Travel

Dreaming Places ~ From Shropshire To Lamu And All In A Day

One of Bishop’s Castle’s pioneering eco-homes

Today, as July winds down, we have a summer’s day. Only the third in a month of coolness and cloud. Sunlight floods the house front. Warmth even. No trace of the wind that has dogged us for much of the year. Stillness then. The soundscape, resonant, a part-song of church bells, bee hum and pigeon chorale.

There’s a sense of bliss.

And where does my mind go?

Why, off to Kenya’s Indian Ocean island of Lamu – a trip made decades ago and at Christmas too.

The harbour at Lamu’s Stone Town

Perhaps our recent spell of autumn-in-summer weather is seasonally disorienting me, although in mitigation, December in Lamu is the hot season, their summer; though rather hotter and steamier than ours.

But in the full-on Shropshire sunshine, the mind plays tricks. Meanders. Perhaps there’s another trigger to this farflung mental safari.

I soon spot it. Back in the days of the Lamu trip we lived in Nairobi, on one of Lavington’s tree-lined avenues of Jacarandas and flame trees and clipped grass frontages. (Strangely, I discovered later, I have ancestors named Lavington).

At nearly 6,000 feet, the climate there is mostly benign – a subtropical highland climate. In June and July the temperatures might drop as low as 48F (9C), and in December to March reach the upper 70s and low 80s F. The finest days there always had us thinking of perfect English summers (big skies and heat-hazy lawns), the sort from village fetes and school sports days.

Summers back then seemed, well, more summery.

And then amid my mind’s eye ramble arrives the Lens-Artists’ theme for the week: balconies. And so, by winding paths, I come to Lamu.

Stone Town – it is now a World Heritage Site. The surviving 18th century merchants’ homes, finely built of coral rag, are evidence of a once thriving city state, one of several Swahili towns and cities along the East African seaboard, stretching from Somalia to Mozambique. These settlements have origins back in the 8th and 9th centuries – the people who lived in them, their language, their culture born (literally) from a thousand and more years’ congress between Arab traders and indigenous African communities.

The goods once traded out – ivory, leopard skins, tortoise shell, gold, mangrove poles (boriti) and slaves. The goods traded in – silks, porcelain, fine carved treasure chests, brass ware, jewellery and dates. In short this is Sinbad territory (Sendibada in KiSwahili stories). He doubtless plied the seas off East Africa; out from the Persian Gulf, the monsoon kaskazi bearing him south; and, after many hair-raising encounters, the kusi winds blowing him home again to Basra.

I’ve written more about this at Quayside Lamu. And about the Swahili HERE.

But now for more balconies. Those perfect places for dreaming. For today, bathed in unaccustomed warmth, I surely am dreaming.

Lamu donkey sanctuary. Donkeys are a key mode of transport on the island

Sundowner look-out over Shela village, Lamu

Lens-Artists: Balconies This week PR at Flights of the Soul sets the theme. Follow the link for a fine gallery of balconies.

Looking Back ~ Moving Forward: From The Kenya Archive

I’m not sure that we’ll ever quite get over leaving Kenya, though it was never our homeland and, by 2000, when we left, our business there was done. But we had lived in Nairobi for seven years, seen many changes as Kenya moved uneasily from one-party rule towards multi-partyism: one externally imposed and alien structure to be replaced by another alien structure, this for a nation of many diverse communities that for centuries had each their own forms of traditional law and order, far closer, I might argue, to any form of democracy that the nations of the technocratic North might think they have invented or progressed towards.

And the reason we were there at all was because Graham (as plant pathologist and food storage specialist) was working on a British Government funded crop protection project, working alongside Kenyan scientists and subsistence farmers in a bid to build in-the-field resilience against crop pests and diseases.

The project base was at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) in Nairobi, but in the early days we did much travelling on the Mombasa highway, going back and forth between the capital and KARI’s Kiboko field station in Ukambani. Sometimes we drove the full 300 odd miles to Mombasa, sometimes less far to the Taita Hills. Mostly, though, it was the hundred mile trip that took us from the Nairobi plains at nearly 6,000 feet, down to the semi-arid lowland just north of Makindu and the Tsavo National Parks.

Ukambani, homeland of Akamba farmers and cattle keepers, is red earth, thorn-scrub country. You start to see mighty baobabs growing here too. They rise up in a natural parkland setting that you feel you must have imagined. Giant hornbills stalk around the verges. The farther vistas, heat-hazy towards the Yatta Plateau, may be dotted red from the shukas of Maasai as they fan out with their herds across the sparse grassland. You may also spot antelope and giraffe here too. For in Kenya it is said there is more wild game outside the huge national parks than inside them. Sometimes the great trucks that plied the highway back then would collide with a giraffe, thereby providing an unexpected meat meal for nearby farming families.

Mombasa highway at Kiboko looking north – Nairobi-bound

The giraffe in the header photo were spotted on the Kapiti Plains, south of Nairobi. We used to see ostrich, impala and gazelle on the roadside here too. But the sight of several giraffe moving across the plains, the peculiar gait that has them stepping in some shared slow rhythm all their own stopped the heart.

We were so very lucky to see such sights. Even now there’s a catch in my breath.

#SquaresRenew

Off-Centre In Lamu

Once, a long time ago when we were living in Kenya, we spent Christmas on Lamu Island. I wrote about our brief stay HERE. It seemed like a dream when we were there. And here in this photo (posted a few times before) Mzee Lali, dhow captain, also dreams, the late-day breeze bearing us along the Manda Strait back to Shela village.

Stone Town: a World Heritage site

Shela Beach above, and Shela Village below. Donkeys were ‘parked’ under the thorn tree until needed for transport.

Crossing Manda Strait to the air field in a sudden squall

Lens-Artists: Asymmetry This week Donna sets the theme and shows us how asymmetrical framing can give compositions a different kind of balance.

Nice Symmetry ~ Symmetrically Nice

A flight of fancy was needed on this drizzly Shropshire day. So why not skip off to Nice for some dreaming Cote d’Azur light. And (somewhat loosely interpreted) take up Sofia’s this week’s challenge at Lens-Artists to look for all manner of things symmetrical.

The Promenade des Anges beside the glimmering Mediterranean seems a good place to start – glorious under the sun even in late October. And what could be more cheering than an azure avenue of beach brollies…

…glamorous by night:

…vibrant in its old town streetscapes, markets, palaces, churches, museums….even a sudden cloudburst doesn’t dampen its spirits…

and when the sun comes out again…oh, that light, shades of Matisse, Chagall, Dufy…

…and then it’s back to the beach for some symmetrical sunbathing:

Lens-Artists: Symmetry This week Sofia shows us many exquisite examples of symmetry. Please visit her blog and be inspired!

Across The Gulf ~ Mirage Or Mountains?

I’m still not sure if the Taygetus mountains of the Mani Peninsula are fact or figment, and I stared at this view for an entire week – at daybreak, at twilight, in sun and in storm. Real or not, these mountains beckoned. And I was entranced. Still am, when I look at the photos. They were taken from Harakopio (Peroulia Beach) in Kalamata, Greece, overlooking the Gulf of Messenia.

I’ve read my Patrick Leigh Fermor (Mani: Travel in the Southern Peloponnese) which sets off most beguilingly, penetrating on foot this all but impenetrable mountain peninsula (that until recent times scarcely had a road into the interior), but then, after some stunning episodes, the account digresses into convoluted regional history that this reader found more uphill-going than the near-vertical terrain. Still, it’s a book worth tackling for the magical inside-Mani experiences. It truly is.

But if the mountains have long kept people out, then it’s a different story for the coastal foothills. Some settlements along the shore, accessible only by sea, have been occupied since Mycenaean times, i.e. the Ancient Greek Bronze Age (c1750-1000 BCE). If you squint, you can see signs of humanity in the first photo.

But that’s enough of the prosaic. These scenes are just for dreaming.

Lens-Artists: the mountains are calling This week Amy sets the challenge.

Up The Creek In Dubai

We had a brief stay in Dubai while we were living in Kenya. We needed a break from a long spate of El Nino rains. The stop-overs in UEA bookended a sunny week on a small island in the Maldives, but when we flew into Dubai, it was lowering skies and big puddles on the runway. Not at all what we expected. The nights were chilly too and very windy, the beachside palm trees swaddled in sacking. We did have a couple of fine days, though, as this very fine sunset on the Creek shows.

You can just make out the dhows moored along the further shore. (And in the bottom right corner, the woman who had come specially to feed the gulls). I bet the Dubai skyline looks nothing like this now. There was a frenzy of construction going on when we were there in the late ‘90s. It is a city state endlessly in motion, constantly reinventing itself. I’m wondering, though, if the dhow trade is still as vibrant as it was when we were there. We saw cars, trucks, refrigerators, car parts, sink units and all sorts being loaded for onward Indian Ocean destinations – a far cry from the days when the Creek was nothing but a fishing village, and the local lads made a living pearl diving. The way things change.

Lens-Artists: motion This week Patti wants us to feature movement.

Once In Kalamata

A few Septembers ago we had a family trip to Kalamata on the Peloponnese. I had not been to Greece before, and it was love at first sight – from the moment we left the airport. There had been a fierce summer that year with no rain and the earth looked parched. I don’t know what it was that spoke to me most – the rugged stony uplands, the everywhere-colonies of feathery phragmites reeds, the wild cyclamen, household clutter around the homesteads and olive groves, the olive groves themselves, the country lanes and then the views of the Taygetos Mountains across the Messinian Gulf. The only downside for us, though quite the opposite for the locals, we brought the rain on our heels, so there are stormy skies as well as china blue ones. It anyway seems like a dream now.

Past Squares #13

Life in Colour: Orange

Once In Nice…Of Past Pleasures

“For me, a stained glass window represents the transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world. Stained glass is exhilarating, it needs gravity, passion. It has to live through the perceived light.” Marc Chagall

Today Becky’s lovely blue gallery reminded me of the photos I’d taken of Marc Chagall’s stained glass – this on a long-ago stay in Nice. The window is in the auditorium of the Musee National Marc Chagall, which has to be one of the finest little galleries in the world: the setting, the building and the art fusing in dreamy synergy that captures the humanity, joyousness, and all round good spirits of Marc Chagall. He was a man who created in all media. He saw his work “not the dream of one people but of all humanity”.

And then there is his use of colour. Picasso probably has the last word on that: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Past Squares #9

How Elephants Hide In Bushes

These elephant photos were taken in the very special community sanctuary of Mwalunganje near the South Kenya coast. It was set up in the 1990s to ensure the future of an important migration route from the Shimba Hills to Tsavo East National Park AND as means to provide compensation to 300 smallholder farmers whose crops were being destroyed by the herds. The farmers retained ownership of the land in the form of shares, and many of them took up posts running the sanctuary as a tourist attraction. The project continues to be run (or at least it was still going last year) with the support of the Kenya Forest and Wildlife Services and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. (More photos at this link).

The Mwalunganje sanctuary is extraordinary terrain, a remnant Jurassic Forest survivor that still supports many cycads. They look like small palm trees and, as living survivors from a 200 million year old forest, are a seriously endangered species.

Mwalunganje Hill is also a sacred place for the local Duruma people. Here there is kaya, a palisaded space where traditional rites are performed by the elders. On the day when we went to look for it there was a tree blocking the trail – frustrating for a nosy mzungu, but then I thought, ‘quite right too. You have not been invited there.’

There’s more about the sanctuary HERE

A Very Big Zambian Baobab

Zambia is a country blessed with some magnificent trees and miombo woodland that makes for parkland like landscapes. This particular tree is in South Luangwa National Park, one of the world’s wildlife treasure spots. (Do not believe the tales that Africa has no wildlife left. It is absolutely untrue.)

Here is more of the tree that wouldn’t fit in the square. The damage on the lower trunk is probably due to elephants and/or other other grazers:

Tree Square #30

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge