Mombasa again

Very unexpectedly I find myself back in Mombasa! My colleague who was supposed to attend the working party in which I am now a participant, took ill and at the last minute I was asked to step in. Fortunately I was available to travel and Mombasa is definitely not the worst place in the world to visit. The only thing that drives me crazy is the lack of direct flights. From Durban to Mombasa on a direct flight would be around four and half hours but because I had to use three flights going via Johannesburg and Nairobi the day's journey took thirteen and a half hours!

There was one great benefit of flying through Johannesburg though and that was being able to meet up with my friends, Jo and Diets, for a good brunch and chat. It certainly was the best way to pass the stopover time and provide a nice distraction from the second flight which I was dreading.

My reason for not looking forward to flight number 2 was because it was on one of the grand old dames of Kenya Airways' fleet - an ancient Boeing 767-300. The old bird lumbered down the runway and vibrated into the air and we were on our way. The cabin crew gave out headsets for the onboard entertainment but in the three and a half hours it took to get to Nairobi there was nothing to watch or listen to with the headphones! Luckily the passenger sitting next to me was a really interesting guy who sets up and runs factories to produce avocado oil in South Africa and Kenya. I learnt a lot about avos and the production of oils used in the cosmetic industry. Funny conversation though for someone like me who doesn't like avos! And for those who know that my aversion to avos is because of the colour - he didn't think it all that strange. Apparently he has heard all sorts of reasons for not liking this fruit.

The rest of the journey to Mombasa was fine and I arrived at my hotel at about 21:30. The hotel had overbooked their rooms and there wasn't a room available for me. They said that they would put me into a two bedroom apartment and then move me as soon as a room became available. Oh yes, they also wanted me to share with one of my colleagues. I refused point blank to this. I would share with one of my colleagues that I work with everyday but there is no way I am willing to share anything with someone I may only have met once or possibly not at all. They seemed to accept this quite easily so maybe they were just chancing it. I was taken off to my suite and could finally relax.

The apartment's lounge

The master bedroom

The view from the dining room

The first work day was rather a waste of time. We are working on a publicly available database called StatBase which is a repository for fishery statistics of the western Indian Ocean. The database is available online and the first problem we encountered was the poor internet connectivity at the institute where we are working. A decision was made to transfer the database onto a local server to speed up all the work. Eventually late in the afternoon we were introduced to the latest version of the database and had to provide report-backs on the status of the data for each of our countries. There are representatives from eight countries around the table: Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, Comoros and Seychelles.

The meeting room

The view of Mombasa old town from the meeting room 

 Fort Jesus across the way from the meeting room

When I got back to the hotel I was told I would have to move to a room. I was expecting it and it was fine so I beatled up to my apartment and shoved all my things in my suitcase. My new room is nice, obviously no separate lounge but it has a great view of the ocean. It was good to unpack my things properly knowing that I will be in the same place for a few nights.

My new bedroom

The beautiful sunrise this morning

Day two of the work had a farcical start! The database programmer missed the transport to the institute. No one realised that he was missing because we all thought he had come in earlier than us to sort out an issue on the server and that he was in the server room. Eventually when the Kenyan IT specialist came looking for him we realised that he was still at the hotel. A taxi was dispatched to collect him and then he still needed to sort out the problem before we could get on with our work so we wasted another couple of hours.

There is only one more day of this work so I am really hoping I can finish what needs to be done before I fly home. This will be the only blog from here because the slow internet makes uploading the content so very slow. So until the next trip farewell.