The train to Mombasa

Oh, wow. This was an adventure and I'm just beginning to recover from it. We took the train around a month ago from Nairobi to Mombasa, thinking it'd be romantic and adventurous. We were wrong.  It was pretty hellish and resulted in some sort of food-borne pathogen and 32 hours of sweaty, claustrophobic, hungry discomfort. However, I can now look at the pictures without a full-body cringe and discovered that there were actually some fun moments and a little adventure (besides the train taking 32 hours instead of 13). Please note that we still do not recommend the train under any circumstance.

I've discovered "Stoney Tangawizi", a popular soda drink here. I have no idea what flavor it is, but it tastes sharply gingery. I like it. This is our train compartment, I'm sitting on the lower bunk and there is an upper bunk that Nathan slept on. 

Dinner was really, really bad. Even the novelty of eating on a train did not make up for it. Mushy bland rice, canned vegetables in salt sauce, preceded by a clear flavorless snot-textured soup and followed by about 4 tiny cubes of mushy fruit. Disappointing. 

Usually the train travels through the night, arriving the next morning between 8 am and 10 am. This means that the many tiny dusty towns that the train passes through see the train in the wee hours of the night, however due to the delays, the train passed through the towns during daylight. This was an endless source of entertainment for the children, who would run towards the train, waving wildly, shouting "sweets!" 

It was entertaining for a while but we had no sweets to give out. Nathan played guitar for hours at one end of the car, I read a book. 

Many of the towns looked like this. 

I'm pleased I was able to capture this picture while the train ambled by at about 7 mph. This is a bunch of village women collecting water from a 'well'. The well is basically a pit dug into the ground that collects muddy spring water. I'm guessing it's one of the villages only sources of water. People bike and walk from kilometers away with plastic jerry cans (which are ubiquitous here) to fill them up with the muddy water. It's hard work. Many of the villages that Nathan's organization's partners work with use the same system to collect water, which is used for drinking, bathing, and cooking. The organizations try to find alternate, cleaner water sources, like drilling boreholes, collecting rainwater, or installing rudimentary filtration devices.

I promise the next entry will have cute animal pictures and be more cheerful! 

Revisiting Pho, and returning to Narok

We're finally back at home with our intestines in shambles and our spirits slightly exhausted. Due to our shaky health, we've been eating a lot of soup- and I've been craving (and thus making) lots of pho. I made it back in spring for the first time (entirely from scratch) and have 'perfected' and simplified the recipe here in Kenya. Making chicken broth from scratch is noble and tasty but takes a lot of effort- particularly because it's hard to find happy, free-range chickens here (unless you kill them yourself).

I make a quick broth of chopped garlic, ginger, onion, a sprinkle of peppercorns, a cinnamon stick, a star anise clove, a dash of cardamom and some cloves. After about an hour of simmering, I strain the broth, add some more water and a couple cubes of vegetable or organic chicken bouillon. It smells amazing! Then I add some carrots, mushrooms (on the rare occasion that we find them in our local grocery store), rice noodles, sugar snap peas (or whatever other suitable veggies we have on hand) and serve topped with cilantro and lots of lime juice. It takes about 10 minutes of prep time and is delicious.

I should say, it takes 10 minutes of prep time if you aren't fancy. But a few weeks ago, Nathan cooked dinner (!! I know!) and the spirit moved him to cut the carrots into fancy flower shapes. It was the cutest thing and I loved it- ever since, I've become a bit of a carrot snob and have taken to flowering my carrots too. Because why not? We all need fancy carrots in our lives on occasion!

In other news, Nathan went fish-tastic at our little cottage last week. He bought a fresh reef fish nearly every day from a local fisherman and prepared it by steaming in foil with limes, or BBQ'ing it, local style. We're planning to go back to the same place over the holidays and I know he is looking forward to more fish BBQ.

He is holding the fish in a little BBQ trap doodad. I can't remember the kiSwahili word for it. 

The trap doodad with fish pinned in it. 

The imprisoned fish is then placed on a charcoal BBQ stove thing called a "Jiko". Most families cook over this for every meal (they balance a pot on the top). There are gigantic bags of homemade charcoal sold on the side of every road. It's unfortunate that there aren't many cooking options, because the homemade charcoal is made from local trees- and has contributed to huge problems with deforestation. 

 The cooked fish. 

A Mombasan parasite?

Ok, so I'm not as paranoid as Nathan but I do think we caught some sort of nasty bug a few weeks ago.

Thinking back, there have many opportunities to acquire some new germs.

First, several weeks ago we took the train from Nairobi to Mombasa. I can confidently state, without reservation, that Nathan and I wholeheartedly recommend AGAINST the Nairobi train.

It. Was. MISERABLE. Taking an overnight train was on my life list, but this was NOT worth it... not only was the food appallingly bad (gristly meat, greasy/soggy instant rice, tasteless/colorless soup and dry white bread), but it was 18 hours late. EIGHTEEN. It was supposed to arrive in Mombasa at about 8 am and did not arrive until the next day at 2 am. Not cool. I could continue moaning but both of us are somewhat scarred from the experience and not quite ready to relive it.

So we could have got the food poisoning/mysterious parasite while festering in the grimy heat of the train.

It could have been the smattering of questionable-to-definitively-grungy restaurants we ate at while in Mombasa (there was a particularly grimy Ethiopian cafe that, in retrospect, was actually just a really bad idea to eat at. Why did we eat there, Nathan?). There was the tamarind juice that was kindly shared with us by a neighbor of the apartment that we rented. Pretty sure the water used to make the juice wasn't bottled.

I bring all this up to explain my absence over the last two weeks. We got really sick. It was less than fun. While we did enjoy poking around Old Town Mombasa and I achieved my goal of finding a ton of vanilla beans, it was a challenging week. We decided to take the last week of our trip to recuperate on the beach, and have been thrilled with that decision.

We are staying at Tiwi Beach in some cute self-catering cottages. We bought some bread, veggies, fruit, cheese and milk in Mombasa and have holed up here. It's gorgeous. The water is beautiful, though the snorkeling leaves a bit to be desired. Local fishermen provide us with fresh fish every day, and a lady comes by selling veggie samosas and these fried dough chunks (mandazi) that Nathan loves to gorge on. We've bought local tropical fruit and have been eating simple, healthy, parasite-bashing meals.

We're feeling better, though not 100% yet. We have to face the train for the trip home in a few days and there is a ball of dread in the pit of our stomach weighing down our exhausted little bellies. (And by little, I mean that we both lost at least 5-8 lbs over the last week or two.)

Anyways. Since I'm feeling a touch better, I thought I'd post an update and share our breakfast from this morning. Pancakes with fresh pineapple chunks* caramelized in passionfruit juice, plus a coconut.

I'm including multiple pictures of our breakfast because I am feeling arty and want to show off how close to the ocean our little cottage is. 

We also made juice recently from a bunch of mandarins, oranges and passionfruit.

*Strangely, I am allergic to fresh pineapple but not if it is sauteed or cooked. Weird, huh?