June 17th---A Great Way to End Our Time at the Coast

What a great day! Almost as good as the safari day. We left the hotel in the morning and headed towards Mama Alice Caseka's farm.

She is a pretty amazing women. On her farm she has fruit, cows, goats, sheep, butterflys, stingless bees, and honey bees.

                                                                     Passion fruit vine

                                                                  Stingless bee colonies
She gave us a wonderful tour of her farm. She discussed how her farm works and how she keeps bees. She has all three kinds of hives: log, Kenyan top bar, and Langstroth.

                                          Log and Kenyan Top Bar Hives

                                                           Maryann and Alice Caseka
Her biggest problem here is the honey badger, but see has also seen other pests such as moths, and bats. For the log hives, Mama Caseka says the bees prefer the wood of a certain type of tree. This tree is naturally hollowed some what and the rest of the hollowing is done with tools. Her oldest log hives are up to 20 years old! While walking around for the tour some things I noticed about the farm:
   Everything is planted in holes so that the water collects around the plant.

                                                        Maize planted in dug out hole.
   Fencing is done with branches and sticks and there are clear pathways through the farm.

While on the tour Mama Caseka gave each of us three oranges picked right from her tree. Fiona had me smell the leaves and they smelled sweet and citrusy. After saying good-bye to Mama Caseka we headed for Malindi. We stopped to eat lunch along the way at a streetside restaurant. It was great to have everyone together.

                                                       Jeremy outside our lunchtime stop.
We then went to the Gedi Ruins, which is where the co-op for honey extraction is for local beekeepers. Here they also have a butterfly building, and buy pupae from surrounding farmers also.  The tourist part of the Gedi Ruins though is the remains of the buildings that existed 700-800 years ago when the east coast of Africa had the biggest slave ports in the world. This port was controlled by Arabs during this time. The ruins were amazing and Fiona, Maryann, and I got a private tour by Benson who has lots of experience here because he use to work here. There were lots of giant Baobab trees here and one of the largest had stairs building next to leading up to a landing near the top of the tree. It was unbelievable!

                                                           The landing in the tree.

                                           Looking down from the landing on the central court.

                                            Jim and I measuring the trunk of the Baobab tree.

                                                             The ruins at ground level.

                                           Maryann, Jim, Fiona, and Benson on our way out of
                                                                       Gedi Ruins.
Our next stop was one especially for Jeremy, the Galileo pillar in Malindi. This pillar is the third pillar of a set of three on the African continent and mark the three landings of Galileo on his famous journey to India. Jeremy had seen the first two and now has seen the complete set. Malindi is an interesting just to drive through. It is a pretty big city and has a fairly big muslim population. It was interesting to see this culture.

We then headed back toward Mtwapa, stopping at one more place along the way, a place Maryann called the boardwalk. The turned out to be Mida Creek, where there is a large mangrove. The interesting thing about this place is it is like an inner lake on the coast that is fed by the Indian Ocean. When we got there we enjoyed fresh coconut juice while we waited for the second vehicle to arrive. There were 6 or 7 guys there that were very energetic and reminded me of people who love and truely enjoy what do. It was great! So the boardwalk is actually a 260m length of "bridge that takes you out through the mangrove to a deck where you then get in a canoe and come by canoe back to parking lot. The "bridge" is many free swinging sections of bridge with rope as the rails.  I enjoyed this stop very much. Once we got out to the deck the boatmen sang us the kiswahili "Jambo" song,  complete with dancing.

                                            Mida Creek Nature Preserve (Dug out canoe)

                                                               Beginning of the boardwalk

                                                                 Submerged mangrove

                              Making our walk across: Kilonzo, Maryann, Fiona, Jim, Muli, James

                                                 Fiona, Jim, and Muli on the boardwalk.

                                                                  Everyone on the deck

                                                                Jeremy and Kilonzo

                                                          James, Fiona, Jim, and Muli

The canoe ride back was a lot of fun too. The boatmen continued singing as we made our way back.
We made it back to the hotel and got ready for our end of the week group dinner, at a neighboring hotel. It was a very nice dinner and was a wonderful way to say good-bye to the coast.---Sara