Adventures on the Banks of Lake Victoria

I'm slowly building up a bank of stories from trip by writing a diary everyday but as you can probably imagine, spending that amount of time everyday blogging would kind of defeat the purpose of the trip! So anyway, since my last post, I'll just quickly run through some the highlights:

After a long day walking around Nairobi with Ieuen and one of the guys who tried to sell me a safari on the first day - turned out to be a pretty ok guy, and good guide!

That evening I got the overnight bus to a small town called Homa Bay - the most terrifying trip of my life!! I don't know if the fact that we left an hour late made the driver feel he had to compensate by going twice as fast, but I didn't sleep at all. Adding to the threat of death and general discomfort of the journey were the facts that: I had no seatbelt, the guy next to me was slightly obese and drooling on me, I only had a shirt and pair of shorts which made it very cold, I was suffering from spontaneous, chronic nose bleeds (my black sock came in handy in the absence of any tissue paper) and finally the constant stopping and starting for road blocks and trenches across the road. So all this made for a pretty crappy journey. At the final bus stop we all got off and I got a piki piki (motorbike) taxi to a couple of different "hotels" till I found one that fit the budget.

Anyway it turned out that the prime minister of kenya was stopping by that town on that day to deliver some very important speech. So I just dropped by bag and went for a stroll around the town. Nothing much to see really apart from the lake, but even that sight was slightly spoiled by the hundreds of snotty nosed kids shouting "Mzungu, How are you?"

Didn't get to see the PM in the end.. The crowds were so huge that the police HAD to beat them back with thier batons. Given the Kenyan police's reputation for crowd control (usually involving a firearm), I decided it was best not to stay.

I chatted to a couple of people who, seeing my apparent boredom, suggested that I take a Matatu (minibus) to the next town 20kms away called Mbita. Given my experience so far with Kenyan buses, I decided to look into the option of going by boat. Apparently they only go in the afternoon and I'd payed for the night in Homa Bay, so I might as well stay until the next day, resolved to climb the big hill around the town the next morning. 

So the next day I woke up late, ate some lunch (cheaper than the previous day as they forgot to charge me the Mzungu price). Then set off for the hill, stopping by the supermarket to buy some water - where i met two guys who looked about my age, who insisted on showing me the way. Suspicious at first, I led them round town a bit chatting to them. When I was convinced they didn't want to kill or rob me, we set off. Got some good views...

Then it was back down to check on the boat situation - now apparently they only go every 3 days and today was not one of them! So on the insistence of the two guys (Alex and William) I went to stay at their place - they were rich apparently because their dad was a Bishop. The fact that I was an atheist didn't seem to deter them. If anything I became their little conversion project. It became a bit awkward the twentieth time they asked me if I had any connection to rich donors who I could link to their orphanage. 

Anyway I slept well and the next morning I went with Alex to Mbita in a packed corola stationwagon - 10 people including the driver! Thankfully this particular road was so terrible that we never got above 40km/h and it ended up taking almost 2hrs for the 20 something kilometer journey.   

So I'm going to stay a night or two here in Mbita, then see if I can get the biggish ferry to one of the bigger cities in Kenya - Kisumu...