Sunday, January 9, 2011
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| Claire, Joey, Elaine, Eric, Eric and Rojan |
Why on earth did I imagine that the old, privileged msungu life style was over in East Africa?! Perhaps because of reports by various friends and acquaintances who decided they to leave for a variety of reasons. The Watts family are the only ones we know, who stayed – and not just the parents, but the whole family, except for one daughter who now lives, not in the parent country of jolly old England, but in New Zealand. However, there are still plenty of expats here, as well of course as white Kenyans, and, presumably white Tanzanians and Ugandans. When we lived here, one could not claim citizenship after the age of 18 unless one’s grandparents were born here; now white residents can if they were born here, so presumably two of our children could reclaim their citizenship should they wish to. When we lived here, neither women nor non-citizens were allowed to own property; now anyone can invest in property in Kenya and they do, big time. Watamu has become a holiday resort of choice for the Italians, though Ocean Sports still remains an old British colonial type stronghold.
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| Watamu Town main street |
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| Tourist 'duka' |
Today we swam and relaxed over breakfast until Elaine and Eric came by to pick us up to go shopping at the Watamu village tourist dukas. Unfortunately the store where we hoped to purchase kitenge shirts for the boys was closed, but no matter, we spied Claire and family having breakfast outside a café owned by Italians, so we joined them for passion fruit smoothies and visited for an hour. I did find a long skirt for myself to supplement my sparse wardrobe, however.
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| Kenya 'matatu' (taxi cab) |
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| The hotel bar and restaurant are decorated by many of these giant fish |
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Then we returned to swim and cool off for a couple of hours until they all arrived at Ocean Sports for the ritual Sunday curry lunch buffet, for which, besides deep sea sport fishing and chocolate mousse, this hotel is famous. The place was packed with white residents most of whom seemed to know one another, along with a smattering of Italians. It was reminiscent of Sunday lunch at ‘the club’. And a good lunch it was too. Good food and good company, the camaraderie enhanced by the fact that it was Eric’s 74th birthday.
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| Claire and Rojan's house |
After a three hour lunch, we adjourned to Claire and Rojan’s house to visit a while longer on their deep, cool veranda by the pool and met their 5 or 6 dogs and their school teacher landlady, who currently occupies her guest house, from the International School in Moshi, Tanzania who was home for the Christmas holidays and plans to retire to her Watamu property sometime in the next year or so. What a beautiful oasis, not a beach property, but almost at the end of the Watamu coast road, next to a traditional African village. Rojan, a builder by trade, is building a new house for his family into which they will move in a few months. He also runs a snake farm where he milks the venom for use in snake bite antidotes. Helmut was a little disappointed that we didn’t go to see the snakes!
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