A candle and a laptop

 Just coming back from Mombasa, from a working meeting in a lovely and very comfortable hotel. Like one of the participants described, perhaps too nice for a meeting since there was so much to miss being in a air-conditioning room the whole day just feeling the sea breeze between coffee breaks!

Sad to see so many hotels and tourist places empty. It is low season (rainy season), and the global economic crisis (as well as the last year problems in the country) does not help.

From the work point of view , great to meet so many colleagues and get so much done in such a short time. It does help to meet people face to face and clarify pendent issues that otherwise can take weeks to be answered or resolved…Hope the momentum will last to get some more necessary feedback soon.

From the personal point of view, great to meet two old friends while waiting for the flight connections at the Nairobi airport and update the gossip…

From the tourist point of view there was just enough time to do short a sea safari over the coral reefs and a brief overview of old Mombasa and Fort Jesus (build by the Portuguese in the 16th century) before going to the airport.

The sea safari was amazing with what they called another type of sea cucumbers (one I have never seen before, that releases dark purple ink when is disturbed) but a quit Google search indicated more to be a sea hare (http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=seahatac). The anemone with small and very cute back and white fish protected within its ‘arms’. The colorful starfishes and brittle stars and the crabs with fur. The apparently poisonous sea urchins with small rounded small bodies and quite long and sharp dark spines. The most difficult part was to walk with our naked feet within the dark and dense seaweeds without seeing where we were stepping our feet in and having the guides removing some of these poisonous specimens a few cm from our route (and telling us how painful was the prickle from one of those needles and how expensive was the medical treatment to alleviate it)…I had a feeling that perhaps they were exaggerating a bit so that we would feel like paying them a good tip at the end for their safe ‘guidance ’, but who knows…

Fort Jesus was impressive (www.museums.or.ke), build over meters of solid hard coral reefs and nicely facing one of the sea sides of Mombasa Island. The small museum inside the Fort has beautiful Chinese porcelain pieces collected from the bottom of the shore from old shipwrecks from those times. Old cycads and baobab trees with more than 700 years old that were amazingly preserved  since those old times until now (some people luckily already worried about preserving plant genetic resources that long ago).

Interesting to see the new recent trends with the airport road of Mombasa being renamed Barack Obama Rd, the Obama strawberry flavored bubble gum promotional campaign in town and the Obama Kikoy (traditional piece of cloth usually used by women wrapped around the waist with the Obama face printed with the map of Africa) walking around the busy streets…