Being all touristy

Today, being a Saturday, meant I didn't have to go to the hospital for rounds (yay!). Instead, I slept in (yay! again) and then was picked up by the driver for some touristy time.

Our first stop was Midi Creek, which is a salt marsh / mangrove forest / bird habitat. My guide explained all about mangroves as we walked around, and then we had this:



He called it their Indiana Jones bridge, and it was. It was shaky and unsturdy and went on for 200 meters and was all sorts of fun. Then we began walking around the salt marshes and saw a couple of different species of birds, including a sacred ibis and yellow-billed storks, which are shown below.

After Midi Creek, we went on to Gede, which is an ancient city with sections dating back to the 8th century. It has a long and complicated history, beginning when the first Muslims came to Kenya and ending with the excavation of the site in the 1950's. In the middle was a war that Vaso de Gama started with the people of Mombasa (to the south), aligning himself with the people of Malindi (to the north). The people in Gede got caught in the middle and ended up leaving their city. It wasn't found again until the 1920's.

Here's what the palace of the city looks like from above (they have a very rickety treehouse which I climbed up to to take pictures). There was also a section for the other "nobles", the middle class, and where they theorize the poor lived. Excavation is still in process, but they estimate around 3000 people lived there when they abandoned the city. Among the artifacts that have been found are bowls and coins from China, scissors from Spain, and lamps from India. The world may be smaller now than it was in the 16th century, but not by much.

And this was the original mosque, which they estimate to have been built in the 8th or 9th century. They found graves under the mosque, which was highly unusual--Muslims don't bury anyone in mosques--and they think this mosque was built on top of an old Bantu burial ground (Bantus were the people who were there when the first Muslims came). I don't know if anyone's done any forensics on them to test that hypothesis or not.

After wandering around the ruins, my guide and I fed the monkeys bananas:

If I look terrified, there's a reason for that: I was. And I have scratches on both arms to prove that when it comes to bananas, monkeys aren't afraid to use their claws to climb people like trees.

Although we tried to get through this in time for me to finish with the jiggers with Dr. Katana, by the time I returned to the hospital, he was nowhere to be seen. I didn't miss him, because the patient hadn't been completely de-jiggered yet. I don't know if he's planning on finishing tomorrow or Monday, but either way, I'll be out on Safari :)