Lamu Island: Chapter one

Lamu is an island off the coast of Kenya near the border with Somalia. The bus to the ferry to Lamu takes about 7 hours. The ride feels slightly more jarring than exiting earth’s atmosphere. Half the time the road is not really a road. The terrain of the ride is rather bleak. Open treeless fields and marshes give way to dry forests where monkeys dart out of trees to narrowly miss getting hit by the giant bus going 60 miles per hour. Part of the bleakness of the ride is due to the severe drought that Kenya is currently suffering. The rainy season is about a month late, and people have started to get creative. But back to the ride, we finally arrive after 7 hours of unforgiving bumps that lift you several inches off your seat in an a way that makes everyone laugh the first time it happens but by the 100 time you fail to see the humor. We are now hurried onto a small dangerously overcrowded ferry where we sit waiting for another hundred people to be put on a boat made to seat 30. Just when we are ready to leave we see the creepy guy who kept staring at us on the bus, he has just got on the ferry with a large suitcase. “There’s the creeper” my friend whispers. Suddenly a man tackles the creeper to the bottom of the boat, a brief exhilarating scuffle ensues before the creeper is restrained by a man who (it has suddenly become apparent) is a policeman. The creeper is handcuffed and roughed up a bit, by this time a large crowd of cheering people have surrounded the two men. What you would then assume would happen next is that the cop would lead the man away, but apparently in Kenya prisoner privacy is not an issue. The man’s bag is ripped open and torn though by someone who is either an undercover cop or a Good Samaritan. He comes back with what looks like hollow sugar cane. This causes some excitement with the crowd as this seems to be the thing they were looking for. Now he is dragged away from the boat with a crowd of people surrounding him, he is not resisting and doesn’t even look that bothered by the whole thing. His face is peaceful as if this was his plan all along, instead of selling all those drugs to the hapless tourists in Lamu his real plan was to be tackled and dragged away in handcuffs. Now that the entertainment had departed it was time to add another hundred people to the boat and finally to depart for Lamu island.
Chapter 2: The land of donkeys