Lamu Day Three

My tail and I decided to visit Matandoni, which is another town on Lamu island. I saw someone with a basket the day before and asked where it came from and my tail told me ‘Matandoni, I can take you’. I don’t know how many other towns there are in this area, so when he suggested we go there, I thought why not. I asked how far it was, and like a true village person, he said not far.
We met at eight in the morning, had breakfast and then set off.
My leg was still acting up from the walk to the beach the day before, so along the way I asked about hiring a donkey, but we couldn’t find any to take us. So we walked. I turned into Grumpy Smurf, as our ‘not far’ turned out to be quite a distance, which I should have realized it would. My map said that Matandoni was about 6 km away. 6km, I figured was a little bit more than the Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain, where I occasionally exercised. It seemed easily do-able. What the guidebook neglected to say is that it was 6 km through sand and under blazing midday sun. There was no road – why did I even think there would be? So even though the walk was across fairly flat land it was torture for me. My hip felt like it had fallen out of place.
While we were walking I was so bad humoured that all the while I grumbled to myself ‘why didn’t I just go to the beach’, ‘what the hell are we supposed to see in Matandoni anyway’, I wondered if our long walk would even be worth the effort.
Eventually after about two and a half hours we arrived there. Gitau (my tail) informed someone in the village what we were there to do and they led us through some streets and put us to sit in a shed with some baskets and left us. We waited for a long time, watching some children play just outside the shed. Finally an old man came to greet us in broken English. “You are great man, you are chief of village, you are happy to meet woman” I realized he had confused you with I. He was a very pleasant man, very happy to meet us, and of course realizing that I was about to leave some money in the village even happier.
We sat and negotiated, and the old man wheeled and dealed until I left 1,000 shillings with him, in exchange for which I had some baskets and a mat. Somehow I left feeling that I had been taken advantage of. Maybe I wasn’t, but after walking two and a half hours, you assume that you’re going to get some bargains, which I didn’t. The price of the baskets and mats was only fair. I had gotten better prices in Tanzania. I was wondering how on earth I was going to be able to make this into a good business deal. Oh well.
Now how would we get out of that God forsaken place? We had walked so far and there was not even a beach at the end of all that. They had a mud beach, not even black sand, gooey mud with tiny crabs. The tide was out so far that the boats were left stuck in the mud. Our options of getting out were not easy. Could we hire a donkey I asked? No one wanted to send their donkey, because how would it get back? What about a dhow? Our helpful translator, who had appeared with the old man, said in an American accent. ‘We ken get one fiy you for about 1500 shillings (about US$20), okay?’ He had to be crazy. Now I started to get upset. I didn’t want to walk back. Fifteen hundred shillings was actually a lot of money here – three nights accommodation. Possibly the bus fare to Nairobi etc. I didn’t want to squander it on taking a dhow back to the other side of the island. Besides I felt I was being taken advantage of again. Nobody here would spend that kind of money to go anywhere. Why should I? Now of course that I put things into perspective and think that my taxi from JFK to my aunt’s apartment in Manhattan costed $50, I guess 20 doesn’t sound so bad, but it’s the principle of exploitation that upsets me, not the actual cost. Our accented guide started to realize how unhappy I was, because I kept muttering to Gitau about how bad the prices were, and we had walked so far etc. etc. so said ‘Never mind, we gonna do some good business, we gonna work something out!’ He put us to sit on a bench and went off to look for a dhow captain to ferry us back. Gitau and I sat and waited, in our boredom we took a few pictures of ourselves, of some children, and we waited. Eventually somebody came back and picked up my bag and told us to follow him. Our guy appeared just behind and said ‘I got one for 400, s’okay?’ Well I guess I could work with that. But that of course just reinforced (at least in my mind) that I was being exploited.
So we walked to the boat.
The dhow journey back, made up for all my bad humour for the entire day. It was a peaceful, quiet sailing trip, about 30 - 40 minutes to a point where the ferries leave for Lamu. The dhow is similar to the pirogue – a simple fishing boat with a large diamond shaped sail. Some dhows have engines, ours did not. We sailed through the mangroves, sometimes with too little wind, sometimes with too much and the wind would fill the sails and cause the boat to almost tip over. I can actually swim okay, my only worry was that if the boat tipped, my camera would go into the water and I would lose – yet again precious photographs. I didn’t even worry about crocodiles, but I didn’t think there were any. They left us at the ferry, after which we took a normal priced ride (50 Ksh) back to Lamu.