Attending A Funeral In Mombasa

During the course of the following days Felix and myself fully indulge in beauty of the local beaches and getting to know the locals themselves a little better. We particularly enjoyed a beach called Coba Cabana, a small beach which was mainly used by locals. I found out afterwards that Elvis (I went with him to Barcelona) had lived in Mtwapa and very close to this beach. Anyway one of the locals was called Cesar (or Taba or Rasta) and he was the 'grillmaster' of the beach. The fish that was caught around Coba Cabana beach was prepared by him for the customers. One morning Margaret wakes us up earlier than usual.

"Wake up, we need to go to the beach now. The fishermen are coming in soon and bringing fresh fish with them." She shouted through the flat with that intense voice of hers that penetrated every wall. We jump into our clothes, walk down to the road and stop a pickypicky (motorbike) to take us down to the beach as fast as possible. We get to the beach just in time, we see the fishermen arriving with their boats and bringing bucket after bucket filled with the fresh fish to the shore.

"How many do you guys want? Maybe it's better if just I go so they won't get tempted to rip us off." Margaret asks us while the three of us are still sitting in woven chairs and watch the actions of the fishermen in front of us.

"Just get maybe two or three for each of us." I reply with my mouth watering from the smell of some of the fish that Cesar was grilling right next to us. She runs off to start haggling with the fishermen. A few minutes later she comes back with 7 small and nice fish.

"Haha, I managed to only pay 150 Shillings (just over £1) for these." She said happily. We gave Cesar the fish and another 200 Shilling to prepare and grill them for us.

"Here you go my friends, enjoy. Also I want to invite you to come visit my place. Near to where I live they make palm wine." Cesar said to us as he starts serving the first few fish. He has long rastas and always wears custom mades hats to prevent his dreads from intermingling with the food. These hats have an open top and his dreads fall out of that opening like a palm tree.

"Oh sure man, should we do this tomorrow?" Felix answered as he started devouring the first fish.

"Ah I have to work tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow I have a day off. Let's do it then, I can pick you up from Margarets place in the morning. We'll keep in contact via text." He said as he got back to grilling.

Two days later we meet up with him again, first thing we do is go to a custom shoe maker to make us some nice kenyan flip flops. Afterwards we head to a place close to his house. Like he said there were plenty of people there filling massive buckets of freshly prepared palm wine into smaller bottles for sale. This is an alcoholic beverage made from the sap of various palm trees, in this instance mainly coconut palms. The special thing about this drink is that it gets more alcoholic over time, however this happens very quickly. This causes it to taste like a lovely coconut lemonade on the first day, something similar to a beer on the second and after that it may start going rancid or if kept under the right conditions continues to have a rise of alcohol content. We nourish ourselves with this refreshing drink for some time until Cesar gets up to call a pickypicky.

"I forgot to tell you guys, but there is a funeral happening a little further away from here. There will be many nice people there and if you want to I can take you there." He said as he managed to find two motorbikes that could take us there.

"Sure man, sounds like and interesting experience. I have only experienced one other funeral in my life and that was in Germany. Sounds like this one might be quite different." I respond and Felix and I get on one of the motorbikes to follow Cesar. After a quick 20 minute trip we get to a big tree under which dozens of people had gathered and join them. We had brought fresh palm wine that we hand out to the people surrounding us in the shade of the tree. We got to the point where the body was carried by four men and then put into a big hole that had been prepared right next to the tree. At this point it seemed like a pilgrimage was going on as hundreds of people arrived at the scene and everyone was eager to help filling the hole up. There were not enough shovels for the people and everyone had to wait their turn eagerly. It seemed like quite an exciting and happy moment, very lively and energetic. This starkly opposed the experience that I had from the funeral that took place in Germany. After this overall fun event we head back to the beach and relax before going back to Margarets place to have dinner and enjoy one of our last nights sleep before going to Nairobi.