Thursday, January 16, 2014

Country Girl and Boy Visit the City

Today my bride of 47 years and I took a spur of the moment jaunt to the city of Kisumu.  Kisumu is the third largest city in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa.  It’s on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria which is the second largest lake in the world and straddles the borders separating Kenya from Uganda and Tanzania.  Only Lake Superior is bigger.  Once we alighted from the bus in this thriving metropolis we walked about a mile along Jomo Kenyata Avenue, kiosk and vendors lining the whole route, turned right on Oginga Odinga Avenue, passed through the downtown commercial area, and headed straight for the lake just a few hundred yards away.

We had a yearning for fresh Lake Victoria tilapia.  And, we wanted to experience the lake, its flora, and its fauna again.  The most notable flora is the water hyacinth, which often chokes harbors, bays, inlets, and sometimes big chunks of the lake itself.  It floats as isolated plants and as islands many times larger than a football field.

Today, or perhaps yesterday, winds were favorable and the bay at Kisumu was nearly free of the pesky plant and it was easily accessible for its customary use as a drive-in car wash.

This car wash stands immediately in front of the ubiquitous tilapia “restaurants”, numbering at least thirty packed cheek to jowl.  

There has been a lot of paint and some new “high rise” construction added since we last visited some four or five years ago.  

Two of the restaurants are now two stories high, but you can still see through every one, front to back and side to side.  The only thing that separates one from the next is a small waist high wall and the color of the paint.  Food is served water side and the fish is cooked in big pots of oil over wood fires on the landward side.

But before lunch, we wanted to take a boat ride. We signed on for a one hour cruise hoping to see birds 

and the ultimate prize, hippos.  About 45 minutes into our hour we spotted them, but only two.  Mom and calf put on a brief but exciting show, surfacing about 10 times in five minutes,

but mom did not trust us and their total time at the surface in ten surfacings was less than 20 seconds.  Nonetheless, it was a beautiful sight.  Back to land we went.

I would love to report that the tilapia was better than ever but it was not.  Perhaps we just can’t tell a fresh tilapia from one that’s a day or more old as they lay on the table ready for cooking.  We got the latter, I think.  

But the ambiance was as good as or better than ever.  This year there were no kids sniffing glue; that was good.  But there were lots of guys washed cars while we watched and we had the opportunity to buy just about anything we might want from the fellows who walked by draped with posters, tools, trinkets, car emergency kits, first aid kits, flashlights, newspapers...  We chose a newspaper, read it, and took a tuk tuk to the matatu station where we found our ride home..