Lamu - Kenya
Written by Amanda Jones for the San Francisco Chronicle Travel Section
"You cannot," the adolescent chided, "go in there." He repeated this again, slowly, as if it were an accepted fact that infidels are of inferior intellect. The problem wasn't merely that we were infidels, it was that we were female infidels and this was a mosque.
"Ah yes," I replied, "I am painfully aware of that." The women shuffling by cocooned within black buibuis drove the point home. It seemed implausible that a mere 24 hours ago, a few hundred miles away, we had been with bare-breasted, bare-armed, bare-legged tribeswomen. This was Africa after all.
Mohamed, our guide, shifted his body in front of mine as if he were convinced I was about to lurch into the mosque shouting some slogan about women's rights being human rights. His eyes pleaded with me not to create an incident. Perhaps one of his clients had committed such a heinous faux pas recently. I walked on, skirt swinging above my naked ankles.
We were on Lamu island just off the Swahili Coast of East Africa, a bastion of fundamentalist Islam that just happens to be fringed with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It comes as a surprise to most to find such a place in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Lamu island is located two degrees above the equator. The port, Lamu Town, is the oldest living town in Kenya, the country to which it now belongs. But for centuries it was ruled by the Sultan of Oman as part of his vast spice, ivory and slave-enhanced kingdom which stretched from Somalia to Zanzibar. Hence the introduction of Islam.
It has miles of uninhabited beaches, an azure ocean plowed with dhows, a temperate climate, and, in the town, a labyrinth of alleys threading through 17th-and-18th-century houses. Buildings are made of whitewashed coral-rag block, thatched roofing, and covered with scarlet bougainvillea. Most have elaborate buttresses, keyhole windows, wooden shutters, intricately carved doors and thick stone stoops, bowed from eons of sandaled feet. Muezzin calls from the mosques stir up prayers at all hours. Men drift through town in white robes or sarongs and embroidered kofia caps. The smell of spiced shrimp hangs over the harbor. It is sublimely genuine, and, in being so, sublimely romantic.
I once had an idyllic vacation in Lamu. I usually have a steadfast rule that I never return to a place where I've had a blissful time. In my experience going back doubtless means one of several things has happened in your absence: 1. A casino has gone up. 2. The very young have discovered it and raves happen nightly. 3. There has been a crippling war or coup and the bad guys won 4. Bill Gates went and prices tripled.
I had found myself in Lamu unexpectedly during the mid 1990s. When safari plans went awry, my cinematographer friend and I pulled out a map and let our fingers drift towards the wide blue Indian Ocean. I had heard about Lamu years before, probably from some former hippies who had been there in the 60s, searching for the next Nirvana. I immediately fell under its spell, felt gypped when I had to leave after three short days and had vowed to return. And now, four years later, I had.
Lamu, however, is not a picture-perfect beach resort. The town itself is a place well past its heyday, centuries past it. It has open drains and piles of abandoned rubble. It has old buildings left alone to crumble in peace and new ones going up with dubious construction. Cankered curs slink among the broken buildings, the market is almost unbearably noisome, the donkeys, (there are no cars), leave their doings in the streets. It is a landscape of authenticity.
To get there you must fly west from Nairobi to Manda Island then catch a dhow across the channel to Lamu. On my initial trip, we hadn't much money to spend so we surrendered ourselves to the tenacious "beachboys" vying to show us apartments for rent in guesthouses. The first place we saw was the top floor of a 300-year-old house in Shela beach, a charming village a mile or two outside of Lamu Town itself. It had an expansive limewashed rooftop patio, Zanzibari carved wooden daybeds, brightly colored scatter cushions, a houseboy who was to do our laundry and bring us breakfast, and a 180-degree view of the sea. We took it at a cost $30 a night.
We passed those few days swimming, eating seafood, occasionally walking into Lamu Town, napping on the daybeds, and walking the great spread of beach. Lamu beaches are mostly empty, mostly brilliant white sand. They have warm water with nothing in it that bites, stings, attacks or itches; they are relatively safe and the water is surprisingly clean. How many areas can claim all that these days?
So, it was with trepidation that I returned to Lamu, a girlfriend in tow and a little more money. I was sorely tempted to try to find the rooftop hideaway again, but I concluded that that would be pushing the "I shall return" thing too far. We had booked Peponi, also on Shela Beach, a chic hotel that has been the retreat of Nairobi's Happy Valley set for four decades and is now the lair of celebrities and lower-echelon royals. One friend reported sauntering into the bar there and striking up a conversation with a fat-lipped Brit he later recognized as Mick Jagger.
I knew the hotel fairly well already. On my previous visit, the cinematographer and I would rationalize the expense, pull out our smartest duds and scurry down the beach to their restaurant for dinner. Owned by gorgeous, gregarious British-Kenyan Carol Korschen and her handsome but rather less-gregarious Danish-Kenyan husband, Lars, the restaurants serves the best food in East Africa—chili, lime and ginger crab and coconut rice, or tuna carpaccio.
To understand the charm of Lamu, beyond merely the beach, you should know a little of its history, its melange of culture: Bantu, Somali, Portuguese, Indian, Turkish, Omani, Yemeni, and, finally, the British. Lamu Town dates back to the 14th century, maybe earlier, although people had been living on the island for more than 2,000 years. There was a rather confounding period from the 1500-1700s when Lamu was dominated by the Portuguese, although they seem to have had little influence on the place. The Turks and the Mazrui Arab rebels were the next to make a play, eventually beaten back by Omani royal forces. After this win, the Sultan of Oman quickly made Lamu a part of his dominion. When he died, he bequeathed his title to his two sons and a nephew. The youngest, Prince Seyyid Said, had no intention of sharing the role, so promptly killed his cousin and declared himself Sultan, quashing his elder brother. Tiring of the dreary desert of Muscat, he moved his capital, including his 200 concubines, to Zanzibar, turning the Swahili Coast into a beehive of Arabic exoticism.
The language spoken in Lamu is Swahili, the common tongue in all of Kenya and Tanzania. Its base is tribal Bantu mixed with Arabic, evolving expressly so Arabic traders could do business with the native inhabitants of the Swahili coast. Lamu, like Zanzibar, had an economy based predominantly on the slave trade. Slaves captured in East Africa were sent to Zanzibar to be sold, then put on sailing ships bound for the Middle East. Lamu was a port-of-call en route, a town where ships waited out seasonal storms, taking on board the ivory, horn, tortoiseshell, oriental silks and spices that flowed in and out. It remained a magnet port until 1907, when the British forced the abolition of slavery on the new Sultan of Zanzibar. Lamu went into an economic decline, and its fertile history of trading disappeared with the slaving ships.
"The shards of all that glory remain," Mohamed, our decorous guide, said proudly. It seemed to me that like so many formerly important towns, Lamu lives in limbo between the past and the present. The buildings still stand, the mosques still throng with salaaming worshippers, but the last few centuries have barely infiltrated. Wealth dried up, people ceased to come, progress stagnated. But Mohamed was correct, the town affords a glimpse of past Swahili life. "Narrow your eyes," he said, "and it's possible to imagine the Omanis in turbans, rhino-horn daggers strapped to their sides; the harem women chattering in the courtyards of walled houses; the donkeys heading to the wharf loaded with the merchandise of Africa, the Orient and India; shackled slaves being driven back into the holds of immense dhows; Indian traders bartering at their stalls; a few British settlers striding about in safari getup." This all sounded rather poetic, and I looked at Mohamed with new appreciation.
After roaming through the dust and heat, we stopped at Petley's for a rooftop drink. Petley's is one of the oldest hotels in Lamu, refuge for many a past wanderer. These days it's great for a drink or meal, but I would not recommend staying there. In fact, I would not suggest staying anywhere in Lamu Town itself if you have the option of Shela. There's no swimming beach in Lamu Town and it's noisy. And there's also the donkey sanctuary. Some do-gooder English organization formed the "International Donkey Protection Trust," a sort of rest home cum loony bin for donkeys run amok. Hence the tortured braying of "injured, sick or worn-out" asses echoes through the town all night long. A donkey sounds wretched at the happiest of times; imagine a colony of indisposed ones. All people must have their cause, but in Africa, where tragedies can be of epic proportion, I can only suspect what the locals actually think of such benevolence.
We sat on Petley's roof that evening drinking fresh lime juice, watching Africa's show-off sun plunge for the horizon. Lamu did not disappoint, in fact the return trip intensified my interest in Africa's panoplied past. And I can quite confidently say that although he Christmased a little further down the Swahili coast last year, Bill Gates has not yet stepped foot in Lamu.