The next stop along the coast was Lamu, an ancient Swahelian town which is still inhabited. Lamu is on an Island, so it was a bumpy bus ride up the coast and then a short boat journey over to the town itself. Its a touristy place and so hotel touts are waiting for you when get off the boat, I managed to dispatch them with ease and got to the hotel as planned. You can instantly see why its a touristy place because its pretty special. Beautiful architecture and narrow cool streets, lots of juice bars and cheap restaurants with tasty food. Its a very Muslim place and in answer to all the Western tourists many of the women opt for the full robe and covered face, just the eyes on show, despite this the people generally remain freindly and relaxed to each other and the tourists.
I thought about visiting some of the outlying islands, or taking a boat trip, but in the end thought sod it im just going to laze around for a few days. Which I did, generally keeping myself to myself and staying out of trouble, a few trips to the beach to swim in the warm sea, and lots of strolling around the quiet picturesque streets, and eating way to much food. With no beer on offer I resorted to binge drinking Tea and visiting the Cinema. I had some great days doing absolutely nothing, pretty much ignoring everyone else and only chatting to a few locals, antisocial but great.
Next up Mombasa, and the bus journey was a shocker. The road isn’t particularly good so its a bit bouncy at the best of times. All of the buses leave at roughly the same time and race it down the road to pick up new passengers. When one bus stops the others overtake, and so they kind of leap frog down the route.
While overtaking one bus something went wrong and we are suddenly skidding out of control. There is about a fifteen foot gradiented drop on one side of us. It looked like we are going to go down it and maybe roll a couple of times, I remember being more angry than scared, and was quietly confident about getting out of this one unscathed - I had a good seat. The bus hit the crash barrier which manged to absorb the impact (of the 60 or more seater bus) and we came to a halt. I blasphemed out loud (m f’er!).
The guy behind me thought we hit a cyclist, everyone piled out of the bus, and so did people from the bus we were overtaking. Sure enough there was a tangled up bike and a guy lying on the floor covered in blood and flour (he was delivering flour). To everyones relief the guy came-to after a while, he had obviously broken his leg which was twisted in a bad way and the bone sticking out of his thigh. Im not particularly good with this kind of thing, so left some of the locals who seemed more adept at first aid than myself. Despite us telling him not to, the guy sat up and was visibly quite shocked but fairly stable. Thinking it was just a matter of waiting for the ambulance I went and escaped the heat by sitting in the bus. After a while the mandatory ten babies that have to be on every bus started a crying match, so I went back outside.
I was pretty shocked to see the casualty lying down covered head to toe with a blanket. We were now looking at a fatality, he died nearly an hour after the crash, from suspected head trauma. The Police turned up another hour later (thats two hours), one of them drove us on to Malindi, while the other transported the bus driver and the corpse. It was quite a solemn journey, and we had to swap coaches at Malindi while they impounded the other one. The replacement coach was a bit of an old bird and got two flat tyres on the journey to Mombasa, it was a long bouncy ride but we made it in the end.
Of course the moral in this story is, take trips like this and seize the day, because you never know you might get hit buy a bus cycling to work tomorrow. I Thankyou.
