Moor’s knew how to build as most of the buildings are still in good condition and are being lived in today. Walking around the old town there is a feeling of going back in time, it is as though the slave trade never stopped. We were fortunate when we visited the old town to find a young Kenyan student who was studying English at the local college. To earn the money he needed for his studies, in his spare time he worked as a guide for English tourists. His fee was quite reasonable and without his knowledge and assistance we would have missed many parts of the town and known very little of the town’s history. Although we had spent some time in town which we found very interesting, the main purpose of the holiday was to give the children a holiday to remember, therefore most of our time was spent on the beach and out on the coral reef, which is what they enjoyed the most.