Homa Bay

Today we left Nakuru early for another driving day. Polykens took us to his home town, Homa Bay, which is on Lake Victoria. It took 6 hours to get there. We drove through a lot of fertile valleys, part of the Rift Valley. We drove through mile after mile of tea plantations. Mature plants are picked every 17 days, with the same worker always picking the same patch. After the tea plantations were the banana plantations. Sometimes you can see small tent villages. These were the people who were misplaced out of their homes during the post-election violence 2 and a half years ago. Their homes are gone, a lot of them burnt, and they have nowhere to go.

There does seem to be some order to the traffic once you get used to it. There are so many slow slow trucks that you need to overtake. If it is safe to pass, the truck driver will signal left. If it is not safe, he will signal right. Passing is done with little room to spare, or sometimes drivers just make opposite drivers wait, and sometimes you can overtake someone at the same time that they are overtaking. Or 3 or 4 drivers will overtake at once, so you just juggle your way into line. Often the one at the back of the pack will overtake first, so you have to watch behind you as well.

Roundabouts are labelled with town names but no street names are labelled. If you want to know where you are going, you just pull over and ask someone and have a nice conversation while you are at it. People are really polite and friendly with each other for the most part.

We stopped at Kisii and there were other wazungu there. White people are so rare, we really feel like we stick out, so you have to talk when you see another one, no matter where they are from. Today Anton was wearing his "mzungu" t-shirt which shows a white man wearing safari clothing and a pack and looking at a map. When people see a mzungu, they stare or greet us. Anton was driving today and other drivers kept honking at him, just because he was white. Today some girls were taking pictures of us wazungu. We are a tourist attraction.

When we got to Homa Bay, Poly wanted to take us to Ruma Conservation area, but it took 20 minutes to go 3 km because the road was so bad. When we found out there were 6 more km to go, we turned around. Foiled by the roads, again.

We instead went right down to what used to be a pier on the lake, and Poly was amazed to see the whole bay covered in some sort of plant. The locals call it papyrus and blame it on the Nile. But it isn't papyrus, it's more like a lily that has gone mad. The locals said the wind had blown it in this morning and would blow it out again tonight. It was preventing any boats from coming or going.

After awhile on the pier, we attracted a little group of watoto (children) who followed us about ("How are you? How are you?") and we walked through a group of stalls where people had hung leftovers from the fish factory to dry. The factory takes what they want and dumps the rest of the fish out back in a huge pile. Then the people race to load up their wagons with fish and then run to their stall to dump it, where someone else is waiting to hang it. Then they race their wagons back for another load. Once the remnants are dry, they can either be cooked for eating or selling, or be used to feed livestock.

Poly thought it would be a good idea if we could tour the fish plant, so we headed that way. Security was extremely tight, it took 10 minutes before they allowed us past the door. Then we were made to sit in a pavilion to wait until the manager was ready. After 20 minutes of waiting, we were shown into the manager's office. He turned out to be from Israel and we learned that most of the fish there is shipped to Israel. He was very busy so we left. We went back to the pier, sat and watched some naked boys playing in the reedy lake, and then watched a beautiful sunset over Lake Victoria. The reeds were really moving at this point.

Dinner was excellent at our hotel, called Hippo Buck Hotel. This is probably the nicest hotel we've stayed at, it is new and clean. When we returned to our room they had put fancy covers on the bed for us, left us some tea, and there were a few geckos running around to keep us company.
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