#kiwayu

Hallå från Kenya! (That means "Hello from Kenya!" in Swedish. Cause this is a classy blog, with different languages and stuff.)

Tuesday afternoon, we returned from our three day dhow excursion to Kiwayu, a small island just off the coast of Kenya. It was a fun little trip, really more of a vacation than anything - all we did was chill on the boat, chill on the beach, play soccer, snorkel, read, and sleep. Not a bad way to spend three days, right? 

Chilling on the dhow.

I'll dive a little deeper into what we did below. First though, here's a link to a map I made that details our route. We sailed (and by sailed, I mean we used the motor until we ran out of gas, then we sailed) about 40 miles in total, and it was 8 hours each way. That's right nerds smart mathematician readers, we were doing an average of 5MPH. I could have jogged and gotten there faster. No worries though - I plowed through like 200 pages of my book (I'll be talking about that later). 

Our little camping spot on the west side of the island.

After our long boat ride, we reached the island in the later afternoon, and immediately headed across the island to a massive, gorgeous, and empty white sand beach. Kiwayu has a population of just a few hundred people, so we had this huge beach all to ourselves. We swam for a bit before the girls took off on their own (for a description of that mess, check out Carly's blog), and we pulled out the soccer ball to screw around with. Some locals showed up eventually, and we enjoyed a little pickup game (we lost 5-3, which ain't bad for 5 tired Americans). Eventually, we headed back, rocked an awesome sunset, ate, and slept.

The next day, we woke up (too) early for a little snorkeling excursion on the east side of the island (the Indian Ocean side - BRING IT SOMALI PIRATES). We had a blast and saw some pretty sick fish, and tired ourselves out good enough to do jack-diddly for the rest of the day. I'm OK with it. 

The next day, we were up early (don't really know why - we didn't leave for like two hours), and left the island. Eight (EIGHT) hours later, we pulled into the Lamu port, and we were all wrapped up. Gotta say, it was a very relaxing trip.

Before I go, a few logistical details. First, the shared Flickr account I wrote about a couple of weeks ago appears to have been a failed experiment - long story short, Yahoo! makes it extraordinarily hard to share an account, so we'll have to either find a different solution or abandon our plans for shared photo awesomeness. Second, sorry my posts have been sparse over the past few weeks - I know it's cliche for a amateur blogger to apologize for rare posts, but in this case I think it's warranted. I know there are a lot of you who care deeply for myself and for the students I'm sharing this experience with, so I'll do my best to keep things more up-to-date. Hopefully posting will return to normal (i.e. more than once a week) when we get back to Mombasa this weekend. 

So, kwa heri for now - I'll post soon about Mawlid, a major Islamic holiday that Lamunians go crazy for. Hope all is well stateside!