Day 497 - Stories

I woke up at 6:30 today. It was the first cloudy and 'dreary' day since I arrived here, and when I say cloudy and dreary I just mean that the sun is not blinding you are it rises. It was a beautiful morning. Due to my major withdrawal from human interaction I decided to venture into town. I ended up getting a massage, mediocre but still enjoyable and at $7 for an hour who am I to complain. After walking through the streets and being majorly haggled by street vendors, I hopped on a boda boda to escape. Apparently tourism has not been too good lately, maybe it is off-season, so seeing a Mzungu, foreigner in Swahili, means money. I only bought a ring, mainly due to the fact that I have no clue how much should cost and I only had limited funds on me. I never feel good when I get ripped off, and getting ripped of is what they all had planned for me. This little adventure took up half of my day.

My boda boda driver had two circle scars on his cheeks. I learned that the Masai also have scarification rituals or at least that is how it seemed according to the driver’s words. Very interesting. This will require more research for sure (once I have stable internet access).

I also discovered today that there are poisonous snakes around. I was walking down to the beach as I always do and there it scurried away as I put my foot down. Eek. After that I had to find out if it was poisonous or not in case I ever find myself in another snakes presence.

This is unrelated to my day today, but the snake has got my mind going. Monday, October 1^st, my last day at the AECOM compound I had a life altering experience. I had gone hiking Jebel the day before and we had to trek through extremely tall grass to get to the top.  It was quite ridiculous actually. We lost the trail a million times; it was afternoon so we were sweating buckets. To say the least, this last climb was my least favorite of the three times I have hiked Jebel. Once we reached the top I recovered from the awful climb. It was, as before, so peaceful and one of my favorite ways to experience Juba. While climbing the reality of coming across spiders, snakes, ants and various other insects crossed my mind many times. So back to Monday. I was packing up my room and randomly stopped to scratch my head, only to find something stuck in my hair. I proceed to pull it out of my tangled mess of hair only to find that half way out of my hair it was a tick. A TICK! I had a freak out with the thing still hanging out in my hair. I finally got it out and had another panic about whether I had pulled the head off or not. Thanks to the confirmation from a wise friend in the compound, I pulled it off with the head intact. An awful moment in my life survived and recovered from. Lesson of the story, if one finds a foreign piece of something in their hair and they have been in the wilderness or grass or nature of any sort do not immediately remove. Check before removing. This way, someone else will find the tick and they can remove it instead of you having to do it.  Even telling this story makes me paranoid I have ticks crawling on me… Eww.

Back to Mombasa. I learned that the prison here is considered to be worse than the one in Bangkok, or somewhere in Asia. Apparently the conditions were so poor that the US, Canada, Germany and four other countries got together and built a new wing specifically for jailing pirates. It was said that the conditions of Mombasa’s prison was unfit for the pirates. I thought it was interesting and kind of strange.