Mombasa: Day Two

After two weeks of drinking chai tea, M demanded coffee first thing on Saturday morning. There’s no Kenyan equivalent of Starbucks that we’ve found so far and the concept of “to go cups” is also foreign so we took a seat at a little café for some coffee and pastries.

After the coffee pit stop, we continued to walk until we came to Kongowea, a giant, open-air, second-hand clothing market. There were hundreds of small shops crammed into the area, each selling clothes imported from Canada, the US, and sometimes though rarely, Europe. Second-hand clothes are big business in Kenya and you see evidence of this daily as shirts and hats of American sports teams float by on the street. Apparently post-Superbowl, we’ll see the losing team’s merchandise everywhere according to a local friend. Our favorite so far has been the “Cleveland recycles” shirt we saw last week. Do you think the previous owner knows how recycled that shirt would become?

The owners of the stalls in Kongowea buy clothes by the kilo and typically specialize in one item such as shirts or pants. The upside for us is that all the clothes are in American sizes and I’ve picked up a few skirts and shirts along the way. Other than tourist places, I haven’t seen a single store selling new clothing though I’m sure they exist in certain areas.

We didn’t linger at Kongowea since it’s notorious for pick-pocketing and so we hopped a matatu to Fort Jesus in Old Town Mombasa [that's the flag on top of the fort in the first photo]. Fort Jesus was built by the Portuguese in the late 1500s and then proceeded to change hands a bunch of times.



It is on a gorgeous point of land at the mouth of the harbor. It’s built on coral bedrock so in addition to the fort built above there are rooms and staircases carved into the coral below.





After exploring the fort for a while, we strolled through Old Town which is full of small twisting streets with glimpses of the water if you look down the correct alleys. As previously mentioned, Mombasa is a port city with a very diverse history. At points on our walk, it seemed that we could have been walking through Mumbai, Riyadh, or Nairobi as the neighborhoods shifted ethnically, religiously, and culturally.

We are starting to get the hang of which greetings to use for which people. “Salaama” is said between Muslim Kenyans (who may be ethnically African, Indian, Middle-Eastern or “Arab” as they say here) and is a borrowed word from Arabic (as many Swahili words are). It is currently pretty easy to identify the Muslim Kenyans because the women are veiled and the men wear circular caps; this may change at least for the men after Ramadan. To a non-Muslim Kenyan, you use “Habari” which means “news” in Swahili; “Jambo” is really reserved for tourists. Everyone seems delighted when mzungus make the effort to speak Swahili so we try to use the correct words whenever possible.

We passed several mosques, a Jain temple, and the dhow registration office before making it to our final destination, the spice market. As you can imagine, the spice market is an olfactory delight with bin after bin of freshly ground spices, chilis, peppers, and vegetables used in the Indian-Arab-Swahili fusion that is Mombasa’s cuisine. After a few minutes of haggling, M bought some tea masala (which is currently sipping in his chai as I write this) with the fresh blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, and black pepper.

Since the sky was now threatening rain, we hoofed it back to the ferry and started the journey home. It was a successful first foray into Mombasa especially braving the Ferry by ourselves so we celebrated by going to bed early and going for a long run this morning. Yes, we know we’re in our 20s and not our 60s but believe us, it’s exhausting being foreign all the time! You should come visit if you’d like to find out.