Senegal nekh ngama

Here again, despite my mum and friends insistance that I changed plan, I returned in my beloved Senegal. This time with Mario, e new friend who was also a good buddy.
My plan was to come here with Ale but her cute small baby wanted like to spend a few more weeks in the cold Italian weather thus I finally spent these first 2 weeks with Mario.
It was a completely different vacation, so far we just visited saint Louis and Dakar but we loved to meet new friends and get new experiences. Last year Ale was a protector angel more than a brother while this year despite plenty of help and planning from Italy, we deeply entered in a new African dimension in the good and also bad side. As Ale previously explained me, I realized that in Africa a toubab is always considered a rich guy who can spend for himself and his friends, this principle is apply for almost any African man or woman, rich or poor, in fact Doctor Diof gave me a warm welcome to dakar by asking me 5 or 6 times more than a taxi would have asked me for the same trips to the airport, not enough he and his staff took us to a small inexpensive restaurant to have lunch and obviously to get their lunch paid. Often when someone take you somewhere you will be asked to pay for petrol; which is quite wierd in our culture anyway if you keep relaxed; understand their different point of view and learn from previous mistake you will gradually start to adjust and adapt to all these new situations enjoying every moment of your stay.
Since most of those local friends revealed unreliable or unefficient chaperons, I and Mario shifted to become independent travellers. In Sanit Louis campus we met a pretty and fine spanish speaking girl Magui as well as a lawyer student Nikolas who introduced us to Awa and other students, he took us to the cheap restaurant La Source where we had delicious and cheap faco brochette. Yet the nice student Marie Gaby took us to the gendarmerie to explain how Mario was stolen of his Samsung Galaxy Note in the market before SL bridge.
In Dakar too we met lot of new friends and step by step we started to filter the few good and honest ones from the mass of those who would have taken advantage of us only. Nicolas suggested that we go to Le Voyageur discoteque on fridqy night and it was a wonderful place to meet good friends being fed up with Le Patio or Yengoulem or Chez Willy filled with prostitutes, whereas Le Farou Beach was a disappointing spot for a saturday night, bad people and bad music. Doctor Julienne, a colleague of doctor Badiane, also a good friend of us, suggested The Castle nightclub as well as Just Four You, since she is a very kind and serious person I am almost sure that we can also enjoy those places.
Dakar is a very frantic interesting city and senegal, once you learn how to walk alone properly, is a fantastic country.

Mombasa

At the end of my short Kenian vacation I spent a week end in Mombasa because I prefered to fly to Nairobi instead of repeating a long bumpy and unconfortable bus trip. At the beginning I thought I just had bad luck not to find a flight direc tly from Malindi, but I soon realized it was a great opportunity for a short visit of Mombasa. Once more I asked Aisha to be my travel buddy and despite it was also her first time in Mombasa, she was an excellent guide. We found a decent and cheap accommodation in the 5th floor of the Safari Coast hotel, a simple hotel next to a big market area, not very safe at night time but ok during the day. Mombasa, like Lamu, is situated in a island and has a charming old town and a Portuguese old fortress, Jesus Fort. We spent all the morning visiting Jesus Fort and old Mombasa with a local guide (I had to bargain hard in order to drop his price to 100 KSH, but in general his service deserved not much more). The fortress was built in 1951 with a cross plant by the Italian Giovanni Battista Cairati for the Portugueses, then conquered by Omani arabs and finally by British empire. it combine some interesting features of the different conquerors like an old water cistern,  Portuguese and British cannons and  imposing old old 18m tall walls with a superb view of the Mombasa bay.

I do loved the old town with its narrow roads, small shops, terraces and old mosques that reminded us how deep is the Arabic influences in this part of Africa. Even the food we experienced in the Island Dishes restaurant was a superb mixture of herbs and ingredients of African and Arabic cultures. This is a totally safe and inexpensive part of Mombasa which is a place I would love to return (along with Lamu, near the Kenian border with Somalia and Kampala, this last in Uganda). 

As for the beaches, I had no time to experience them nor am I a beach addicted, anyway I have been told that the most beautiful and "wild"ones are sited on the south side of Mombasa like Galu or Diani beach whereas the most lively ones(bars, clubs and restaurants) are on the north coast: Bamburi and Shantzu beaches.

Mombasa nightlife is great, especially in the weekends. We spent a super saturday night to Florida club (entrance fee is KSH 300 for men and KSH 200 for women). Florida is at 15min by taxi from our hotel and is well sited just along the seaside. There are several bars with different music styles to satisfy clients coming from India or Chine or Europe and also a nice show where beautiful dancers show how charming and athletic African women can be. Drinks are not expensive at all and there is a very fine and friendly atmosphere. Other 2 good clubs are Casablanca and Bella Vista with live music.

Finally some nightlife!

Once we settled in our apartment and started to ramble in Malindi I wondered if I could finally enjoy a kind of simple nightlife I was dreaming about since my first day in Nairobi. Although November is still low season, I was quite satisfied of the local night scene.
Just to mention one of the greatest day I had in Africa, I would talk about my good tuesday.
We bought some beans, potatoes, mangoes (probably the sweetest of the world), eggs, honey, homemade yogurt and full grain millet bread. I started to cook a kind of omelette with too many   previously fried vegetable and although the result could have been much better we really enojoyed the result, noone left a spoon of our dinner.
I enjoyed my Polcino Oasis stay even thanks to a big smimming pool attac hed to the beach, where I could swim and relax with no hassle of the too many hawkers and rastas on the beach, but also because I could play with some wonderful, sweet and full of energy kids living there with their parents, often italian-kenian couples.
I remember with great pleasure a tuesday night while I asked to my new friend Aisha (this one, a more open-mind and relaxed muslim girl), roommate of Aldy's girlfriend Hadija, this last a Guinness beer lover.
I asked Aisha if I could do her some Shiatzu massage and with no surprise she happily accepted, confirming once more how open Africans are toward physical contact, just as scared most of europeans are confusing all the time massage session with "raping session".
After a pressure massage and a stomach balance, Aisha was sleepinng so deeply and when I woke her up she said she could sleep on until the following morning since she was in a kind of paradisiacaly state. I was so proud, content, satisfied and glad that my tiny shiaztu skills could get such a good result. Not enough I suggested to my friend to also experience a new Tao based energy circulation between our bodies following the teachings of Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams: once more we had to look at each other with open eyes and hands contact, to have no prejudices,  to have a deep and low breath, to visualize and feel her ying and my yang circulating from our 2 bodies, to forget what else was happening outside our small bright universe and have no prejudices at all. Once more the result was stunning, we did something great and she thanked me for this new experience. It was finally time to head to Malindi town center where there are lot of small nice bars and small discos: Starts and Gatlers, Kienieji, Fermento, Star Dust, Melting Pot, Pata Pata Beach Bar or Club 28. We opted for the first one to watch a difficult, vibrating Champion's Cup defenders of Chelsea. Juventus won with an impressing 3:0 and I thoughts...this was a "perfect day".
The following night we went to Melting Pot, also nice bar, with a soft atmosphere and the usual bunch of local beauties looking for a aged "mwazungu" client eager to exchange a night/week of love with some financial help. As far as I understood Kenya has a much stronger and strict sexual habits than for example Senegal or Mali (the many different churches that found fertile sole in this country probably is not by chance) but there are so many young mothers who have not any kind of financial aid by their kids' fathers and sell themselves for little money. I don't blame them at all, in their place I would do exactly the same, saying or thinking something different would be pure hypocrisy.

Welcome to Malindi

Finally after a very long and uncofortable (but still better than my trips in Mali and Senegal) we arrived in the early morning in Malindi. It was still dark but the air was warm, rich of flower scents and welcoming, I was so curious about  Kenian coast and about Malindi where too many Italians decide to spend their holiday or...their life.
We found a nice furnished apartment at Polcino Oasis Village, an old tatty residence where most apartments have been sold to italians. I enjoyed the lovely garden, the big swimming pool attached to the beach but really hated those tiny persistent hungry Kenian mosquitos who used to assemble every night to have dinner mostly with my blood and sometimes with that of my friend Aldy. No mosquito net, no repellent seemd to discourage them, Aldy tried other products with very little fortune.
The beach of Malindi is wide and long, a white sand and pristine warm water but has a thick layer of long seeweeds that your feet should get used to in order to enjoy swimming there.
There are many hotels and resorts, some of them luxurious ones and of course the over protected villa od Flavio Briatore, the most famous muzungu of Malindi. We used to do a 1hr walk on the beach twice a day, getting until the Marine Park, pity that every 10 meters we were stopped by local sellers, hawkers and idlers who consider Italians as the best clients/friends/helpers. That could be funny the first day, OK the second, unbearable from the 3rd!
As usual I did prefer to mix with local visiting the small streets of old town, where we met by chance Camilla, an Italian woman who moved there 13 yrs ago with her husband. They bought an old mansion in the Arabian area and restored it in a magnificent B&B arabian style, Swahili House. She is the first non kenyan certified safari guide while her husband is running a scuba diving center. She was extremely worried because Malindi has experiencing a very low number of Italian tourists this November,caused by the huge financial crisis who made many Italians unable to take their beloved vacation to Kenya.
In Africa you can repair for cheap almost everything you would have to throw in the rubbish, that's why I succeed in having my old but tough Nokia repaired for a few bucks. While doing searching for the right shop we found by chance a great place, Jabreen Cafè, probably the best cafè of Malindi, surely the beloved by me and Aldy. It was working almost at every time with locales and tourists, serving delicious simple food (beans, pees, a kind of boiled spinach called Mchicha, a nice chapati, a white maiz flour polenta called Ugali but also eggs, chicken and fried fish). WE never spent more than 2,00 euros and always exited full and happy.
I also met a sweet lovely mobile phone shop assistant, Aisha. It was so nice to chat with her and to understand her strict muslim way, I even invited her to visit with me Lamu but she needed a friend girl chaperon as well as she told me she NEVER goes to any bar because considered immoral.

Nairobi

 I arrived at Nairobi airport early in the evening with lot of foreigners ready for their safari games. A local friend took me to Marble Arch Hotel where my Kenyan experience started. The hotel was just in downtown and although the sound of a near music was enticing me a lot, the scary reputation of this big city along with the heavy security measures, south-African style, discouraged me to go out and enjoy my first African night...such a pity!
Nairobi, as most of African capitals, has many interesting things to see and do but you really need a local guide who take you to the most interesting spots. We only visited the Karen Blixen Museum which is nice and interesting. This danish woman author of Out of Africa (that became a film with R.Redford ) and other books lived in this marvellous house from 1917 until 1931 when after she divorced from her husband she returned to Denmark because her Coffe plantation was not successful at all. The house interior is quite interesting with some original old furniture (some of it had been sold when she got bankrupt) and some not original received as a present from the Out Of Africa movie production company. However what really impressed me was the marvellous garden, with its huge old trees and colorful flowers.
Nairobi is a chaotic city, mostly affected by huge traffic jam and sadly polluted, but it also seems a vibrant, frantic city where you can find plenty of small African restaurants (where you can eat with a few thousands of shillings), many pubs and also many sandwich bars. No doubt that after 10pm the city center gets desert and most of tourists rush back to their hotels or to their favourite disco-pub protected by a strong security service. I do hope I can visit it one more time with a reliable kenyan friend.

A taste of Kenya

Before leaving I was asking myself if I would have enjoyed in Kenya as much as I did in Senegal, if I could feel the same emotions. During this trip I realized that this was a wrong doubt because you can not compare Kenya to Senegal as much as you would not compare Italy to Finland. Both are in Africa or in Europe, but each of these countries has its special "taste", its culture shock, its favourite meal, its traditions, in other words its good and bad sides. The tourist will continuously complain of local crap food, of light shortage, of road potholes, of hawkers while the traveller, the real one will try as much as possible to find the best in every situation, even the most difficult, even the annoying. Lets say that in the first part of my short trip I acted as a fucking tourist, while in the second I finally became a real traveller appreciating every drop of energy that Africa let fall in my tongue.

final thoughts

What can I say? I left Italy in the middle of a cold winter with a strong puzzled because I was not returning to Thailand  with its gentle people, delicious food, wonderful landascape and safe atmosphere. Not to mention the crazy atmosphere of Phnom Pen by night where I also have a good local friend. Instead I had very little information of West Africa, my only contact, my friend Yousuf totally unreliable (in fact he didn't answer my phone calls a few days before my departure). Lot of Italian friends telling that I was totally silly to travel to a country inhabited by wild beasts, looters and monkeys. What were I doing? Where where I going? Our new friend Sofia from Norway asked me what were my expectations of this trip and I candidly replied "I had no expectations". No doubt it was a totally positive surprise. The highlight of my vacation were: African people that I met, Senegalese food, Dakar nightlife and Yoff beach, but also the birds' sanctuary of Djoudj, but also Casamance and Bijagos islands. On the other hand I didn't like Gambian frontier police nor some persistant and impolite Gambians, I also disliked Malian food and the terrible means of public transport (bus and septplace) used in this part of the world. I know that's a part of the "African adventure" I also know that locals use them regularly and withmuch less complains, but next time, because there will be a next time, I'll strive toward travelling by a rented/private car. I would be happy if with these posts I was able to transfer you even a tiny amount of the feelings I experienced during these 2 months in Africa.