Saying Goodbye to Mwamba

June 12, 2006
We worked in the morning and said goodbye to our monkeys. They gave us
a special performance by raiding the shamba to the south of the ruins
and grabbing several ears of corn before the people on the shamba
realized what was happening. Maurice appeared to be injured when we
saw his this morning and was limping with a large gash along his left
hand. Despite being slowed considerably by his injury, he kept going
into the shamba to grab tasty corn. We are worried that the little guy
will become Maurice Choma if he is not careful. The people on the
shamba often set dogs out to guard their plots when there have been
too many monkey raids. We took several photos of them before we left
the group for the day. We stopped by Kipepeo to say goodbye to Salim
and then went on to lunch at the Mobil Mart Café with Leslie, Patrick,
Laura, and Susan. We said our goodbyes and grabbed a matatu back to
Mwamba where we worked feverishly to get finished packing before we
had to leave for Malindi. We stopped off to do some quick emailing
before leaving to catch the bus. The bus was late, but we really could
not complain, since there was an ice cream store right there that we
had never noticed before! The bus finally arrived about an hour late,
and we were very happy to see that it was very nice! This was no
sketchy Falcon bus like we'd taken when we first arrived, this was a
coach! The overnight trip was not bad at all, and we both got plenty
of sleep before we arrived in the morning.

June 11, 2006
Today was our day off. We finally woke up and made ourselves some
breakfast before starting of getting a lot of errands done, like
laundry, etc., in preparation for our safari. We had to visit the
beach a last time, and the waves were amazing and high. Monica took
one look and thought she would just sit out. Scott ran straight into
it and had a blast thrashing in the 10'+ surf. It was much fun!

We went to Colin and Ronnie's tonight to have a little exit interview
about our experiences at Mwamba and to transfer a birding database
into Colin's hands. It was an interesting discussion, and Colin had
not been getting much information from the management at Mwamba about
what was going on there. We were apparently not the first people to
voice concerns about the management. Hopefully, he can enact some
changes before the reputation of the field station is tarnished too
badly.

June 10, 2006
We walked to Turtle Bay today taking photos of everything and looking
like quite the tourists. We continued our photo expedition at Gede and
got some good shots of the guides and workers there. The coolest thing
about today was going out to dinner at Turtle Bay Beach Club with
Andrew McNaughton. His project redesigning several of the guest areas
is nearly complete, and it is mostly open for use. We started with
dinner in the pizza garden. It was quite good, and we had a
impassioned discussion of how environmental and human concerns can
work harmoniously in Kenya in light of the attitudes of tourists
(e.g., Italians) and the government. We had a great tour of his work,
including a very cool new bar that is made from sanded, finished, and
joined canoes that had been used by local fishermen. He also painted
all of the pictures in the guest areas. It was a fun night.

June 9, 2006
We hade an early morning with a walk/run to Turtle Bay. We finished
our monkey-watching duties early, so we could concentrate on other
data collection. At lunch, we decided to have chapati while watching
the monkeys, which is typically bad, but we thought that they would
not think of us as a food source, considering we had been with them
almost every day for 4 months. As we were eating, Monica saw a monkey
looking at us. Nancy had spotted the chapati, so we hid the chapati
quickly! She came over until she was maybe a meter away and looked at
us both with sad brown monkey eyes. When that didn't work she tried to
threaten us by bobbing her head. Evenutally, she gave up and left to
eat some leaves on the ground. The whole episode was very cute.

On the way home, we stopped by High Tech Dream World (which lives up
to none of its namesake) to do some emailing. After 10 minutes, our
email loaded and Monica received the stressful news that her
advisor-to-be at SFSU is leaving before we return to take up a
position at Penn State as the head of their anthropology department.
Luckily, we had decided to make tonight our happy hour night at Pole
Pole. It was definitely a good night to go.

June 8, 2006
It was a pretty good day. We saw an incredible sunrise this morning.
We watched the sun open up in the sky like an enormous orange eye on
the horizon. What a great way to wake up! We had a good
monkey-watching day, and we stopped off at Plot 15 to get a tour of
Mida Manor, which is a nice place on Mida Creek. Ivor gave us a ride
back to Plot 28, which was great. Monica spoke with her mother tonight
and found out that Dave and Liz had conveniently forgotten to deliver
the message from her. The rest of the night was filled with lots of
mosquitos eating Monica's feet and lots of packing in preparation for
leaving.

June 7, 2006
We had a great day. It started off with a run in the morning, and we
barely missed a downpour. Monica walked with Patrick to the ruins, and
she ended up having a very successful monkey-watching day. Scott went
on to Malindi to get some emailing done, buy tickets from Malindi to
Nairobi for our gorilla trek, pick up our Swahili rap video CD, and
then caught an "express" matatu to Mombasa.

"Express" is used pretty untruthfully sometimes, and every so often
you will have a manamba tell you it's express when it is not. Express
matatus are cool, because they do not overcrowd and they go straight
to Mombasa without stopping. On the way to Gede, the "express" matatu
made a couple of stops, and I started to wonder if they were just
trying to fill the last seat or if I had been had. But I did not get
to find out, since the matatu broke down completely when it reached
the Gede Mobil station. We all piled out, and they crammed about 20
people into a rather sketchy matatu. Then they started making stops
... everywhere. If it was not stopping to pick up and drop off someone
every kilometer, the engine was giving out, and the manamba would have
to get out and try to turn over the starter from behind the driver's
seat. At least Scott had a nice slow tour of the road from Malindi to
Mombasa.

Finally, he reached Mombasa 2 hours off schedule and immediately
headed to the Akamba ticketing office. It was pretty painless. The
office is only about 1 km from the matatu stand, and the Akamba staff
were very fast and efficient. 10 minutes later he was headed back to
the matatus, made a stop along the way to grab some food, and made it
back to the matatus 30 minutes after he arrived. The first matatu was
"express" but with no one on board Scott decided to find a more full
one after waiting a few minutes. The second matatu was almost full,
and it looked like a winner. This time he really did get an express
matatu and they even dropped him off at the Gede junction, so he could
walk back to Patrick's house.

Why Patrick's house? Tonight was Pati ya Chapati night! Laura, Monica,
and Scott all went to his house to learn to make our favorite meal. We
had a great time. Monica and Laura received kangas to be in the
kitchen. We each worked the mbuzi (literally, "goat" in Swahili which
refers to a stool with scraper used to shred coconut). We each took
turns doing the different steps and quickly realized that it takes a
pro to make chapati nice and round. We finished and ate until we were
completely stuffed. It was absolutely wonderful! We finally caught a
ride on their truck to Gede where we took a matatu back.

June 6, 2006
Today was Leslie's first day back to monkey watching. We took the
morning matatu with her and Laura rather than running since there was
heavy rain. We worked 1/2 of the day, but took the afternoon off to
go to Malindi and get a bunch of emailing done. Our plans were foiled
when we arrived and realized the power was out! We decided to eat
some lunch at Stars and Garters. This was not our favorite place as
we were both famished and it seemed to take years to get our food.
Once it arrived though, the ham and cheese sandwich and chips were
quite good. It was also amusing to watch the sixty-yr old Italian men
hitting on the African prostitutes at the bar (right in the middle of
the day). Power had still not come on when we were done so we just
about resolved to go back when we decided to try to find some Swahili
music to buy. We found a store, but they only had tapes.

The guy there took us to another store "nearby" (he walked us halfway
across Malindi) where we not only found the Swahili music, but in
music video form. We were quite excited! When we told them we didn't
have enough money for it (we hadn't brought much with us), they
offered to burn us an illegal copy for only a fraction of the cost.
We thought this was great! :) However, when they tested the burned
copy, it didn't work so we arranged to buy the original for 1/2 price
the next day. Finally, we were almost out of time and had to take
care of the most important thing ... getting Scott a haircut to trim
the enormous bush of hair that had accumulated on his head! We tried
the kinyozi (barber) that Steffen and Stanley had suggested, but they
were closed (that side of the street was without power), but the other
side had one open. We decided: why not? So Scott got his first Kenyan
haircut, and it looks very good (and all for 50KSh). While Scott went
back to Mwamba to finish some computer work, Monica decided to stay in
Malindi until the power returned. Unfortunately, the power never did
return, so she came back a bit frustrated.

Scott had some great comments at dinner while he talked about how
horrible it is to put people in the banda at $20 a night and how many
other places there are in Watamu for much cheaper. He had
unfortunately started talking without thinking, but we thought that
"issues resolve themselves", so no harm could be possibly be done.