In Kenya

The email access here has been down for the past few days. Here
is a quick summary of what we've been up to since we left our
home in Boston and started our adventure to Kenya.

Day 1 (2/3/06):
We arrived in Nairobi after a long flight (17 hours) that was delayed
on the tarmac in Zurich for another 1-1/2 hours, so we arrived in
Nairobi quite late and were pretty exhausted after crossing 8 time
zones and sitting for ~20 hours. When we arrived, we were
supposed to meet Patrick, the brother of the person who had been
teaching us Swahili before we left, but we did not see him and
figured he had gone home, so we instead took a cab from the
airport to our hotel and crashed as soon as we got in the room

Day 2 (2/4/06):
The next morning after spending all morning trying to locate a sim
card (to give us a prepaid cell phone line) we finally phoned Patrick
to see if he was free and learned the whole horrible story that he
had waited at the airport for us until 11 the night before. It turned
out that we could have literally gone across the street for one, but
we were clueless. We felt so bad about missing Patrick at the
airport, but it all turned out ok, and we had an excellent time in
Nairobi. Monica has a rather saucy photo of me and a giraffe :)
when we visited the Giraffe Center ... if only we had the bandwidth
right now to post it! He showed us around the city, including the
sites of the American embassy bombing and the recent building
collapse and then took us out for Nyama Choma (barbecued meat)
and biya (beer ... Tusker brand, of course) before getting us to the
8:30pm night bus to Malindi.

We were the only wazungo (Europeans) in that part of the city not
to mention on the bus. We were in the back of the bus for the trip
on the bumpiest road imaginable, which made it like a fun roller
coaster for the first 20 minutes (bouncing a couple of feet from our
seats each time we hit a bump), but it became irritating and
exhausting for the next 9 hours. Monica's bladder was on the way
to bursting from all of the bouncing, and we only had one bathroom
break!

Day 3 (2/5/06):
We arrived at Watamu the next morning at around 5:30am, took a
matatu (crazy-driving minivan stuffed with people and pimped out
with black lights and pimping music) to Turtle Bay, and then caught
a ride from Steffen to Mwamba, where we will be staying for the
next several months. The place is awesome and the beach outside
absolutely gorgeous; we can't wait to send photos, though, the
bandwidth restrictions will probably cause problems. The people
and food are great. We were able to spend our first day on the
beach and saw some very strange little blue jellyfish and a weird
sand worm. We also experienced the beach boys who all wanted to
hawk us their wares.

Day 4 (2/6/06):
We had our first day of monkey-watching today (just rested
yesterday), which was fun (I've never seen so many monkey
nipples) and exhausting, since the heat between noon and 2pm is
unbelievable. We have some great zoomed in photos and videos
up close and personal with our new monkey friends and cannot wait
to send them back. We even named two of the juveniles: gizmo
and scrapy. Anyway, we should probably head to
bed.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
Mwamba Field Study Centre & Bird Observatory
A Rocha Kenya
PO Box 383
Watamu, 80202
Kenya

tel: +254-(0)42-32023
eml: mwamba@arocha.org
website: www.arocha.org
also: www.assets-kenya.org