Dropped Off
Today, we had a fun little exercise called the “drop off”. Basically, we were put into pairs, given a location in Mombasa, and told to go there. Simple enough, right?
Wrong. Or, at least that’s what I thought. Here’s what went down.
Public transportation in Mombasa basically consists of “mutatus” (small buses or vans) and tuk tuks (think motorized rickshaws). The tuk tuks are like taxis, in that you tell them a location, work out a price, then you’re on your way. Mutatus basically run back and forth between two locations (usually a central part of town, like the post office, to an outlying area), the names of which are printed on the side of the doors. Tuk tuks go for shorter distances, costing ~50 Kenyan Shillings (KSH) per trip ($1.00 = 80KSH) depending on the distance. Mutatus cost roughly 20-30KSH per trip, and carry usually 12-14 people in each van.
Inside a mutatu, at a gas station
So, basically, we had to reach an area on the outskirts of Mombasa using tuk tuks, mutatus, and any help we can find from bystanders. No big deal.
Me and my partner, Cheickna (a student from Pomona in California), left the SIT house in Old Town, walked down the street a bit, and decided to ask a street vendor that we’d joked around with, Mbeza, if he knew how to get to the “Akamba Carvings”, our target location. Mbeza speaks very good English, but in a very soft and at times unintelligibly raspy voice. It took some patience, but eventually he told us exactly what to tell the tuk tuk driver, and what mutatu to take, and where to get off. We flagged down a tuk tuk and were on our way.
It was shockingly easy. The tuk tuk driver pointed at a mutatu for us to get on, the mutatu conductor (the dude who takes your money) stopped right at Akamba, and half an hour later, we were done.
Cheickna in the Akamba art market, next to a monkey.
Akamba turned out to be an art depot - basically, all of the wood carvings (which are all pretty beautiful) are made by members of the Akamba tribe, and each worker is paid when one of his/her carvings is sold. It was pretty stunning at what you got for $5-10 - some of these carvings probably could have been sold for 3-4x their price in the US. We snagged a carving of a mask and a giraffe’s head as gifts.
So, great day - we got to see some of the city, explore a bit, and get a little more settled into our new home.
P.S. A ton of emails were sent out over the past few days to friends and family linking to this blog, so I just wanted to to say “Hamjambo!” to all those keeping up with me over here! Thanks for reading.
