Travelling Hopefully - A German Bar, an Ethiopian Restaurant, an English Breakfast and Kenyan Prostitutes

As the above title makes clear Mombasa is a bit of a melting pot.  I flew in from Zanzibar on a flight which was so early that I cleared customs in Mombasa before we were due to leave the ground in Zanzibar.  The international airport in Zanzibar is a modest affair with only half a dozen flights leaving on the day I was there.  I suspect that the pilots of my aircraft figured they were there, the passengers were there, the runway was clear so why not go early?  In contrast to my lengthy experience at Nairobi I cleared customs in Mombasa in about five minutes (being one of about three non nationals on a flight that only held twenty probably helped).  I was so early that I was actually sitting around outside waiting for the taxi sent by my airbnb host to arrive.  I amused myself by looking hopefully at the eager taxi touts hanging around and then shaking my head when they approached.

Once the driver had got over his shock at finding me waiting for him he took me out to the northern beaches of Mombasa where I would be staying for the night.  My host was an Austrian lady who had lived in Kenya for the last two decades eventually winding up living in what used to be the servant quarters for a large beachside house.  Vervet monkeys frolicked in trees as I approached but the little bastards vanished when I returned with a camera.  Instead I took a lot of photos of a cat and its kitten that didn't quite belong to my host but hung around on the (accurate) assumption that if they did so she would feed them occasionally.

To feed me I wandered down to a nearby German bar for dinner.  There were Bundesliga results on the wall and a whole bunch of German (or at least German adjacent) flags hanging from the rafters.  I spotted the flag of Switzerland and the ducal standard of Luxembourg among other more genuinely German banners.  German beers were available but in deference to my host country I ordered a Tusker instead.  The prostitutes were definitely Kenyan, one of them even approached me until she realised she would do better with one of the doughy businessmen from a nearby resort.  I ordered Hungarian goulash, I'm not sure if it was Hungarian or even goulash but it was delicious.

The next morning, deciding I didn't want prostitutes before breakfast, I wandered along to an Ethiopian restaurant.  The young lady there was Kenyan, very attractive and did a good job of pretending to be friendly but all she wanted to sell me was food.  I had an English breakfast which was actually very good.

Downtown in Mombasa is Fort Jesus.  This was built by the Portuguese in the 16th century when they still had pretensions to a world empire to defend their recently acquired holdings in the Mombasa region.  It had mighty cannon covering the sea approach capable of sinking any ship which ventured near.  Which is probably why the Omani Arabs landed a little further up the coast and besieged the fort from the landward side.  A later revolt kicked the Omanis out and invited the Portuguese back in but the Omanis eventually took the fort back again.  Ultimately it wound up in British control who used it as a prison possibly on the theory that it might be better at keeping people in than it had proved to be in keeping them out.